Curvy by Lesley Dormen

One day I get tired of crying and feeling sorry for myself—I’m not starving, I’m not in a war, I’m not crippled—and decide to track down my real father’s phone number. Isn’t it about time? I’m practically thirty years old. This is my life, right now.

I call Cleveland information. I don’t know why I’m surprised when they give me the number. Irving Brandwein, as present and accountable as Macy’s. I write it down on the corner of a takeout menu from Hunan Royal.

It’s the Fourth of July weekend, a few weeks before Prince Charles is supposed to marry the shy kindergarten teacher. Everyone—meaning my ex-boyfriend and some crazy girl he broke my heart for—has left the city two by two. When all that’s left is me and my carefully chosen pile of new books (The Complete Novels of Jane Austen Volume 1, The Interpretation of Dreams, Strangers on a Train), armature against the heavy air, the Sunday stillness every day, the whoosh of the occasional taxi, the Doobie Brothers coming from someone’s open window. The soundtrack to the end of the world.

I don’t know my father, not really. My mother divorced him when I was six, replaced him with a new father right away, then another one when that one turned out to be defective. The last time I saw him I was—what? Twenty. He called to say that he was passing through New York for a sporting goods convention—that’s his business, sporting goods or sports clothes or maybe sports trophies, something like that—and could he take me to dinner. Very polite. The time before that I was ten, when he took me to lunch and asked me why I wanted to change my name. This was in Cleveland, where we lived. My mother took the same care dressing me as I took dressing my dolls. For lunch with my father: patent leather Mary Janes and my brown tweed Chesterfield coat with the velvet collar. (The bowler hat with streamers felt babyish. I left it in the car.) I didn’t have the heart to tell this almost stranger that Mother had changed our names, unofficially at least, the moment she remarried. “I just want my last name to be the same as my mother’s last name,” I said primly over chicken in a basket. My initial sense of importance—my younger brother, Alex, wasn’t included—had been worn down by my father’s soft, persistent questions with their alarming implications. I wanted to go home, to my biography of Abigail Adams and the new puppy our second father got us.

The last time my real father called, I asked if I could bring my best friend, Phoebe, along to dinner. As I said, I was twenty. Nothing that happened to me was real unless it happened to Phoebe, too. My father was shorter than I remembered. Phoebe and I sat beside each other on the banquette, smoking and drinking gin and tonics, telling what we had studied at college and how we liked our first jobs, the two of us scrupulously avoiding each other’s eyes for fear of collapsing into awful helpless laughter. The memory makes me cringe. “I’ll wait for you to call the next time,” my father told me kindly at the end of that evening. I guess it wasn’t a great strategy on his part.

A few days later, I get up the nerve to dial the Cleveland number. She answers the phone. His wife. I ask for him, for Irv. That’s how we refer to him, Alex and I. He’s the original one-name celebrity. “It’s Grace,” I say. “His daughter.” I feel like I’m calling the President.

“It’s nice to hear your voice,” my real father says when he gets on. His voice has the gentleness I remember, a little bit shy. He definitely sounds surprised. We say a few formal things back and forth, but it doesn’t matter what they are. It’s like he’s been waiting for the phone to ring. I know the feeling.

The next thing you know, Irv and his wife are going to stop in New York for a day just to see us—me and my brother—on their way to a wedding in Florida. The first Saturday in August. They’ll arrive in the afternoon and spend the night. So there’s going to be a reunion: Me, Alex, Irv, and his wife. Not Mother.

“Have you told her yet?” my brother says. He has zero memories of Irv—he was only three when they divorced—but he’s onboard with the reunion. “Because you know she’ll want to be in on it.” Nope, I haven’t. I’ve been relishing the secret. It’s like walking around town with a concealed weapon.

“This has to be about us, not her,” I say with big sisterly authority. It occurs to me, though. Telling would be like actually using the weapon.

I say I’ll explain it.

“Good luck,” he says.

I take the subway to my mother’s apartment on a Friday afternoon. We only have to stick around the office until noon in the summer. I work for a consulting firm that tracks novelty item and condiment trends. I write up reports for Howard and Josie, the two partners, put together focus groups, attend luncheons sponsored by Pez and the Pimento Council. Look, it’s not the job I’m supposed to have. I can’t even go into all the reasons I have it.

