Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

Leo looked at her, surprised. “Of course she’s bringing Button.”

Of course. “Anyone else?”

Leo went to the refrigerator and found a bottle of pinot gris unfinished from lunch. He poured what was left in a glass sitting out on the sink. “Maybe a boyfriend. There’s someone named Gerrit. I think he’s Dutch. She said she didn’t know what Gerrit’s plans were yet. She might be on better behavior if she has someone to impress.”

“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” Franny asked the lobsters.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Leo said.

Franny shook her head. “Nothing. It’s the next line.”

“It’s not the next line,” he said, and took his wine out to the porch.

Franny put a pair of scissors in her purse and carried the six boxes out to the car. Franny, who felt herself to be without talent, was very adept at carrying more things than anyone would have thought possible. She could feel the lobsters scrabble as their bodies slid heavily into the dark cardboard corners of the boxes.

“Need a hand?” Jonas said, speeding up his pace when he saw her. He was coming back from the pool, his chest and back unevenly scorched.

“I’ve got it,” she said, setting the boxes down to open the car door.

“Are you going into town?”

“Back into town.” She arranged her passengers on the floor of the backseat — three on either side.

“Let me just run inside and get my shirt,” he said, his face bright with opportunity. “I need some things in town. I’ll keep you company.”

She started to tell him no, to explain, but instead she nodded. She waited until the kitchen door had closed behind him, waited another ten seconds, and then got in the car and drove away.

Franny and Leo didn’t talk about marriage, except sometimes sentimentally in bed, his hands spreading wide across her back, and even then it was only to say how quickly they would have married had it not been for the future and the past. What they never spoke of was the prohibitive element in the present, which was Leo’s daughter.

For the most part, Franny tried her best not to think about Ariel, whom she had met on several disastrous occasions early on in her relationship with Leo. Franny didn’t aspire to like Leo’s daughter, but she hoped to someday achieve a low level of distant compassion towards her. To that end she disciplined herself to think of her own father whenever Ariel came up, to imagine Fix showing up with someone younger than she was, poor dear Marjorie pushed to the side. Fix taking up with his favorite cocktail waitress, not just for the weekend but going on five years. Her father in love with this cocktail waitress who had no means of supporting herself but who would wait for him in motels when he went on stakeouts. When she could think of things that way, the lava of Ariel’s rage against her was easier to bear. The simple truth was that Franny couldn’t stand to be hated. Sacred Heart hadn’t prepared her for it and college hadn’t prepared her for it. Law school had been doing its best to toughen her up but then look how she’d done in law school.

Franny found a parking spot two blocks from the water and carried the six boxes down to the end of the pier, past the fishermen with their buckets and lines, past the tourists holding hands. She wanted the lobsters in deep water. Maybe they’d be stupid enough to crawl into someone else’s pot tomorrow but she didn’t want them walking straight up on the beach minutes after their exoneration. She set the six boxes out in a line and opened them up. Christmas at the pier. Christmas for crustaceans. They were a dappled black and green now, not the electric red they would have been after boiling. They were still frisky, energized by their proximity to salt water, waving their bound claws in impatience. They would never know what they had missed, though being lobsters, they would probably never know anything. She took the scissors and stuck them in the box, doing her best to cut off the wide rubber bands without nicking a claw or losing a finger. (The first band on each one was easy, the second a challenge.) When she finished, she tipped them one at a time out of their boxes and into the ocean, where they made a pleasing smack against the water and then sank from view.

By the time Franny had loaded down the car with all the necessary provisions and driven back to the house it was late in the afternoon. She caught a glimpse of Leo on the front porch talking to someone by the door (Nine for dinner? She had enough) while the rest of them were off who knows where. There was a sleek silver Audi pulled to the back, the Hollingers must have arrived by now. Franny thought how nice it would have been to have taken a shower before she saw them but that wasn’t going to happen. She started carrying the boxes and bags into the kitchen. She’d made three trips when Leo came in with a tall young man with a long black braid.

“Franny,” Leo said.

Franny put the heavy box she was holding down on the table, half liquor, half wine. There was a second case of wine still in the car. She kept her hands on top of the box to keep them steady. That first moment she saw him she knew exactly what it was she’d done, how serious and wrong it was to have given away what didn’t belong to her. She had known it at the time, too, but she hadn’t cared. It was the way Leo had listened to her, the way he had asked her so many questions and then told her to tell him everything again. There had been nothing in her life to equal the light of his attention.

“Christ,” Albie said. “You look exactly the same.”

He was taller and thinner than she could have ever imagined he would be. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and some oversized pants covered in pockets. His arms were dark and muscled, his wrists tattooed. He was at once someone she knew as a brother and someone she had never met. “Not you,” Franny said.

Hadn’t she thought he’d show up sooner or later? She had expected him around every corner in those first months after the book came out, but time passed. Did she forget about him then? “How did you find us?”

“I found him,” Albie said, motioning to Leo. “It turns out he’s the easiest person in the world to find.”

“That’s good to know,” Leo said.

“I wasn’t thinking about you,” Albie said to Franny. “But I guess it makes sense. Somebody had to have told him.”

They had wanted to go to the barn and brush the horses. If they brushed the horses and mucked out a few of the stalls then usually Ned would let them take turns riding the mare for the afternoon. But Albie was driving them crazy. What was he doing that was so intolerable? Standing here in front of him now, Franny couldn’t remember. Or maybe he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Maybe it was just that someone had to watch him around the horses and none of them wanted to do it. He wasn’t the monster they told him he was, in fact there wasn’t anything so awful about him. It was only that he was a little kid.

“Albie has terrible breath,” Franny announced. Then she turned to him. “Didn’t you brush your teeth this morning?”

That was how the ball got rolling. Holly leaned in and sniffed the air in front of her brother’s face. She rolled her eyes. “Tic Tac, please.”

Caroline looked at Cal. “You might as well. You know he’s never going to brush his teeth. I don’t think he’s brushed them since we got here.”

Cal pulled the little plastic bag out of his pocket. He had four in there and so he gave him four.

“All of them?” Albie asked.

“You stink,” Cal said. “If you don’t you’re going to scare the horses.”

Jeanette left the room then. She didn’t say where she was going but the rest of them said they had to wait for her.