“Two seconds.” She got to her feet, bending over the desk, still typing furiously. Suddenly she let out a yelp, hands to her face. She took a step back from the keyboard. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, no,” she said again, whispering the words this time as she dropped back into her chair, eyes closed.
“What is it, sweetie?” I started toward her as if I might somehow be able to fix whatever was wrong, but she waved me away.
“It’s nothing.” She stared at her monitor. “And I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat,” I said. “You hardly ever eat dinner with me anymore.”
“I’ll get some cereal later,” she said. “Just … right now, I have to fix something. Okay?” She gave me a look that said our conversation was over, and I backed away, nodding.
“Okay,” I said, then added helplessly, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
“She’s having a meltdown,” I said to Ian as I walked into the kitchen. “And she’s not hungry.”
Ian was chopping tomatoes for the salad but he turned to look at me. “Maybe I should go,” he said.
“No way.” I spooned the pesto-coated rigatoni into my big white pasta bowls. “Someone needs to help me eat all this food. Anyway, it’s not you that’s keeping her away. It’s me. She avoids me all she can.” I didn’t want Ian to leave. There was comfort in his company. He’d been Sam’s law partner and close friend for more than fifteen years and I wanted to be with someone who’d known my husband well and had loved him. Ian had been my rock since Sam’s death, handling everything from the cremation to the living trust to managing our investments. How did people survive a devastating loss without an Ian in their lives?
Ian set the bowls of pasta on the kitchen table, then poured himself a glass of wine. “I think she worries I’m trying to take Sam’s place,” he said. He ran a hand over his thinning blond hair. He was one of those men who would look good bald, but I knew he wasn’t happy about that prospect.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said, but I remembered Grace mentioning that he might as well move in. Should I have asked her why she said that? Not that she would have answered me.
I sat down across the table from Ian and slipped the tines of my fork into a tube of rigatoni I didn’t really feel like eating. I’d lost twenty pounds since Sam died. “I miss my little Gracie.” I bit my lip, looking into Ian’s dark eyes behind his glasses. “When she was younger, she’d follow me everywhere around the house. She’d crawl into my lap to cuddle and I’d sing to her and read to her and …” I shrugged. I’d known how to be a good mother to that little girl, but she was long gone.
“I imagine everyone feels that way when their kids become teenagers,” Ian said. He had no kids of his own. Forty-five and he’d never even been married, which would be suspect in another man but we’d all just accepted it in Ian. He’d come close long ago—with Noelle—and I didn’t think he’d ever quite recovered from the sudden ending of that relationship.
“Sam would have known what to say to her.” I heard the frustration in my voice. “I love her so much, but she was Sam’s daughter. He was our … our translator. Our intermediary.” It was true. Sam and Grace had been two quiet souls with no need to speak to each other to communicate. “You could feel the connection between them when you’d walk into a room where they were sitting, even if one of them was on the computer and the other reading. You could feel it.”
“You’re such a perfectionist, Tara,” Ian said. “You have this expectation of yourself that you can be a perfect parent, but there’s no such thing.”
“You know what they loved to do?” I smiled to myself, stuck in my memory, which was where I was spending a lot of my time lately. “Sometimes I’d have a late meeting and I’d come home and find them sitting in the family room, watching a movie together, drinking some coffee concoction they’d invented.”
“Sam and his coffee.” Ian laughed. “All day long. He had a cast-iron gut.”
“He turned Grace into a caffeine addict by the time she was fourteen.” I nibbled a piece of pasta. “She misses him like crazy.”
“Me, too,” Ian said. He poked at his rigatoni.
“And then to have Cleve break up with her so soon after.” I shook my head. My baby girl was hurting. “I wish she were a little more like me,” I said, and then realized that was unfair. “Or that I was a little more like her. I just wish we had something more in common. Some activity we could share, but we’re so different. Everyone at school talks about it. The other teachers, I mean. I think they expected her to be into theater, like me.”
“I think there’s a law there can only be one drama queen in a family,” Ian said, and I kicked him beneath the table.
“I’m not a drama queen,” I said. “But I’ve always thought the theater could be so good for her, don’t you think? It would get her out of her shell.”
“She’s just quiet. It’s not a crime to be an introvert.”
Not a crime, no, but as someone whose need to be with other people bordered on the pathological, I had trouble understanding my daughter’s shyness. Grace loathed any social event that involved more than one or two people, while, as my father used to say, “Tara can talk the ears off a stalk of corn.”
“Has she mentioned getting her driver’s license yet?”
I shook my head. Grace was afraid of driving since Sam died. Even when I drove her someplace, I could feel her tension in the car. “I suggested it a couple of times, but she doesn’t want to talk about it,” I said. “She would have talked to Sam, though.” I slipped my fork into another piece of pasta. Sitting there with Ian, I was suddenly slammed by the reality that could catch me unawares at any moment—in the middle of my classroom, while casting the junior play, while doing the laundry: Sam was never coming back. He and I would never make love again. I’d never again be able to talk to him in bed at night. I’d never again feel his arms around me when I woke up in the morning. He’d not only been my husband but my dearest and oldest friend, and how many women could say that about the man they married?
We were loading the dishwasher when my phone rang, the electronic tones of “All That Jazz” filling the kitchen. I dried my hands and glanced at the caller ID. “It’s Emerson,” I said to Ian. “Do you mind if I take it?”
“Of course not.” Ian was even more addicted to his BlackBerry than I was. He had no room to complain.
“Hey, Em,” I said into the phone. “What’s up?”
“Have you spoken to Noelle?” Emerson asked. It sounded like she was in her car.
“Are you driving? Do you have your headset on?” I pictured her holding her cell phone to her ear, her long curly brown hair spilling over her hand. “Otherwise, I’m not talking to—”
“Yes, I have it on. Don’t worry.”
“Good.” I’d become überconscientious about using a cell phone in the car since Sam’s accident.
“So have you spoken to her in the past couple of days?” Emerson asked.
“Um.” I thought back. “Three days ago, maybe? Why?”
“I’m on my way over there. I haven’t been able to reach her. Do you remember her talking about going away or anything?”
I tried to remember my last conversation with Noelle. We’d talked about the big birthday bash she, Emerson and I were planning for Suzanne Johnson, one of the volunteers for Noelle’s babies program … and Cleve’s mother. The party had been Noelle’s idea, but I was overjoyed