David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“Leave him alone. For now.” How Benji had fumed at their mother’s talent for denial, which had, much to his and Claudia’s told-you-so dismay, earned Evelyn a sucker punch. But here he was doing the same thing.

“Leaving him alone isn’t an option,” Claudia said pointedly.

“I’m not saying leave him alone,” Benji said testily, even though he just had. “I’m not saying ignore him. We need to keep a close eye. But if you try to rein him in, you’re going to get nothing but a fight. You might even lose him. And where would he go if not here?”

“When did you become an expert?” Claudia asked, but before Benji could answer, Evelyn broke in with, “What do you mean lose him?”

A shell of silence hardened around Benji. He may not be able to say it, but they all knew what he meant.

Claudia, a note of triumph in her voice, announced, “Navi will be here tonight.”

“What is this going into?” Evelyn asked tightly. “Tuna fish?”

“Chicken salad. Chicken’s in the fridge.”

“He left to get away from Arnav,” Benji reminded them.

“Did you ever stop to think he may not be making decisions from the best place right now? Arnav’s been through this before. He’ll know what to do.”

“Or he’ll chase Max away, and then we’ll be outside instead of inside, and then there will be nothing we can do.”

Cat, who had been sitting quietly at the table until this point pulling the ends from a pot of string beans she planned to make for dinner, said, “You did the right thing, Claudia.”

“Catman,” Benji said, the sweet in his voice mixed with caution. “Put on some music?”

Cat abandoned the beans and held out a hand. “Give me your phone.”

“Use yours. You have better music.”

“I don’t have better music,” she answered angrily. Things had been rough between them lately. His mind was constantly switched to Bravo TV and his phone a top secret conduit to Sam Palin’s Realm of Promises.

“Use mine,” Claudia offered, producing her phone as if waving a white flag. She set it on the table, then relieved Evelyn from chopping the chicken.

Cat rose. “Forget it. We’ll use mine.” She huffed as she plugged her phone into the little dock that sat on the counter and pushed “Play.” An album Benji and she had listened to a hundred times before. “I’m so sick of A Ghost Is Born ,” she said.

Benji wanted to ask, “Then why did you play it?” but let the moment pass.

Evelyn, who had left the room to get Henry, returned holding his hand as he mumbled like a child, “I don’t want to eat.”

“You have to eat,” Evelyn answered. “You’ll die if you don’t eat.”

“I want to eat outside.”

“It’s so hot out,” Benji complained.

“It’s summer. It’s not that hot out.” Evelyn deposited Henry in the chair next to Cat and, taking a vote (only Benji voted for air-conditioning), asked Claudia to help Max clear the picnic table.

Benji watched his mother bustle around the room, suddenly stabbed in the heart by the increasingly pronounced drag of that arthritic hip. She hadn’t had it easy. He turned to his father, too much of a wreck, too much of a ruin, to blame much anymore, but still Benji blamed him. And then there was Max. And Cat. A familiar rabbit hole opened up in front of him — how to do right by either of them? — but before he fell into it, his phone rang. A twinkling starshine of a ring that, lately, did nothing so much as set Cat’s teeth on edge. He fished it out of his shorts’ confusing array of cargo pockets and said, “Damn. I’ve gotta take this.”

He disappeared out the back door, the screen slamming shut behind him, and slipped around the side of the house, shyly, guiltily, like a boy who needed to pee.

“He’s been getting a lot of those lately,” Cat explained to Claudia.

“What’s that?”

“Phone calls. Of the damn-I’ve-gotta-take-this variety.”

Claudia dumped the chicken into the bowl with the celery and walnuts and quartered green grapes and went for the jar of mayonnaise.

“He doesn’t say what they’re about?”

Cat plunked her beans into the pot, two at a time.

“I want my mother?” Henry asked.

“Business. He says they’re just business. This theater camp thing in Lake George with some guy he met at the ground breaking a few weeks ago. Or didn’t meet. Reconnected. From high school. Do you know Sam Palin?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. And you don’t believe him?”

“I don’t not believe him, exactly. Did you ever read Highlights magazine when you were a kid?”

“Sure,” Claudia said, fond of the memory of those cartoony pages. “I’m surprised you did. You’re so young.”

“Remember that game: the two pictures side by side, similar except for the smallest details, and you had to pick out the differences? Look! The stone disappeared! Or: there’s a monkey in that tree! That’s what it feels like with him. I know something’s changed, but I can’t put my finger on what it is.”

“Have you talked to him about it?”

“I googled theater camps in Lake George.” Cat’s fingers moving through the beans, snapping off all evidence of the vine with impressive speed.

“It’s come to that?” Claudia asked sympathetically. “Googling? I’ve been there.”

Cat laughed. “I don’t know. I feel like one day you’re taking business calls, and the next you’re packing your things and saying, ‘Sorry for breaking your heart.’” Two beans missed the pot and tumbled to the floor. She stopped midway from picking them up. “Claudia,” she began, flushing pink. “I didn’t mean.”

“Where’s my mother?” Henry hammered his palm on the table until Claudia stepped to his side and asked, “What do you need, Daddy?”

“You’re not my mother.” He sounded small all of a sudden, broken and lost.

“She’s not here. Is there anything I can get you? It’s me, Daddy. Claudia, your daughter.”

When Henry didn’t answer, Claudia looked to Cat with a tolerant smile.

“Open mouth, insert foot,” Cat went on.

Claudia raised a hand, a priest giving absolution, before returning to her salad. “He’s not cheating. Take it from the woman wearing the scarlet letter.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s my brother. He’d tell me.” She sounded sure, though her confidence on this front, in one’s ability to say, yes, without doubt, I know this person well, better perhaps than he knows himself, had been brutally shaken over the last year.

“Take this,” Claudia instructed, “and these.” She handed Cat the cool bowl of chicken salad balanced on a stack of colorful plastic picnic plates. “I’ll get my father.”

Over lunch, they discussed their imminent outing. Evelyn had to go to a big-box store to pick up odds and ends for Henry’s move: a hamper, a tiny television meant more to kill the nursing home’s antiseptic silence than to entertain him, and packages of new undershirts on which she’d been instructed to write his name. They’d agreed that Benji would drive their mother, Claudia would stay with Max and Henry, and Cat would go for a long, mind-clearing run.

But as they finished lunch and cleared the table, Max, apparently immune to the heat as he spread out with his considerably dog-eared score, had a different idea. Cat and Benji could go on a run. Claudia could drive Evelyn. And he, Max, could keep an eye on Henry.

Everyone, especially Claudia, thought this a bad idea.

“But Henry naps after lunch. He’ll nap. I’ll work. Won’t you, Henry? Besides,” he said, turning an eye full of challenge toward Evelyn and Claudia, “you two should spend more time together.”