My mother and I sit on the terrace. She lives in an apartment house that takes up the whole block, but her apartment is on a low floor, and you can see directly across the street into a firehouse that’s been remade as a sculptor’s studio. What an excellent New York view. I feel sorry for the sculptor, though. All he gets to look at is my mother’s mammoth white brick building.

My mother has made iced tea for us to drink with the biscotti I picked up on the way. She’s perfectly dressed, in pale linen afternoon clothes. She looks like she’s just come from or is going somewhere. Where? She doesn’t have a job, she doesn’t see a therapist, she doesn’t volunteer, and she has no hobbies. A mystery as usual.

“Grace, you know me. I only want this to be a good experience for you and your brother,” my mother says after I’ve made my speech about who can participate in the reunion and who can’t.

“Okay, well, good.” I sit up a little straighter. I like this feeling—gently but firmly forbidding my mother to suck up all the available attention.

We each sip our tea.

“Although I’d be curious to see Irv after all these years,” she says. “That’s natural, isn’t it?”

Who knows what’s natural? I ask people to share their feelings about tiny pickles. Is that natural?

“Have you discussed it with Dr. Gold?” my mother says.

“What do you mean?” She means, Did you tell her before you told me.

“Does she think this is a good idea for you right now?”

“Why wouldn’t it be a good idea?”

Recently my mother called Dr. Gold and asked her what she should be doing to help me. She and Alex hover impatiently around my prickly unease like diners waiting for their table. “Be her mother,” Dr. Gold says she told her. I wish I had thought of that.

Instead of going downtown to my empty apartment, I let my mother persuade me to walk around the corner to a neighborhood boutique she likes. My mother chats it up with the saleswoman while I peel off my T-shirt and jeans and try on a bunch of stuff in the dressing room. I come out in a strapless cotton dress with a matching jacket and consider myself in the mirror. I don’t feel like me exactly, but do I feel like someone I might like to be? I try to picture my father seeing me for the first time in ten years. A sophisticated young woman. Nice shoulders, curly hair. Sexy. My mother runs her hand thoughtfully across the back of the dress with a small frown. I know that touch. It’s code for stand up straight. I see what she sees: I’m crooked. One shoulder is higher than the other. I have no idea what happened to make my spine curve that much and no more. I don’t even think about it. I’m tilted in a certain direction, and that’s that. I adjust my shoulder.

“I love that on you!” my mother says with a great big smile.

“And it’s transitional,” the saleswoman tells my mother.

I get the dress and some other stuff. My mother pays for everything while I pretend to be mesmerized by a scarf and jewelry display at the front of the store.

The next day I go to Bergdorf’s for shoes. I tell them to put it on my mother’s charge. I sign her name on the slip and write “Daughter” in parentheses.

The following week, Dr. Gold and I start out with the upcoming reunion and how I feel about it and what my fantasies are of what might happen. I feel good, kind of excited, I have no particular fantasies. “I just want him to know what kind of person I’ve turned into,” I say. But what kind of person is that?

I tell her about the shopping trip. Last winter Dr. Gold and I spent three sessions on whether or not I would accept a raccoon coat my mother no longer wore. Telling her about the new clothes is like confessing to some kind of junkie relapse. Just when I think I’m about to finally understand the nature of my bargain with my mother, a fog fills my skull and settles around my brain like a fairy-tale spell.

“That dress I got—it’s not even my style,” I tell Dr. Gold. I sound combative. Is the spell her fault?

“Well, how would you describe your style?” she says.

“Less, I don’t know, structured. Looser. More flowy.” I get a picture in my mind of Joni Mitchell, then Virginia Woolf, then Julie Christie in Darling. Folkloric hippie? Droopy thirties tea dresses? Mod London? A furious ball of misery and complaint has lodged itself in my throat. My eyes fill up. Why don’t I have a style? Dr. Gold uncrosses and recrosses her legs. Now I worry that I’ve inadvertently insulted her style. Not that she has a style. When I started seeing her at the clinic two years ago, she wore jean skirts and sandals. “I’d prefer to see a man,” I told the director of the clinic when he asked if I had a preference. “No particular reason.” They gave me Dr. Gold. She was so new then she didn’t get to go away in August. Now she wears silk blouses and tailored skirts and spends the entire month in Greece or Sardinia or Wellfleet. One of those places. It’s almost a relief when people go away.

