Archives: July 30-August 5, 2006

July 30, 2006

Grandma lays the last of her cards down on the table, marking the end of this hand of Canasta. She's trouncing me pretty soundly today, already halfway to the 5,000 points she needs to win, while I linger around 100 after she keeps catching me with a full hand.

“Not exactly on your game today,” she comments, counting the score from her cards. “You doing all right?”

“Yeah, just a little tired.” I was this morning—and by morning I mean when I rolled out of bed around noon . Afterward, I got to this apartment about an hour later than I ordinarily would on a Sunday.

“Finding the nightlife in Shermantown, are we?”

“You might say that.”

“You kids,” Grandma shakes her head, and stacks up the cards, before setting them down in front of me. “Your deal.”

I split the deck in half, shuffling it in pieces. A Canasta deck is a little more than twice the size of a normal deck of playing cards.

I start dealing out our hands, and for no particular reason, I recall the newspaper clipping I found in my father's drawer the other day. I haven't gotten around to asking Dad about it, and wonder if Grandma might be able to resolve the whole thing. “So hey, I was wondering—do you know anything about Derek O'Malley? Or Katherine O'Malley?”

She freezes, answering the immediate question in that instant. “What do you mean?” she asks back.

“I was cleaning out the old man's office yesterday. Found a newspaper clipping saying Katherine O'Malley gave birth to Derek O'Malley. No big deal, but I was just wondering why Dad would have that—who those people were.”

Grandma picks up her cards slowly and begins to sort through them. “I think that you had better refer that question to your father directly.”

I set the remainder of the cards down on the table. “Why? What's the big deal?”

She shakes her head. “It's not my place to say. You had really better ask your father.”

July 31, 2006

Anastasia and I stand at opposite sides of a display table. We fold shirts at about the same pace, which is funny because she follows the recommended folding procedure precisely, while turn sleeves inward and crease the shirts kind of haphazardly. It's a slow day, and with Jermaine manning the register, it almost feels like we're alone.

“So I was thinking,” she says, “would you like to come home for dinner Wednesday night?”

I look up. “Come home?”

“Yeah, as in come to my house. Meet my mom, and my sister, and my niece.”

I hesitate. “Well yeah, that sounds good.”

She rolls her eyes. “Well don't sound so excited.

“It's not like that.” I set a shirt aside. “It's just, I'm wondering what you have in mind. Like—for example—how would you be introducing me to your folks.”

“I would say this is Preston .”

“But Preston , your friend?”

“What else would I introduce you as?”

I look down and pick up the shirt again, setting back to folding it. “I don't know. Preston , your co-worker.”

“It's a fine line, isn't it.”

I glance up and she has a mischievous little grin on her face. It's only there for a second as puts one shirt in its place, then looks away to find the next.

August 1, 2006

My schedule just hasn't matched up with Dad's these past few days. I want to ask him about Derek and Katherine O'Malley. It's such a little thing, but it's grown larger in my mind for the sheer secrecy of it—because Grandma wouldn't give me any answers, and there's nothing I can figure out on my own.

So I spend this afternoon Google searching there names, first together then alone. There are a handful of hits for each, but nothing recognizably connected to each other, my father, or Shermantown.

Katherine must have been a client, I reason. And he was probably handling her case around the time of my birth, and wanted to remember that whole period in his life.

Of course, that doesn't explain why the clipping is in with “Family” folder.

So maybe she wasn't a client, but rather a friend. Maybe someone my own mother met in Lamaze class or something—a companion for her and my father in that time of their lives, to the point where Dad would have saved that clipping and then haphazardly stored it with my own birth announcement.

But that doesn't explain why my grandmother wouldn't want to talk about it.

And so, I go on searching, trying different variations on the spellings of names, thinking maybe the newspaper got it wrong, or some website has a typo that can take me someplace closer to figuring this out.

August 2, 2006

“ Preston , this is my mom,” Anastasia begins.

Her mom reaches out her hand. “Preston, you can call me Barb,” she says. “It's so nice to meet you. Anastasia didn't even tell me she was seeing someone. Then, all of a sudden, it's ‘Can I bring Preston home to dinner?'.”

