Reunion

There was time, yet, for Froot Loops before her mother and Calvin arrived. She poured a bowl and ate it standing at the counter, Peep lurking at her ankles until she put the milk dregs down for him to finish. Ten ’til eight. She had better put some socks on; her toenails were ragged, and who knew what kind of garbage this Calvin guy might decide to report to Perez or TMZ?

She could hear her mother’s voice chastising, her, telling her to relax already. Right, relax. Re-lax. “Chill,” she said, heading back down the hallway. That her mother wanted to introduce this latest companion suggested he was, in Nancy’s estimation, higher caliber than most. Even so, after years of exposure to the public’s appetite for gossip—guilty, herself, of spreading it now and then—Blue preferred to be overly cautious. Live by the sword, die by it.

Calvin K., as he was introduced to Blue, was in every visible way her mother’s counterpart. Silver hair, pierced ears, rangy and kind looking. According to her mother’s earlier account, they’d met at the co-op on Lake Park one Saturday morning, buying organic vegetables. Calvin had an endearing passion for rutabaga.

“Calvin, meet my oldest, Harmony Blue—or just Blue, if she prefers.”

“She prefers,” Blue said. “Is it Calvin Kay, K-a-y?” She’d need to know in order to have him checked out. Her practice of getting background checks on her mother’s companions was another of the subjects neither of them spoke of, or not to one another at any rate.

“No, it’s the letter K, for K-r-z-y-z-e-w-s-k-i,” he spelled it out, then told her it was pronounced sha-sheff-ski. “It’s Polish. Ya’d think someone would anglicize it, but there you go.”

“Well,” she said, taking her mother’s coat, and his, “Good to meet you, Calvin K.”

“Hard to beat ‘Kucharski,’ huh?” her mother said.

Which was why Blue had chosen Reynolds.

Though Calvin’s accent had already answered her next question, she needed something with which to make conversation. She did not, after all, know a single thing about rutabaga. She said, “Are you a Chicago native?”

“Nah, Winnebago. I came here in ninety-seven, I guess it was, to run a bookstore in Hyde Park—my brother’s. He had colon cancer.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Is he—?”

“Gone? Yeah. Saw that special you did on it, though. I appreciate that.”

Her mother, hair down, wearing a form-fitting Impressionist print top and jeans, told Blue, “We watched the show today. Calvin’s been a fan for years. What was with the tears? Do you have a cold?”

“A cold?” Blue closed the closet door and led them into the living room. “No, I’m not sick.”

“When you were little, I would always know when you were coming down with something because your emotions would be all over the map. Could be early menopause—are your periods irregular? Are you having hot flashes?”

“No! Really Mom, it’s nothing,” she lied. “I’m tired is all. Hey, I have some of that red wine you like; can I pour you a glass? Calvin?”

After they’d settled onto the L-shaped sectional, Blue listened while her mother brought her up to date on her sister Melody’s latest. For as intertwined as their lives had been as children, she and Mel had a tenuous connection as adults. Blue relied on their mother to keep her current about Mel, while Mel had their mother and the tabloids to keep her updated on Blue, either of which she seemed willing to regard as reasonably authoritative. The question now was whether their mother or the media would be first to alert Mel to her on-air outburst.

Currently, Blue’s mother was saying, Mel and her husband Jeff were leasing out two hundred tillable acres of their central Wisconsin farm to Green Giant and, using the rent income, had just bought themselves an RV. With their sons both grown and out of the house for the first time, they were planning to spend the coming summer touring the country, one KOA campground after another until they’d crossed off all twenty-nine of their sightseeing goals. “They’ve never traveled; Jeff refuses to fly.”

“So they’re gonna knock ’em all out at once, eh? Carpe diem,” Calvin said.

“I can’t get over how differently you and Mel turned out,” her mother went on. “No way can I see you in an RV—or on a farm, for that matter.” She told Calvin, “She’s never been one to settle for what’s ordinary.”

Blue shook her head. “That’s not true.”

“No?”

“No.” She craved ordinary. Grocery shopping. An afternoon in the park with a blanket and a book. “If you mean my career, you know that a lot of my success is owed to luck.”

Calvin chuckled. “A pretty good run of luck, then.”

“You laugh, but I’m sincere. I started out as a production assistant. I never saw myself hosting a talk show; I wanted to do the news.” If she threw herself into her work as though it was a life raft, if she appeared to be far more dedicated than her cohorts, that was only because she’d used work to fill the empty spaces that others filled with spouses or children, with bar-hopping or hobbies or sports.

In her defense she added, “I had Froot Loops for dinner.”

“You just made my point,” her mother laughed. “How many times have you been there, to the farm?”