I find a room for Irv and his wife in a hotel on Park Avenue South. A good weekend rate and equidistant from my brother’s apartment and from mine.

I call up my brother to tell him.

“I know that hotel. They shot a scene from The Verdict in the bar. Paul Newman slaps Charlotte Rampling across the face.”

“So do you think I should take it?” I picture us all meeting in the dark woody bar after they’ve had a chance to unpack and get settled. I hear myself telling Irv and his wife that a Paul Newman movie was filmed here.

“Do whatever you want,” my brother says. “This is all your idea.”

I have a few memories of Irv as my father, that’s all. I’ve combed through them with Dr. Gold: Irv giving me a stuffed monkey named Zippy, Irv hiding colored Easter eggs under the sofa cushions, Irv’s pale calves sticking out of a bathrobe. Mother was the one who’d asked for the divorce. Why? Unclear. She’s remarked that Irv could be “sarcastic,” that he wasn’t “ambitious,” that he was “a little too short on the dance floor.” She’s said that it was a long time ago. Don’t even try making someone remember something. It’s like telling someone who to love. Irv remarried right away, too. My brother and I used to make fun of his new wife’s name—Bettina. Wheatina, we called her. Peals of laughter. My mother laughed, too. We were big laughers.

“Who made that joke?” I ask my brother during one of our planning conversations.

“Probably I did,” he says. “Why? What are you saying?”

“I’m just asking.” Everyone is so touchy all of a sudden. Is there a law that says I have to find the same old jokes hilarious? This one happens to strike me as mean. And why does my brother still have all the basic facts wrong? He thinks Irv is from England.

“He’s not?”

“He was there, during the war. But he’s not from there. They were Polish Jews.”

“Didn’t he fly in that battle over Holland? The A Bridge Too Far battle?” We have a few photographs of Irv from World War II. There’s one of him in his lieutenant’s uniform. A bomber jacket and a cap. His face—his kind eyes, the shape of his mouth—is deeply familiar to me. “I thought Irv’s mother was English or something,” Alex says. He says it like he doesn’t care one way or the other.

“I think she lived in England for a while. As a young woman.” Actually, I’m hazy on the details myself. “Irv’s parents—our grandparents—were socialists,” I say. I feel proud of this.

“I wish I had that leather jacket,” my brother says.

I imagine we’ll eat at a nice bistro in the West Village on Saturday night. Should I get theater tickets? No, it won’t be that kind of visit. We’re probably going to want to spend most of our time talking.

“If this is just going to be some superficial thing, if we’re not going to talk about why he left, then I don’t want to be part of it,” my brother says on the phone one evening. I’m surprised by his sudden burst of feeling.

“What’s he so angry about?” I ask Dr. Gold at our last session before her August break. “He thinks Irv wanted to leave. Where did he even get that idea?” I don’t know why I feel so indignant. These are mostly rhetorical questions, and Dr. Gold doesn’t answer them. I talk some about work, about how the business is shaky and if it fails I’ll probably have to go on unemployment and if that happens how will I even be able to see her because if I don’t have a job where would I get the money? After that there’s not that much to say. In the silence I can hear the clock ticking. The session is almost over. I wonder if we’ll hug. When Dr. Gold asks me how I feel about her going away, I say, “You, you, you. It’s all about you.” It’s not like I expect her to laugh. As far as I’m concerned she’s already gone.

I met my ex-boyfriend—he’s a writer who does freelance stuff for us—through James. James is our office manager.

“So what’s his story?” I asked James after spotting this cute guy in the office one afternoon.

James is ten years older than I am, ugly and kind, with a large, pale head, doleful blue eyes, and thin hair the color of sand. The week I was hired, two years ago, a pipe burst in my office—we’re on the third floor of an East Thirties brownstone—and I had to share with James for a month. We got to know each other. I learned that his marriage, to an attorney for the health and hospitals union, was faltering but that he didn’t know whether he wanted to save it or leave it. Like me, he loved Fred and Ginger movies and old popular songs. He collected vintage postcards and tropical fish and rolled his eyes at the temperamental business practices of our bosses.

The game wasn’t something James and I decided, exactly, just something we slipped into. We pretended that we worked for a company that made some nameless widgety product. James was Mr. Appleton, and I was Miss Hanford, the sexless boss and the spinster secretary. We were formal and repressed with each other, as if it were the fifties. When I moved back to my own office, Appleton Products stayed in business.