I laugh, a little awkward as I shake her hand. She looks a lot like Anastasia, just a tiny bit shorter and with a few gray hairs. I wonder what else Anastasia might have told her. “Well, it's nice to meet you.”

“This is my sister, Debbie,” Anastasia goes on, to a woman who looks a little less like her, with curlier hair, a little heavier set. We shake hands as well. “And this,” she goes on, lifting a little girl from her seat on the living room floor, “is Ellie.”

It's strange just seeing Anastasia hold the little girl. On one hand, there's an ease to her—she's very natural, and it's as though she could be the mother. At the same time, it drives home this other side of her life. This is who Anastasia is—who she always has been—when she's not in the store, or hanging out with me somewhere. This is the Anastasia who has her stake in taking care of a child, and has had it affect her life.

“Cute kid,” I say with a chuckle, waving to her as if she's more than a couple feet from my hand.

“First time we've had a man over for a while,” Barb says, “Probably since your uncle Peter was over at Christmas time.”

I run a hand through my hair. “Huh—just four women and me here. Guess I'd better remember to put the seat down.”

Barb laughs and Debbie smiles, as Ellie reaches out for some indeterminate object in the distance. Anastasia only rolls her eyes.

We settle down to eat. Barb apologizes over and over again for just boiling a pot of spaghetti, and I keep reassuring her it's good, and that I couldn't make anything better. Anastasia is quiet, but I catch her glancing up at me every now and again, and try to smile at her when she does. Barb does most of the talking, while Debbie devotes most of her attention to the kid.

I don't belong here one bit. As much as Barb is trying to make me feel at home, I'm a man visiting a house that's been permanently altered by careless men. I am, as Anastasia observed before, John Burns's son, and here I sit at the table with Anastasia, working to scrounge up enough money so she can leave home for college in the spring. I'm here, not as Anastasia's boyfriend, despite what Barb has surmised. I'm not anything to these people, really.

But then, as Debbie alternates trying to feed Ellie, and wiping the mess from the kid's face, I catch and hold Anastasia's eyes for a few seconds. Barb's still talking, but her voice becomes just a pleasant hum in the background. And in this instant, I feel a sense of home.

August 3, 2006

I tip my can of coke upside down, swallowing the last drops from it. Barb and Debbie went to bed long ago, and this is the fourth soda I've had out on this couch. Anastasia drinks glasses of tap water, but is staying up with me nonetheless.

Ellie fell asleep on the easy chair hours ago, and Anastasia said she would put her to bed before she turned in. It's hard for me to fathom just how long the kid has been sleeping, just lying there, breathing in and out as we talk.

“Would you really want to leave here?” I ask. “I know you said you want to get out of Butterton, and start someplace new. But with the ties you've got here—”

“It's going to be hard to leave,” she cuts me off. “There's a part of me that's always going to want to stay around, so I can give my sister and my mom a night off every once in a while—or so I can be there to see every step of Ellie grow up. But this isn't my life. I mean, it's a part of my life—but I need to have something of my own.” She shakes her head. “I need to get out of here.”

“I get that,” I say. I start to reach a hand toward her side of the couch. We've been sitting on opposite ends, but we seem to keep growing just a little bit closer. “I mean, you've got to leave home at some point. I guess I was just saying that it's gotta be that much harder when there's this much at stake.”

“It is a lot at stake. But as much as I pretend she is sometimes, Ellie's not my kid. And if I don't get out of here, I'm never going to have the chance to do anything on my own.”

“Like have your own kid?”

“Like have anything. Have a real college experience. Have a real job. Have a real boyfriend.”

We both stop. I don't look at her, my eyes fixed on Ellie. “Guess it would be hard to have a real boyfriend under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

I scratch the back of my head and grin, still not looking at her. “Just, with Ellie, and living at home, and all.”

“That wouldn't keep me from a relationship.”

I turn to her at last. “So what would?”

“For starters, some boy would have to ask me out?”

I clear my throat. “And if a boy did?”

