That fucking whale. I never did finish that book.
But despite that piece of paper, I belonged to that class of people who were invisible to Fiona. I was an ant, a worker bee, one of the faceless millions who kept the world running smoothly and whom, thankfully, you didn’t have to spend a lot of face time with. Fiona probably appreciated, on some level, that there were people to build and renovate houses, just as she was pleased there were others who picked up the trash every week. She lumped me in with the folks who cleared out her gutters and cut her lawn-when she still had her big house-and tuned her Caddy and fixed her toilet when it wouldn’t stop running, even if you jiggled the handle. It didn’t seem to matter to her that I had my own company-granted, it had been handed down to me by my father-or that I employed several people, had a reputation as a reliable contractor, did okay for myself, that I was not only able to put a roof over my, my wife’s, and my daughter’s heads, but that I was able to build the damn roof myself. The only person who worked with his hands who might impress Fiona would be the latest darling of the gallery crowd, some twenty-first-century answer to Jackson Pollock whose paint-stained trousers were evidence of talent and eccentricity, not just of trying to make a living.
I’d had clients like Fiona over the years. They were the ones who wouldn’t shake your hand, afraid their soft palms might get scratched by your calluses.
Since I’d first met Fiona, I’d had a hard time getting my head around the fact that Sheila was really her daughter. While there was a physical resemblance, in every other way the two women were different. Fiona cared deeply about maintaining the status quo. That translated into protecting tax breaks for the wealthy, praying that same-sex marriage never became legalized, and double life sentences for petty thefts.
Fiona’s horror at Sheila marrying me was matched only by her disdain for her daughter’s occasional volunteer work at a legal aid clinic and the time she spent volunteering on Democratic senator Chris Dodd’s campaigns.
“Do you do it because you really care? Or because you know it drives your mother nuts?” I asked her once.
“Because I care,” Sheila answered. “Driving Mother nuts is just a bonus.”
The first year we were married, Sheila told me, “Mother’s a bully. I’ve learned over the years the only thing you can do is to stand up to her. You’ll never know the things she said to me when I told her I was marrying you. But you have to know the most hurtful things she said were not about you, Glen. They were about me. For the choices I’ve made. Well, I’m proud of those choices. And of the ones you’ve made, too.”
I had chosen to build things. Decks, garages, additions, entire houses. After graduation, I sought employment at my father’s contracting company, where I’d worked every summer since I was sixteen.
“I’m gonna need references,” he’d said when I walked into his office right after college, when I was twenty-two.
I loved what I did. I pitied friends who spent their days sitting in cubicle prisons, who went home after eight hours unable to point to a single thing they’d accomplished. But I made buildings. Things you could point to as you drove down the street. And I was building them with my father, I was learning from him every day. A couple of years after I started working with him, I met Sheila on that window job, and before long we’d moved in together, something that didn’t sit well with my parents any more than it did with Fiona. But two years later we stopped living in sin, as my own mother liked to call it, in part because Mom was dying of cancer, and knowing we were legally married would give her some peace of mind.
Four years later, there was a child on the way.
Dad lived long enough to hold Kelly in his arms. After his passing, I became the boss. I felt orphaned and overwhelmed. The shoes were too big to fill, but I did my best. It was never the same without him, but I still loved what I did. I had a reason to get up in the morning. I had a purpose. I felt no need to justify the life I’d chosen to Sheila’s mother.
Sheila and I were both surprised when Fiona started seeing someone.
His name was Marcus Kingston, and while his first wife was still somewhere out in California, his second had died eight years earlier when some yahoo in a souped-up Civic ran a red light and broadsided her Lincoln. Marcus had been an importer of clothing and other goods, but had recently wound up his business when Fiona met him at a gallery opening in Darien. He’d spent a career mixing with the well-off and well connected, just the kind of people Fiona liked to be associated with.
When they decided, four years ago, to get married, Marcus sold his Norwalk house and Fiona put her place in Darien on the market. They went in together on a luxury town house that overlooked Long Island Sound.
Sheila’s theory was that Fiona woke up one morning and thought, Do I want to live the rest of my life alone? I had to admit that it had never occurred to me that Fiona might have any emotional needs. The woman put up such a chilly and independent front that one could be forgiven for thinking that she didn’t need people. But beneath that icy exterior was someone who was very lonely.
Marcus came along at the right time for her.
Sheila and I had wondered, on more than one occasion, whether Marcus’s motivations were slightly more complicated. He, too, had been on his own, and it made sense that he might want to wake up in the morning with someone next to him. But we also knew that Marcus had not sold his business for what he’d hoped to get, and that a sizable portion of his income still went to his first wife in Sacramento. Fiona, who’d been so careful-I might be inclined to say “tight”-with her money for so many years, appeared to have no problem spending it on Marcus. She’d even bought him a sailboat, which he moored in the Darien harbor.
Marcus still did some consulting here and there for importers who valued his expertise and connections. He dined out a night or two a week with these people, and liked to brag about how the business world just wouldn’t let him rest. Sheila and I had, privately, observed that he could be a bit of a blowhard, an asshole, frankly. But Fiona appeared to love him, and seemed happier with him in her life than she had been before he showed up.
They visited a lot so Fiona could see her grandchild. I could find plenty of reasons to dislike Fiona, but there was no question that she did adore Kelly. She took her shopping, to the movies, to Manhattan to visit museums and attend Broadway shows. Fiona even endured the occasional trip to the Toys “R” Us in Times Square.
“Where was this woman when I was a kid?” Sheila had asked me more than once.
Fiona and I maintained a kind of truce through these years. She didn’t like me, and I didn’t care much for her, but we remained civil. There was no out-in-the-open warfare.
That pretty much ended with Sheila’s accident.
After that, there was no holding back. Fiona blamed me. If I knew Sheila had a drinking problem, why hadn’t I done something about it? Why hadn’t I spoken to Fiona about it? Why hadn’t I forced Sheila into a program? What was I thinking, letting her drive around half the state of Connecticut, when she might very well have been under the influence?
And how often had she been drunk like that with Kelly-their granddaughter, for Christ’s sake-in the car?
“How could you not have known?” Fiona asked me at the funeral. “How the hell could you not have seen the signs?”