They’re like small vacations for me, the game days. I forget to be afraid.

Other days, James wanders into my office mid-afternoon, deposits himself in the chair opposite my desk, and tells me stories—about his mother who bakes pies and his father, a state trooper in Oregon. Or I tell him about my life, such as it is, and he tips back in his chair, hands resting on his belly, listening like there’s nowhere else he’d rather be. I feel happy when I can make James smile his whale smile or shake silently with laughter. For minutes at a time I feel good.

“I don’t know. Good writer. Kind of an asshole,” James said.

He was good. I’d read some of his real writing, in one of the men’s magazines. Sexy, too. Muscular and compact in tight black jeans, the sleeves on his denim work shirt turned back so you could see the dark hair above his wrist bones. Took me to a steak house on our first date. “You eat like a man,” he said approvingly.

I sensed another woman in the background from the get-go. Well, in the foreground, too. An almondy shampoo still owned air rights under his showerhead. A few items of clothing (cute, my size) were shoved to the back of his closet. His former wife. She worked for a United Nations agency whose name I couldn’t keep straight in my mind. He said she’d left him for the Palestinian representative to Mozambique.

“Now what?” I asked Phoebe. We were watching television together over the phone.

“Jeopardy.”

“No. I mean, now what?”

“He’s going to dump you five seconds after he recovers from his divorce,” Phoebe said. “But wait—is he divorced?”

“Well, yes and no—I’m not exactly sure.”

“Live dangerously. Ask.”

Turned out he was, but only in the letter-of-the-law sense. He confessed that crazy girls held a fatal charm for him. The girlfriend between the ex-wife and me had been a shoplifter. “And how will you describe me?” I asked him once, pretending flirtation. “You?” He pulled me close, and his hands wandered, sweetly tracing the shape of me. “You’re not crazy,” he whispered. “You’re curvy.” Curvy! Curvy has its charms, but crazy is love’s Super Glue, the mousetrap that never lets go.

I’m the type who gets unhinged after love ends. What’s saner than that? One night I rang his bell after midnight just to demand a more thorough explanation. “This isn’t a police state, Grace!” he admonished. “It’s just dating. Dating ends.” It felt like a police state. “Don’t you even have false pride?” he said, helping me off with my clothes. I said I didn’t. Maybe I was crazy. “That’s good,” he said. “You only have real pride.”

“Well, Miss Hanford, I’m glad to see you back at your desk,” James said when I returned to work three days later, all cried out. “You’re looking well. Your vacation must have agreed with you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Appleton. Mother and I always enjoy our yearly week together,” I said in my prim pretend voice. That’s another thing about crazy girls. They don’t have mothers. They create themselves.

The day of the reunion I wake up with butterflies in my stomach. Their plane is supposed to get in at noon. My brother and I do the LaGuardia to Manhattan arrival math a hundred times.

“He’ll call me when they get into the room,” I tell him again. “Then I’ll call you. Then we’ll meet them at the hotel. In the bar. Or you and I can meet outside, and we can go in together.”

I change clothes a bunch of times. In the end, I’m wearing the new suit.

When the phone rings I think I might be sick.

Alex is pacing back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, smoking a cigarette, when my taxi pulls up. His face wears a pained, distracted look that gathers itself, briefly, into acknowledgment of my costume. “Different look for you, no?”

I feign disinterest. “Father clothes,” I say.

“Well, you look nice.” He flicks the cigarette into the street. “Are you ready for this?” My stomach flips.

The bar is pitch-dark after the glare of the afternoon, but I see them right away, at a table in the back. They’re on their feet the second they spot us. They look like tourists. Irv. Not too tall. Balding on top and puffy around the eyes. Kind of fit and muscular, though, in a polo shirt. Is that a cigar in his hand? I think I like it. Suddenly I’m remembering a bowling alley—pins crashing and the smell of beer.

Okay, here we go. Lots of hellos and handshakes and awkward embraces. I’m shocked by how related I feel to this man. The words form silently on my tongue: My father. Nice hug, and he’s just my size, with a pleasing dryness to his voice and again, that familiarity. Plus he’s regarding me and Alex with so much, I don’t know, pleasure, it seems he feels related to us, too. I feel proud of myself, like I’ve just given birth. Bettina is beaming.

