Lauren Grodstein - The Explanation for Everything

“But you said your experiments were going so well!”

“Circumstances change,” he said, mildly. He didn’t want his daughters to know what he worried about. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

“Girls,” said mock-exasperated Sheila, “why can’t your father ever be optimistic?”

“Because then we wouldn’t recognize him,” Rachel said.

“It’s not his fault,” said Belle, an expert in fault. “He’s had a lot of bad luck.”

“But good luck too,” said Sheila.

“Good luck too,” Andy repeated, to prove he could fake cheer. “I mean, here I am with you guys! If that’s not good luck, I don’t know what is.” Then, to avoid their worried faces, Andy ducked his head into his underseasoned stew.

THEY LIVED FOUR houses down from Sheila and Jeremy on twisty, underlit Stanwick Street, settled among the hunting clubs and fishing holes and cranberry bogs of Mount Deborah Township, centrally located in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. The house suited him: it was small and middle-aged, with a yard too crowded with evergreens for anybody to expect him to mow. His daughters shared a room in the back, and he occupied the drafty bedroom in the front, and to the side of the house, unexpected and graceful, was a diminutive oval swimming pool. He put a pair of rocking chairs on the porch, and every November he watched the crab apples splat on the front lawn.

“Girls,” he said, as they cut across their next-door neighbor’s lawn, “watch out for the pool.” They were both of an age to roll their eyes at him, but, as far as he could tell, neither did. Rachel, three steps ahead of him, cut a graceful figure in the gloaming. Belle almost tripped on a felled branch but caught herself in time.

Almost autumn but the house was stuffy. Andy opened windows, pulled the strings on the overhead fans. He was the second widower in a row to own this house; the previous one had died right there in the wood-paneled den, on the couch, in front of the Sunday morning news shows. The widower’s daughter had knocked the price almost in half to get the house off her hands, and now Andy’s own couch sat in the grooves on the carpet the old man had left.

Belle fell asleep on Rachel’s bottom bunk; rather than take the top, Rachel squeezed in next to her and fell asleep smushed between her sister and the wall. At eleven o’clock, the Pine Barren frogs chorusing outside, Andy turned off their night-light and kissed them each on their smooth sweaty foreheads. They often slept curled together this way, and Andy wondered when they might stop, and what would stop them—puberty, he guessed. Which Rachel would be facing down any moment, if she wasn’t already.

“Dad?”

“I’m here, honey.” But Rachel was only talking in her sleep. He stood at their doorway for another minute in case she said anything else, then backed away.

Andy was scheduled for nine o’clock classes this semester, which he preferred: sleepy students were docile students, and he’d get off campus early enough, most days, to make it to Rachel’s soccer practices. Every year he thought about offering to help coach, but every year he remembered he didn’t know anything about soccer, and could well do more harm than good. So he stood on the sidelines and watched Rachel race up and down the fields, mud splattering her shin guards. She played halfback and she was good, and even though they both knew he didn’t have to watch her practice, she never told him to stay away.

What had his mother told him after Louisa died? Just an hour at a time. Just get through one hour, and then the next, and before you know it, it’s a whole new day.

He sat down on the couch, fiddled with one of the cigars he kept in the box next to the DVD player. He was limiting himself to two a week, but he’d deliberately forgotten when he started counting new weeks. Did a week start on Sunday? Monday? Had he already smoked two in the past seven days?

Screw it. A rustle of leaves outside the open window as a predator swished through the night to pick off a vole or a kitten. He stood up with his cigar, his cutter, and the Zippo that Lou bought him a decade ago in Miami. He would smoke and keep an eye out for cats.

“Knock knock?”

Sheila was standing in his doorway. She had changed her shirt, was wearing a thin cotton T-shirt cut low.

“I was just going outside,” he said. “You want to smoke?”

They were tentative with each other but for this one aberrant intimacy: occasionally, when their kids were asleep, they would share a cigar on his porch. Sheila kept a walkie-talkie tucked into the belt loop of her jeans to listen for Jeremy.

She said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

They sat together in silence as Andy cut and lit the cigar. He handed it over to Sheila, who put it briefly to her mouth—did she even really like smoking cigars?—then looked at the thing as it burned in her hand. She had pulled up her bangs with a tortoiseshell barrette, her no-nonsense glasses, jeans belted at the waist—they had never so much as kissed. Perhaps the moment for kissing had passed, but maybe that moment never quite passed. But it never came, either. Sheila had a thin-lipped smile so sincere and so chapped he could feel it scratch at his heart.

“Here you go,” she said, passing back the cigar.

“Thank you.” Andy let the tobacco tickle his mouth, the smoke stream through pursed lips. “Dinner was really nice, by the way.”

“I’m sorry about the lobsters.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“You looked like you were going to faint,” she said. “For some reason I thought it wouldn’t bother you. I don’t know. I could have done it myself, I guess.”

“Are you apologizing?” Andy asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Don’t apologize. That was one of the nicest things anyone has done for me in a long time. I love lobster.”

Sheila waved a hand in front of her face. The smoke? The false gratitude?

“You know, I was thinking—I don’t even know when your birthday is,” she said. “We’ve never celebrated anything before.”

“November,” he said.

“So you’re a Scorpio.”

He had probably never mentioned that he didn’t believe in astrology—that in fact he took a principled stand against it. “Sagittarius.”

“I’m a Cancer,” she said. “July.”

More silence, then another rustle through the trees. Another animal. Even though he had completed his graduate studies at Princeton, fifty miles to the north, Andy had never been aware of the Pine Barrens, the greatest expanse of virgin pine forest in the country, until he’d found himself teaching biology at Exton Reed. This part of New Jersey was all sandy soil over an aquifer so pure you could dig a hole and drink right out of it, and stunted trees that would go down in forest fires every few summers to be reborn, again, come spring. It was the only place in New Jersey where it was truly possible to live off the grid. He knew of families in the immediate area who generated their own electricity and pumped that crystalline water from wells and shot their own deer and could name every owl species from a distance of twenty yards. His daughters went to school with kids from these families; they called them “pineys” and wouldn’t invite them to their birthday parties, which was fine with Andy.

“And you’ll be thirty-six, right?”

“I’m sorry?” he said.

“In November.”

“Forty-one.”

“Really? I always thought you were younger than that.”

Andy shrugged, puffed on the cigar. Sheila was leaning back against the cheap green all-weather cushions of his rocking chair, closing her eyes. She slapped her hand lazily when a mosquito approached.

“I turned forty a few years ago,” she said. “What surprised me was how useless I suddenly felt. I remember my mother describing that feeling when she was sixty or so, how she felt like she was just being greedy at this point—that anything she was going to do from sixty on was just marking time.”