"Are you going with me?" she asked. She'd hoped that they would act as a family, but it was up to them. When she dropped the news, they were sitting outside on the patio in a tight little circle around the wrought-iron table they'd always used for picnics. Cassie had asked Teddy to put up the umbrella to shade her face. As soon as he did, a cloud drifted over the sun, and the shade around them deepened to twilight.
For once the contentious children were too stunned to squabble. Teddy and Marsha divided their attention between each other and her. Around them was the fragrant backyard that had been their childhood haven: perfect green grass in the small lawn. Blooming lilies in all the borders. They were thinking the same thing. Mitchell Sales, their daddy, the end. Their mood was gloomy.
It wasn't as if they weren't prepared. Still, death coming on them like this, during a lunch break, was so final, there seemed nothing to say. Teddy studied a worm that had fallen into the pool. The worm must have died yesterday, because already it had faded to tan, bleached by the chlorine. He switched his attention to his shoes. They were the same Italian loafers his boss, Ira Mandel, wore. Suddenly Marsha, who'd taken the day off from her internship in the women's jail on Riker's Island, began weeping quietly.
"Tom didn't tell me Daddy was dying today. Does he know?" She was wearing her jail outfit: black pants, black T-shirt. No makeup. She looked pretty good except for the tears streaking her face.
Cassie felt sorry for her. Until now, Marsha had been detached, almost as if the double catastrophe of her mother's crazy face-lift and her father's crazy stroke both occurring practically at the same time was a kind of parental acting out that would eventually come to a peaceful end as hers always had. Now it wasn't clear whether the loss of her father or the fear of death itself was getting to her.
When Cassie was her age, she'd already been married for several years and had a little girl. She'd thought she was a grown-up, had life all figured out. She watched Teddy's knee bobbing, his foot shaking. It seemed as if his whole body was in motion. These days, twenty-three was infancy, and twenty-five was not much older. Marsha worked with unwed teenage mothers, inmates in prison. What did she know about any of that?
"I don't know, honey. We haven't spoken," she murmured.
"But he's been great, hasn't he?" Marsha sought approval for the skinny young neurologist she never would have liked had her father not been felled by his specialty.
Cassie shook her head.
"Don't you think he's great, Mom?" Marsha persisted.
"He's great, Marsha, but what about Daddy?" Cassie asked.
Marsha sneaked another look at Teddy. He glared back at her.
"I don't know about you, but I don't want to watch the bastard croak," Teddy said harshly.
"Teddy, he's your father!" Marsha snarled, her mood shifting from sorrow to barking indignation in an instant.
"Fuck you, Marsha," Teddy tossed off.
"Fuck me, Teddy. You're the one he loved. You were Daddy's boy."
"Oh right, Daddy's boy." Teddy snorted.
"The least you could do is stand by him now… You were everything to him." Marsha shifted into that bratty singsong voice that always drove Teddy nuts.
Teddy made the noise of a fart. The two of them balled their fingers into fists, and sibling rivalry erupted into a fight. Cassie was glad she'd isolated herself from them in the last few weeks since she'd found out Teddy was friends with Mona. The hole in her chest opened up. Her own kids had no thought of standing by her.
"Oh? Oh? Who went with him everywhere?" Marsha taunted.
"Oh Marsha, you had it easy. He left you alone," Teddy parried.
"He wouldn't let me do anything I wanted," she whined.
Teddy made more farting noises. "Like what did you want?"
"I wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to fly," she said plaintively.
"Oh shit, not that again." He kicked a clay pot with a perky red geranium in it. The pot went over, crushing the biggest bloom. Cassie was shocked.
"Daddy said girls can't fly," Marsha sniffed, still smarting over the ancient injury.
"Who'd want to fly? Those things go down all the time." Unable to move, Cassie clicked her tongue at the downed geranium. Why had she brought them here? She hated her kids.
"You're all against me," Marsha's voice regressed to age ten.
"No, sweetheart. No, don't think that way. He loved you," Cassie defended by rote, assuring her daughter even now that her father had loved her.
"He said I'd get PMS and crash the plane," Marsha wept.
"I know, honey."
Teddy didn't want to hear any more of this. "I'm telling you, you had it easy. Daddy followed me everywhere, even into the bathroom."
"So what?"
"What's twenty-five times eighty. Quick, Teddy, multiply, don't think. He'd stick his finger in my chest, yell at me to pee and multiply like a man."
"No one cares, Teddy," Marsha said. She was so cold, the tears could have frozen on her cheeks.
"Marsha, that's not true." Cassie jumped to Teddy's defense. She couldn't help defending. It was her nature. "I care," she said.
"I never knew which to do first. If I peed, he'd scream at me for missing. Every single day! In college he was still grilling me at the urinal."
"You flunked all your fucking tests, you dope," Marsha snickered at the direct hit.
"I didn't want to do it, you bitch. Did it ever occur to you he made me do it? He wouldn't let me fail!" Now Teddy was in tears, and Cassie was shocked even more. What was the matter with them?
"He took you into the business, didn't he?" Marsha spat out.
"Making me work for fucking Ira, you think that's a treat? The shit that goes down there, you wouldn't believe." Teddy kicked another pot. Over it went. This one broke, scattering pot shards and dirt.
"What shit?" Cassie asked, distracted for a moment by business.
Teddy looked away. "Nothing."
"What shit?" Marsha demanded.
"I said, nothing."
"You know everything, Teddy. Give," Marsha hissed.
Teddy shook his head.
The opening Cassie had been waiting for had finally come. She licked her lips. "Teddy, you were Daddy's boy. And you were Mona's boy. That's hurt Marsha and me a lot. Did you ever think about that?"
"I didn't mean to." Teddy shook his head. He didn't want to go there.
"Teddy, your loyalty to the family has been tested. We know where you stand," Marsha said bitterly.
Ah, now it was coming out.
"She was always very nice to me," he said defensively.
"Oh come on, they were fucking in the bathroom," Marsha retorted angrily.
Cassie reeled. "What?"
"I didn't know that." Teddy looked guiltily at his mother.