"What about Daddy"s mommy?" Emma asked.
Eileen might have wanted to reconnect with her children and grandchildren now, but before the accident, Warren couldn"t see the point.
"Daddy"s mommy didn"t want to be a mommy anymore," I explained.
They accepted the statement with the innocence of children. The explanation made sense to them, even if it didn"t to me.
Now when I was feeling sympathetic, I could admit that Warren hadn"t had an easy time with the women in his life.
His mother left him.
His girls were gone.
I never wanted to be another woman in his life who left him. That"s at least one of the reasons I stayed after the accident, when it might have been better for both of us to be apart.
My childhood wasn"t nearly as complicated as Warren"s. I grew up in a moderately affluent neighborhood in New Jersey where my dad owned the Town Pub, where I eventually met Warren. It was a popular hangout, and my dad loved being the center of the social scene. He hired many of my school friends to work there nights and weekends, and my first real job was at the restaurant, too. My mom didn"t have a job until I reached high school, but my dad took good care of her even after their divorce, and we always had what we needed.
About the time I went off to college, the restaurant took a downward slide and finances got tight. My dad didn"t mention the problems, but his checks started bouncing. I got called to the registrar"s office at Boston University and was told that I needed to provide a cashier"s check if I wanted to stay enrolled. My grandmother paid the tuition, and I got a job to pay rent.
When the debts became too much to handle, my dad lost the restaurant and took a job at another one. I needed to earn a salary in the summers, and while many of my friends continued to work at the Town Pub, I loyally went to the restaurant where my dad now worked. The only problem was that I couldn"t make enough money there.
My dad must have had the same problem, because eventually he gave up on restaurants and started driving a cab. At first I felt embarra.s.sed for him. He knew everybody in town. What if he ended up with someone in the backseat of his cab who had been a friend? But he didn"t worry. He liked driving and talking to people, and he had no ego invested.
I admired him for losing everything yet still finding a way to go on.
Dad also didn"t mind when I went back to working at the former Town Pub. Whatever the new owners had done, I still got good tips there, and as Dad saw it, money was money. One day, I got off work at the restaurant early and was heading out with my longtime friend Cortney, when her car broke down in the parking lot. We went back inside to wait for help. A guy we knew called out "Hi!" and invited us to come join the crowd of pals around him. I went over reluctantly, grumpy about the delay and the broken-down car. I didn"t pay too much attention when one of the guys introduced himself as Warren Hance from Long Island.
"Long Island?" I asked, snarkily. "How do you get all the way to Long Island?"
"It"s not so hard," he said, missing-or ignoring-my sarcasm and instead spouting off driving directions specific enough to get me directly to his house.
"Okay, but why did you come all the way to New Jersey tonight?" I asked, as if he"d just circ.u.mnavigated the Atlantic in a rowboat rather than driven across the George Washington Bridge.
"I came to see the restaurant," he said. "My friend"s brother bought it."
"Really? My dad used to own it."
Somewhere in that tangled web was a connection. And it wasn"t long before we both felt a deeper connection, too.
In the next few months, Warren came to New Jersey so often that he probably could have circ.u.mnavigated the globe. I guess you could say our relationship started with my waiting on him, because he returned to the Town Pub for dinner the night after we met-and sat at a table where I was the waitress. It took a few dates before I realized he"d become my boyfriend. Two years later, we were inseparable.
"I want you to move somewhere closer to me," Warren said at that point.
"Where would I go?"
"I"ll find you a place," he promised.
I still lived at home, and though I"d been on my own in college, I"d always relied on my dad. Now, cla.s.sically, the role subtly shifted to Warren. He located an apartment in Queens, and when I worried about how I could afford it, he had the apartment furnished for me. He made it easy to move from my past in New Jersey to my future in New York.
After I met Warren and moved to New York, I began working in the catering department of Barnard College. I"d often arrive at 5:30 a.m. and work until late evening-long hours of running around, nonstop, but I loved it. Food and menus had always been my pa.s.sion and an idea started to nudge into my mind that maybe someday I"d have my own catering company.
When I wasn"t working, Warren and I spent all our time together. We were friends and lovers and shared everything, but he never asked me to marry him. I was young when we met, and maybe he wanted me to grow up a little bit. We were clearly going to be together forever, but I couldn"t understand his reluctance and threatened to leave on a regular basis.
"I probably won"t be here next year if we"re not engaged," I told his family one year at a Christmas party.
"This is the last Easter party I come to without a ring," I said at another family gathering.
But the years went by and I kept showing up, wearing only the rings I"d bought for myself. I talked about marriage regularly, but Warren never responded. Maybe he didn"t have much faith in the whole concept because he"d never really seen it work. Why risk the hurt he"d watched his father go through?
I finally stopped thinking about a proposal.
Which is exactly when I got one.
"What makes you want to get married now?" I asked him one day, after I"d said yes and he"d slipped a beautiful diamond on my finger.
"Because you stopped asking," he admitted. "And I love you."
It had taken us six years from that night at the bar to the evening at the altar.
Once we got married, in April 1999, I quit my job and went off the pill. I wanted a baby-babies-immediately. Children gave life meaning.
Back then it never occurred to me that they could be taken away, devastating all the meaning in life, too.
Twelve
Tragedy turns everything upside-down. Occasions that once made my life good now made it bad. Events I once looked forward to I now faced with dread.
Like Halloween. Isabelle and I had made a tradition of getting dressed up in costumes and going to school to watch our children in the Halloween parade. I loved the year Emma had decided to be a pirate with a bandanna around her head, a fake sword at her side, and black tights with skulls on them. Alyson had looked incredibly cute as a fairy and Katie pranced proudly as a mermaid. Our stoop always had three pumpkins that we"d carved with the girls and lots of lights and decorations to welcome the trick-or-treaters.
Jeannine threw an annual Halloween costume party for the grown-ups-and she took it seriously, with contests and events and over-the-top outfits. For one party, a group of us were characters from The Wizard of Oz: Isabelle was Dorothy, Mark was the Scarecrow, I was a Munchkin, and Brad dressed as the Mayor of Munchkinland. Melissa, who always dressed up as something pretty, got to be Glinda, the Good Witch.
For my first Halloween without the girls, I stayed in bed all day crying. As evening fell, I left a spread of candy on the stoop for any children who stopped by, but didn"t turn on any house lights. Huddling alone in the dark seemed the only way to get through the night. Jeannine canceled the annual blowout Halloween party because all of us were haunted by real ghosts and didn"t need anything else to scare us.
By the next morning, I could check another painful day off the fall holiday hit parade. But there were more to come.
As the leaves fell off the trees and the days got colder, I shuddered at the thought of going to our traditional family Thanksgiving dinner at my brother Stephen"s house in New Jersey. Sitting at his festive table without the girls in their normal places would be more than I could bear.
"Come to our house for Thanksgiving," Jeannine offered, always stepping forward in the crunch. "We"ll start a new tradition."
"What about the extended family you usually go to?" I asked.
"We"ll skip it. Being with you and Warren is more important."