She shrugs. “It would still depend on a lot of things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Things like where the boy fit in my life.” Anastasia stretches her arms and yawns. “Like if he was going away to college, while I'm still here, and there's no concrete reason to think he would look back—I'm not sure where that would fit.”

“And what about enjoying what you've got while you've got it?”

“Can lead to some unique situations.” We both turn to Ellie.

“I'm not saying that that's what I want—”

“And I'm not saying that's where it would go,” Anastasia says. “But—what would you want?”

I open my mouth, stop and smile. “Kind of a heavy question.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” She sighs and looks at her watch. “It's almost three. I should probably be going to bed.”

“Look, I didn't mean that I don't want—”

“And I'm not saying that you meant anything. I'm just saying it's late. And maybe we should talk about this some other time.”

I nod. “Maybe.”

I want to give Anastasia a hug or something before I go, but as I get my shoes on, she picks up Ellie. The little girl's asleep in her arms, and I don't want to mess that up. And so, I leave it at “Good night.”

August 4, 2006

Dad and I have a seat on the back porch. He came home early today to grill and we sit in lawn chairs, side by side, eating the first of the evening's burgers. “Hard to believe this summer's almost over already,” he says.

“That it is.”

“What do you have now—three weeks until you go back?”

“That's about right,” I say, and take a bite. I finish chewing before I go on, as Dad chews audibly. “So, I've been meaning to ask you about something. I was cleaning your office the other day—”

“Looks good by the way. Didn't think you would get it done as fast as you did—I underestimated you.”

I chuckle. “Yeah, it was all right—just an afternoon project, really. But—”

“I'm telling you, that's why I wish you would have let me hire you to work in my office this summer. You're a Burns man—that's good stock. You know how to get a job done,” Dad says, taking a huge bit from his own burger.

“Well, anyway, the thing I wanted to ask you about was this newspaper clipping I saw. It was a birth announcement for Derek O'Malley—born right around the same time of me. Mother was named Katherine O'Malley.”

Dad slows down his chewing, then swallows with a gulp of lemonade. “What did you want to know, Preston ?”

“I was just curious about why you had it. Then I asked Grandma—”

“You brought it up with your grandmother?”

“Yeah—like I said I was just curious. And then she said I'd be better off asking you yourself.”

Dad shakes his head. “Sort of a personal thing, Preston . I'm going to have to ask you to let it go.”

I expect him to say more, but nothing else comes. He puts what's left of his burger in his mouth then gets up to fetch himself another.

August 5, 2006

“So your dad had the birth announcement for some anonymous kid. I don't see what the big deal is,” Matt says over the phone.

I look out my bedroom window, down at the street, before closing the blinds for the night. “It might have been nothing. It's just that it's getting weird. I mean, he keeps it in a folder marked family, and it's only thing that doesn't fit. And like I said, my grandma wouldn't say anything about it, then my dad gets all shifty when I ask him. And that's not like him. We don't talk about everything, but if I ask, I can't remember him keeping something from me.”

“So what do you think it is?”

“Not a clue. And I Googled the shit out of both the names—nothing matches up.”

“Well, everyone's got their little secrets, or people they used to know. Katherine O'Malley was probably some friend of your mom or dad's, and they probably don't like each other anymore, and now no one wants to talk about it.”

I shake my head, as if Matt can see me from all the way over at camp. “Yeah, you're probably right.” I don't believe it, and I'm sure Matt knows that. We let it pass all the same.

“So speaking of mysterious women,” Matt goes on, “I don't suppose you passed my mailing address to Julie.”

“I did not. Hell, I don't even know if I have your mailing address. So, what, she sent you something?”

“A letter.”

“A letter?”

“That's right.”

“Well what'd it say?”

“Nothing much.”

“Come on, I don't need any more mystery in my life. What did she write?”

Matt chuckles. “It's funny, because it really wasn't much. Just a hey, how you doing? Real casual. Wouldn't think anything of it if she said the same stuff in person, or if she IMed it.”

“But she wrote you a letter—”

“Which, on its own, says a little bit more,” Matt finishes. “Interesting times we live in, huh?”