“I don’t know—three?” She knew exactly. Each exhausting visit had seen her treading the narrow line between tolerance and envy. In spite of Blue’s support of her sister’s choices and admiration for everything Mel and Jeff had accomplished, Mel was still inclined to defensiveness. It seemed her every sentence began with a version of, “I know it isn’t as glamorous as your life, but …” Blue hadn’t been there in years. She’d wanted to attend the boys’ high-school graduation ceremonies but Mel insisted her presence would detract from the events. “No offense, but we just don’t want it to turn into Blue Reynolds Day.” The sad thing was, Blue couldn’t fight the logic. She’d sent each boy a generous check and invited them to visit her at will.

“You know,” her mother said, “we should all get together soon. Then Calvin can see for himself what I mean.” She turned to Calvin. “My girls don’t think alike, and they don’t look a bit alike, either. Melody’s taller, kind of stocky, with wide blue eyes and a little bit of a cleft chin. She’s been blonde since she was a toddler.”

“My oldest son’s my ex-wife’s spitting image—well, bigger nose and more facial hair now, ya know—while my daughter’s me to a tee. Could be true for yours—one like you, one like their dad.”

“Not that we’d know if that was the case,” Blue said. She hadn’t meant to sound bitter but the words, once out, had an edge. “We don’t know anything about him.”

Her mother looked at her over the top of her wine glass, then finished her sip and said, “For your own good—and what difference would it make if I’d told you every detail? He was gone even when he was in this world, no practical use to me and none to either of you.”

Which Blue was sure was true, but she had been there on those long Sunday afternoons when her mother played Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” over and over again on the console stereo. Watching her mother towel off after a shower, she’d stared at the black script “L” on her mother’s right hip and wondered, Lou? Leonard? Larry? Lance? The absent presence of L in their lives had gnawed at them all.

“I did the best I could with you; God knows I wasn’t very sensible in my younger years.”

Calvin said, “Who is? All I got to show for my early adulthood is five years’ experience driving a fuel-oil truck, and a perfect memory of the words to every Crosby, Stills and Nash song there was at the time.”

Her mother started singing “Teach Your Children” and Calvin joined in. Blue shook her head, but a part of her, a reluctant, soft part that she liked to forget she had, was captivated. That her mother sang well was no surprise; her singing had always been the cue that Blue and Mel could ask for bubblegum money or, later, new jeans. The surprise was in how her mother and Calvin harmonized so well, and with such obvious mutual pleasure, and in exactly the manner Blue had wished for as a child when she’d watched The Sound of Music and imagined that for her mother there could be an add-on father. Their Maria would be a long-haired, soft-souled, Peter Fonda sort of guy.

If the likes of Calvin had come along back then, everything would have turned out so differently … There would be no past to hide away, no lost son to track down.

Branford has a lead.

But she could not think about that right now.

“Something to eat?” she asked, heading to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.

Through the kitchen window Blue saw that the snow was slowing and, out against the dark horizon, whole floors of lights still glowed in the skyscrapers that separated her from the vast black of Lake Michigan. Who was working this late? Who, like her, had little reason not to work any and all hours, or was so disconnected from those reasons that getting home at nine o’clock, ten, had become par?

She refilled wine glasses and brought out another bottle, along with cheese, bread, olives. Her mother was in the middle of a tale from Blue’s childhood.

“Now this would’ve been around the time Mom died,” she was saying, “so who knows what those girls were thinking, we were all such a mess, but I came home from work—was it the laundry, then? No, no, I remember, I was cleaning houses in this snotty part of Milwaukee, for women who filled their days getting their poodles groomed. Anyway, I finally got home and there were the girls, in the kitchen, very serious-looking, water and flour and paper towels spread everywhere.”

Blue remembered too; she’d been ten, Melody nine. A spring evening shortly after they’d moved to Jackson Park, on the south side of Milwaukee, when Mel, on a let’s-test-the-new-kid dare, had climbed their new school’s flagpole just after school let out. She was already near the top when Blue came outside—not that Blue’s protests would have stopped her—knees wrapped around the pole, one arm waving to the growing crowd of kids below. Blue’s mouth was just opening to yell, “Be careful!” when Mel lost her grip and fell backwards, skimming partway down the pole and then landing hard on her right side. The school nurse—Blue couldn’t recall her name or even quite what she looked like—thought the arm was probably broken. But when she failed to reach anyone at Nancy’s work number, she had reluctantly let Blue persuade her to take Mel home.

Blue remembered how grown up she’d felt, how capable, standing there somberly in front of the nurse, Mel equally somber, not even crying. If Mel had been hysterical, the nurse would never have let them leave. But faced with two little girls who swore their mother was going to be home soon, was probably on her way that minute and that was why the nurse couldn’t reach her, the nurse let them go. “You tell your mother Melody needs to see a doctor today,” the nurse had said, making Blue promise.

“I was thinking that Mel’s arm was broken,” Blue said now, “so I was making a cast.”

“Oh, the two of you,” her mother laughed, “with wet flour clumped in your hair and Melody practically mummi-fied.”

“Cute kids,” Calvin said. “Resourceful.”

And Mel’s arm was broken, and needed surgery, and their mother had been forced to take a second job to pay off the hospital bills.