Still and all, life was getting better, and once his father moved out of the house on July second, Ferguson was impressed by how quickly his mother adjusted to their new circumstances. Everything was suddenly different, and the limitations of the monthly allowance forced her to abandon most of the comforts and all of the luxuries that had come from being married to a man with money: the services of Angie Bly for one thing (which had relieved her of tiresome domestic chores such as cooking and cleaning the house), the Blue Valley Country Club for another (no longer possible under the circumstances, which abruptly put an end to the pleasures of golf), but most of all the free-and-easy spending on clothes and shoes, the twice-weekly hairdresser appointments, the pedicures and massages, the bracelets and necklaces bought on impulse and then seldom worn afterward, all the trappings of the so-called good life she had been leading for the past ten years and which she gave up — or so it appeared to Ferguson — without a moment’s regret. She spent that first summer of pre-divorce separation working in the backyard garden, taking care of the house, and cooking in the kitchen, cooking up a storm in the kitchen, which led to such abundant and delicious dinners for her son after he came home from work that he spent the better part of his days at his father’s store thinking about what his mother would be feeding him at home that night. She rarely went out and rarely talked to anyone on the phone besides her mother in New York, but there were many visits that summer from her friend Nancy Solomon, the loyal comrade of her earliest childhood, who began to remind Ferguson of one of those next-door neighbors in a TV sitcom, the funny-looking fellow housewife who was always available to drop in for a cup of coffee and a long chat, and after Ferguson had gone upstairs to read or work on his new story or write another letter to Amy, nothing made him happier than to hear the women laughing in the kitchen below. His mother was laughing again. The dark circles under her eyes were slowly erasing themselves, and bit by bit she was beginning to look like her old self — or perhaps her new self, since the old one had vanished so long ago that Ferguson could barely even remember it.
Dan Schneiderman and his children returned from Europe at the end of August. In the sixty-two days since their departure, Ferguson had written Amy fourteen letters, half of which had managed to find her in the right place at the right time, while the other half continued to languish unclaimed in various American Express offices across Italy and France. He hadn’t dared to talk about love in any of those letters, since it would have been presumptuous and unfair of him to put her on the spot, to ask a question she wouldn’t have been able to answer to his face, but the letters had been full of affectionate and sometimes highly emotional declarations of undying friendship, and again and again he had told her that he missed her, that he longed to see her again, and that the little world he lived in was an exceedingly empty place when she wasn’t in it. From her end, Amy had sent off five letters and eleven picture postcards, all of which arrived safely in New Jersey, and though the cards from London, Paris, Florence, and Rome were necessarily short (and riddled with exclamation marks!!), the letters were long and mostly talked about how she was adjusting to her mother’s death, which seemed to change from day to day and sometimes even from hour to hour, with some tolerable moments, some painful moments, and weirdly enough some altogether good moments when she didn’t think about it at all, but when she did think about her mother it was hard not to feel guilty, she wrote, that was the most difficult thing to accept, the unending guilt, because a part of her knew she would be better off without her mother in her life, and to admit to that feeling was a terrible admission of her own rottenness. Ferguson responded to that grim, self-hating letter with further news about his parents’ separation and impending divorce, telling her that not only was he glad it was happening but that he was thrilled to know he would never have to spend another night under the same roof with his father and that he didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it. We feel what we feel, he wrote, and we’re not responsible for our feelings. For our actions, yes, but not for what we feel. You never did anything wrong to your mother. You argued with her sometimes, but you were a good daughter, and you mustn’t torture yourself for what you’re feeling now. You’re innocent, Amy, and you have no right to feel guilty about things you haven’t done.
Half of what he wrote to her that summer was lost, but those sentences happened to be in one of the letters that wound up reaching her — in London, just one day before she flew back to New York with her father and brother.
The day after they returned, the three Schneidermans came to the house for dinner. It was the first of many dinners Ferguson’s mother would cook for them throughout that first year of high school, the two and three and sometimes even four dinners a week that were mostly just with Dan and Amy after Jim went off to college again, and because Ferguson still had no idea that his mother and Amy’s father were anything more to each other than the good friends of the Dan told me era back in the spring, he interpreted those invitations as gestures of kindness and goodwill, a sympathetic reaching out to a family in mourning, father and daughter still too distracted by their grief to handle the business of shopping and cooking for themselves, their household a chaos of unmade beds and unwashed dishes now that Liz was no longer around to maintain domestic order, but on top of the generosity there were personal motives as well, Ferguson realized, for his mother was alone now and had been alone since the beginning of the summer, her life suspended between a dead past and a blank, unknowable future, and why wouldn’t she welcome the company of pleasant Dan Schneiderman and his daughter, Amy, who brought words and feelings and affection into the house, and surely those dinners were good for all of them during that transitional period of post-burial melancholy and imminent divorce, not least for Ferguson himself, who found those sit-downs at the kitchen table to be one of the strongest arguments yet advanced to support his theory that life was indeed getting better.
Better, of course, did not mean good, possibly not even close to good. It simply meant that things were less bad than they had been before, that the overall condition of his life had improved, but given what happened at the first dinner with the Schneidermans in late August, things still hadn’t improved as much as Ferguson would have hoped. He had not been with Amy for more than two months, and therefore the contours of her face had grown less and less familiar to him, and as he studied her across the table as the five of them tucked into his mother’s pot roast, he understood that the beauty of Amy’s eyes had something to do with her eyelids, that the folds in her eyelids were different from the folds in most other people’s eyelids, and because of that her eyes seemed both poignant and innocent, a rare combination he had never seen in anyone else, young eyes that would go on being young even after she herself had become old, and that was why he had fallen for her, he suspected, the moment of revelation had occurred when he saw those eyes gush forth tears at her mother’s funeral, he had been so moved by those weeping eyes that he could no longer think of her as just a friend, suddenly it was love, the in-love sort of love that surpassed all other forms of love, and he wanted her to love him back in the same way he now loved her. After dessert, he took her out into the backyard for a one-on-one conversation while the three others continued to sit around the table talking. It was one of those warm and muggy late-summer New Jersey nights, the thick air dotted with the blinks and pulsing flashes of a hundred fireflies, the same creatures he and Amy had captured on summer nights when they were children, putting them in clear glass jars and walking around with those glowing shrines of light in their hands, and now they were walking around in the same backyard talking about Amy’s trip to Europe and the end of Ferguson’s parents’ marriage and the letters they had written to each other in July and August. Ferguson asked if she had received the last one, the one he had sent to London ten days earlier, and when she said yes, he asked if she understood what he had been trying to tell her. I think so, Amy said. I’m not sure it helps, but maybe it will start to help at some point, the not-being-responsible-for-our-feelings stuff, I’m really going to have to chew on that for a while, Archie, since I still can’t help feeling responsible for what I feel.