“What would you like?” Irv says once we’ve arranged ourselves at the table, me and Alex on one side, Irv and Bettina on the other. No false heartiness in Irv’s voice, thank God. A waiter approaches. Apparently, we all drink bloody marys.

But if not false heartiness—what?

Bettina fills in with, “You kids look exactly the same.” I smile and nod, still speechless as a fool.

“It’s wonderful, really wonderful, to see you both,” Irv says then, like a meeting finally called to order.

“Awfully long overdue,” I murmur. Am I at tea in an English novel?

Alex says, “Now I know who to thank for my receding hairline,” and Irv smiles.

“Doesn’t that come from the mother’s side?” I say, but luckily no one pays attention.

There’s a microsecond when the earth threatens to open and swallow us all (only Bettina survives), but in the nick of time I remember to tell the Paul Newman story—he’s even from our hometown—and Irv looks around the bar again, impressed, retrieving from memory the exact scene in the movie which, we all agree, was excellent. From there we slip easily into matters of historical review and record-keeping: Alex accounts for college in Boston, then the two years he spent in South America, running a small leather company. That’s the official story, at least. I offer a funny anecdote about my job. I can do that.

“Did you know that your grandfather was an editor?” Irv asks me. No, I did not. “He edited the Yiddish newspaper in Cleveland.” Hey. How about that.

Irv and Alex discuss the Red Sox and Indians’ pennant chances as if they’re picking up an old conversation. Bettina turns to me. “Is there someone special in your life, honey?”

“No, not really, not right now,” I say. I’m not interested in doing girl talk with Bettina. I’m listening to Irv and Alex, remembering how our second father took us to behind-the-fence dinners at the stadium. I’m reciting the names of the old players to myself—Minnie Minoso, Rocky Colavito, Jimmy Piersall—like it’s some kind of poem. I’m studying the shape of Irv’s eyes, hearing the music behind his words and his habit of punctuating his stories with fond, teasing banter directed toward his wife. I’m betting he tells war stories, the same ones again and again, and that everyone listens with real affection even though they’ve heard them all before. I’m thinking, He reminds me of someone, and then I’m realizing that it’s me.

“His all-time favorite book is Fear Strikes Out,” I say, indicating my brother.

After that everything quiets down. We all let it.

“You know, I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to come here,” Irv says. His hands levitate a few inches above the table, hover, then lower again.

My face wears an expression that says, Go on with that.

“I didn’t know if I wanted to risk it. If it’s not going to lead to anything more than this.”

I nod. But I’m thinking: Lead? Lead to what? “I guess we have to start somewhere,” I say. “Like, just to get some leverage.” Whatever that means. The problem with spending most of your time inside books is you can produce words for any occasion. You just don’t necessarily know what you’re talking about.

“I have no real memories of you,” Alex says abruptly. “I just know that you left. I didn’t know why then, and I don’t really know why now.”

It occurs to me that our second father might have upended the table in response to my brother’s challenging tone of voice. That father had a temper. We neighborhood kids used to put on plays in the backyard every summer. I was always the lead and the second lead—princess, queen, fairy godmother. I’d deign to give my brother a minor role—dwarf, palace guard, woodsman. The summer we did Sleeping Beauty (I played the Queen and Sleeping Beauty) I happened to be kissing Kenny Baum, the King, behind our garage when Alex walked to the center of the lawn and delivered his one line: “There must be a path somewhere through this forest.” Our next-door neighbor, Tommy Lantano, whose job was opening and closing the curtain, a blanket draped over the clothesline strung between our two garages, said, “Shut up, Alex,” and I burst out laughing. Next thing you know Daddy has me by the arm and is hauling me into the house—for laughing or kissing, I’m still not sure.

“Well, the short answer is, that’s the way your mother wanted it,” Irv says. He says it in a resigned way, without a trace of anger.

“Are you sure you kids don’t want something to eat?” Bettina says. Bettina isn’t resigned.

