Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

“We weren’t engaged,” Franny said.

“Franny,” Caroline said. “Let Albie have his due.”

“Same house out in Torrance?” Fix asked.

Franny read him the address.

He nodded. “Same house. I’ll tell you how to get there. We can do the whole thing on surface streets.”

All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.

In Virginia, the six children had shared two bedrooms and a single cat, picked food from one another’s plates and indiscriminately used the same bath towels, but in California everything was separate. Holly and Cal and Albie and Jeanette had never been invited to Fix Keating’s house, just as Caroline and Franny had never seen where Teresa Cousins lived. Bert and Teresa bought the house in Torrance in the sixties when Bert took the job in the Los Angeles D.A.’s office: it wasn’t too far from downtown or too far from the beach. There were three bedrooms, one for Bert and Teresa, one for Cal, and one for Holly. When Jeanette and Albie came along everybody shared. It was the starter house, the port from which they planned to embark on their grand life. In the end, everyone left but Teresa, first Bert then Cal then Albie then Holly and finally Jeanette. Jeanette started talking that last year before college when she and Teresa lived alone together. They had a good time, made each other laugh, which surprised them both.

In truth, the story didn’t turn out to be such a bad one. While Teresa went to work day after day and year after year at the D.A.’s office, Torrance improved. The neighborhood, which had once been a place to leave as soon as there was money, became up-and-coming, and then fully arrived. Teresa planted a succulent garden in a rock bed with plans she took from a magazine. She added a deck. She turned the boys’ room into a den. Real estate agents left handwritten notes in her mailbox asking her if she was interested in selling and she put the notes in the recycle bin. Teresa liked her job as a paralegal and she was good at it. The lawyers were always telling her to go to law school — she was smarter than most of them — but she wanted none of it. She stayed with the county until she was seventy-two, leaving with one of those plush California pensions that would eventually drive the state into bankruptcy. Lawyers who had long since moved on to other jobs came back to raise a glass to Teresa at her retirement party. They chipped in together and bought her a watch.

Once a year she went to New York to see Jeanette and Fodé and the children. She loved them but New York overwhelmed her. Californians were used to their own houses and cars and lawns. She missed the sprawl. She saved up her money and bought a ticket to Switzerland to see Holly at the Zen center. For ten days she sat beside her oldest living child on a cushion and did nothing but breathe. Teresa liked the breathing up to a point but then the silence overwhelmed her. She considered the life of her daughters in terms of Goldilocks coming into the cottage of the three bears: too hot and too cold, too hard and too soft. She kept her opinions to herself, wanting most of all to not be seen as critical. Albie came back to Torrance two or three times a year. She would make up a list of the things that needed taking care of and he would tick them off, putting a new motor in the garage door and flushing out the hot water heater. After a life of scraping by in odd jobs, Albie had, by necessity, become a person who could do absolutely anything. These days he worked for a company up in Walnut Creek that made bicycles. He liked that. At Christmas he sent his mother a plane ticket so that she could come and sit around a tree with him and his daughter and his wife. Sometimes the popcorn and the fireplace and the endless hands of Go Fish would overwhelm her and she would have to excuse herself and go to the bathroom just to stand beside the sink for a minute and cry. Afterwards she’d rinse her face and dry it off again, coming back to the living room good as new. It was what she had hoped for but never for a minute what she’d expected.

Teresa dated a few lawyers after Bert left, a couple of cops, none of them married. That was her rule and she never broke it, not even for a drink after work, which, as they were quick to remind her, was all they were asking for. Around the time Jeanette left for college Teresa fell in love with Jim Chen, a public defender of all things, and they had ten good years before he had a heart attack in the parking lot outside the county courthouse. There were people all over the place, people who saw him fall and called 911. A secretary who had taken a life-saving course when her children were small did CPR until the ambulance came, but sometimes all the right things are as useless as nothing at all. Life, Teresa knew by now, was a series of losses. It was other things too, better things, but the losses were as solid and dependable as the earth itself.

Now there was this thing in her stomach that was doubling her over, enough pain to make her shake, and then it would pull back and let her breathe. If she’d had the sense to go to her doctor three days ago when it started she could have driven herself over, but after three days of not eating she was too weak to drive anywhere. She could call Fodé and ask him what to do, Fodé was a doctor, but she was perfectly capable of having that conversation in her head without bothering him on the other side of the country: he would tell her she should call a friend and go to the hospital, or, short of that, call an ambulance. She didn’t want to do either of those things. She was so tired she felt lucky to make it to the bathroom, to the kitchen for a glass of water, and then back to bed again. She was eighty-two years old. She imagined her children might use this particular stomach pain to answer their questions about whether or not she could continue to live alone in her house or whether she’d have to move to a facility up north someplace near Albie. She couldn’t go to Jeanette, people moved to Brooklyn to fall in love and write novels and have children, not to get old, and she couldn’t go to Holly, though she imagined dying in the Zen center might come with spiritual advantages.

Then on the second day it occurred to her that maybe this pain, whatever it was, could answer the question of her future in a larger way: maybe this pain that felt like it was killing her would actually kill her. Her appendix was still in there somewhere, and while appendicitis seemed like the kind of thing schoolchildren died of on camping trips, it was possible that hers had hung around all these years in order to detonate late in the game. That wouldn’t be the worst thing, would it? Peritonitis? Not as quick as dear Jim Chen going out in a parking lot, but still. When she was having a better moment she found the key to the lockbox, the title to her car, her will. Only a person in deep denial about the future would work her entire life in the legal profession without having a good will. Everything she had was divided three ways. The house, long since paid for, had ticked steadily up in value, and there were savings. Once the kids were out of school she never spent what came in. She laid everything out on the kitchen table and sat down to write a note. She didn’t want it to seem like a suicide note because she was most definitely not committing suicide, but she thought whoever came to the house eventually should find more than the car keys and her body. She looked at the pad of paper she used to make grocery lists. The top was lined with cheerful daisies dancing in their pots above a series of chaotic pink letters that spelled out Things To Do . She had never stopped to think about how stupid it was to buy a pad of paper that said Things To Do but she didn’t have the energy to go look for a plain white sheet. The pain was ramping up again and she wanted to go back to bed.