My brother doesn’t remember the day we were adopted by our second father, but I do. We’re sitting on a hard wooden bench in the big empty hallway outside a judge’s office. This would have been sometime after the day Irv took me to lunch. We’re quiet, my brother and me, not even joking. I can feel my scratchy slip under my dress. Someone shows us into the judge’s office. He’s sitting behind a desk deep as a football field and piled with papers. (Was he wearing a black robe or have I added that?) We already know he’s going to ask us which father we want. Even at ten, I know that this is only the pretend question. It’s our mother we’re being asked to choose.

The judge asks me first: Do I want our stepfather to be our real father from now on?

My mother isn’t in that room with us, but my mother can see me no matter where I am. She can see all the way through me, everything good and everything bad. I’ve hidden my questions in a place so remote even I don’t know how to find them.

Yes, I say.

Then it’s my brother’s turn. When the judge asks him, he says grumpily, “Why do we have to choose?”

“But you could have fought harder to be in our lives,” Alex says now. “You never did.”

“Well, your mother made it pretty difficult,” Irv says slowly as if it pains him to say it. “I’d take you out to dinner, and your mother would turn up in the same restaurant. Or I’d come to the house to pick you up for the weekend, and she’d say that Alex couldn’t come—he was being punished.” I try to picture this: My mother and our second father lurking sitcom style in plain sight. I can even see the challenging hat my mother is wearing. I glance at Alex, who looks frankly skeptical. “But I suppose the real reason is that I didn’t think you two wanted me in your lives.” Irv pauses. “I suppose I felt rejected.”

I’m stirring the swizzle stick around in my bloody mary, poking at the piece of lime. He felt—what? Rejected? He felt that. By us?

“Well, we were just children,” I hear myself say in my most queenly voice. “I mean, that’s what we were.” My head is pounding with the wrongness of it. There’s a whole new slant being introduced here. We rejected him. I’m not sure there’s room in this reunion for that particular slant.

“It was a very big loss for your father,” Bettina says. “It was a tragedy. He loved you kids very much.” I understand something about Bettina suddenly: She hates my mother. The knowledge sends a thrill through me. I’ve never heard of anyone hating my mother. How dare she.

By the time the waiter comes around again we’ve agreed that the meet and greet part of the reunion is over.

My brother and I say goodbye to Irv and Bettina in the lobby, repeating the instructions about the dinner reservation and getting to the restaurant, then Alex and I make our way out to the street, tightlipped, as if we’re in danger of being overheard. It’s overcast now, and humid, but the two of us stand at the curb, dazzled by the light, murmuring sounds at each other, the gist of which is, Do you believe this? Isn’t it unbelievable? A taxi pulls up, we hug quickly goodbye, and Alex opens the cab door. I get in, and he leans in toward me. “I wonder what he thinks of my hands and my elbows,” he says. “I wonder what he thinks of the scar above my eye.”

It had been a few days before the Fourth of July, when my buzzer rang, startlingly, sometime after ten p.m.—a terrible sound. What had I done? James’s voice came crackling over the intercom. Could he come up?

It was the first time James had set foot in my apartment—we didn’t socialize outside of work—and the fact of him standing there, his blurred, impassive face and mournful politeness among my things, my furniture and books and bed, made me shy and worried and, as a result, excessively flirtatious.

“It’s you! I’m so happy it’s you!” I said. He was looking around dismally now, uncertain what he was doing there. “Should I get you a beer?”

He sighed, a complicated soliloquy, and ventured farther in, and for a terrible moment I thought it was Mr. Appleton standing there in my apartment, and for a more terrible moment I thought it wasn’t.

“A beer would be welcome,” he said. “I just thought I needed some, uh, exercise.” With that he sank unhappily into the one easy chair.

“Ah.” I nodded and hurried to the refrigerator.

We drank those, and then two more, me curled up in a corner of the sofa, James planted in the chair. As my air conditioner rattled and heaved, we talked about the usual things. He didn’t mention what had propelled him out of his own home, and I thought it intrusive to ask. Finally, when he appeared ready to leave—he was standing, not steadily, and I was making thanks-for-coming noises—we wrapped our arms around each other and stood for a moment that way, my head against his chest, breathing together, swaying slightly. He smelled altogether alien through his damp T-shirt. Kissing him was frightening and necessary. The kissing carried us to bed, and once there our heads cleared. Too late, or possibly too soon. Either way, our sympathy for each other was unable to transform itself into anything we could get lost in. He left long before morning, pulling his clothes on like a hurried apology. This I sensed rather than saw. I was afraid to open my eyes.

“Take care, Grace,” he said softly.

“You take care,” I whispered.

My phone is ringing as I unlock the door to my apartment. It’s Mother calling, wanting to know how it’s going. “It’s going good,” I say.

“Honey, I’m so glad. I wanted this for the two of you.”

Whatever it is she means, I feel a rush of guilt.

“Mom, I’m sorry about excluding you, but you understand, right?”

“Of course I do. In fact, I spoke to Irv just a little while ago. He invited me to join you for dinner, but I think not. Although he suggested brunch tomorrow.”

“You called the hotel?”

“Just to say hello. Grace, I hope you’re not angry. I couldn’t help myself. I had to know what he thought about the two of you.” I know that this is at least partly true. “I think he was happy to hear from me.”

I picture Irv in the hotel room, sitting on the edge of the bed, talking to my mother. I see the half smile on his face as he lets my mother’s warm voice wash over him. I see Bettina, stretched out next to him on top of the bedspread, her shoes kicked off, fuming. I know just how she feels. Still, my mother is the one I’m rooting for. That’s just the way it is.

He’s a nice man, my father. He’s the nicest man my mother ever married. I know how the rest of the visit is going to play out. He’ll talk about the past. He’ll tell me things about my mother, things he doesn’t mean to tell and that I don’t really want to know, although somehow I already do. He’ll confide in me, wanting to know what he can do to disarm my brother’s anger and whether I think it can be disarmed. He’ll want to know why I’m not married, and he’ll inquire, delicately, if I think the divorce might have had anything to do with it. He’ll want me to know that he’s there for me, and he’ll ask me to promise to stay in touch and let him know, really let him know, if I ever need anything. We will keep in touch. We’ll exchange dutiful Sunday afternoon telephone calls and say “I love you” before we hang up. It’s too late to have a real father, but maybe it’s not too late to know I used to have one, once.

After the night with James, I had spent several mopey days believing myself to be in love with him, several more certain I wasn’t and was instead responsible for causing some serious harm. In the office, James appeared ambiguously jaunty, then stricken, treating me with an awful counterfeit casualness. Finally, I invited him out for a drink. “Why did you come over?” I asked him. It about killed me to do it.

He shook his head. “I like you so much, Grace.”

“And now?”

“I’m married, and you don’t need that. God, it’s the last thing you need.”

I let his words, and then the kindness inside the words, seep into my blood and my bones. I said: “I hope I haven’t behaved inappropriately with you, James, because I wouldn’t want to do that, not with you—you, of all people . . .” I trailed off. That rickety little speech was the best I could do.

On Friday morning, the start of the Labor Day weekend, Howard and Josie summon James and me into the conference room and tell us that business is bad right now, and the firm can’t support a staff. They have to let us go. I knew it was coming; I’ve known it for months. But now that it’s happened I feel devastated. I start to cry. I cry and cry. I’m startled and embarrassed, but I can’t stop. How will I survive not being tucked into this little house with my family of coworkers? What will become of me?

James and I each have a cardboard box to pack up the stuff in our offices. Mine holds a few jars of cornichons and fancy mustards, some dumb novelty pens and retro Pez dispensers, but mostly coffee mugs and office supplies. When I look up, James is standing in my doorway. He’s holding a white plastic crash helmet with the words “I Saw Haley’s Comet Coming” printed on it. It’s his favorite novelty crash helmet. He clears his throat ostentatiously.

“Miss Hanford, on behalf of Appleton Products I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for all your hard work and dedication,” he says. He uses the bottom of his T-shirt to wipe off a thin layer of dust, then offers the helmet to me. “I hope you’ll accept this small gift as a token of our appreciation.”

It’s the best gift anyone ever gave me—well, the most heartfelt. When I put it on my head I almost expect to hear the ocean. “Thank you, Mr. Appleton,” I say. “No matter where I go in life, I will always remember my time here at Appleton Products.” My words feel echoey as they bounce weirdly off the plastic, but I can tell that I’m saying what I mean.

While I finish packing up, I remember James telling me something his father told him, about searching for people who are lost in the woods. The first thing the troopers want to know is whether the missing person is right- or left-handed. Apparently, people tend to get lost in the direction of their handedness. Everyone leans one way or the other. Someone who knows which way will always know how to find you.