Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [40]
“Benjamin,” his mother breathed. “This will set you up for life.”
His mother’s elation was nearly matched by his father’s wariness when Ben called him a few days later. “So how’s this gonna work? You got a scholarship or something?”
“They’re offering me a package,” Ben said. “Some money outright, work study, loans—”
“Because I gotta tell you, Ben, I’d like to help you out, but it’s not a real good time. I got debts like you wouldn’t believe.” His father sighed. “Listen, I know you can do this. I had to work my way through school—”
“Dad, you dropped out.”
Ben could hear the static on the line between them. “You’re a smart kid, Benjamin. Smarter than I was, I guess. Right? I didn’t get into fucking Harvard. With that degree you can get any job you want, go into investment banking and make a killing. Jesus. A kid of mine, going to Harvard. I’m starting to like the sound of that.”
STEPPING DOWN FROM the train, Ben looked around, trying to get his bearings. The station was located in Rockwell village, across from a bagel shop that Ben recognized and the requisite small-town strip of dry cleaner, post office, bookstore, and coffee shop. Farther down the street were a nail salon and—of course; he should have guessed—a tasteful toy shop with educational wooden toys displayed in the window. It was a lovely day, mild and sunny, and despite the purpose of his visit, Ben felt strangely at peace. This was such a pretty town, Rockwell. Ben could imagine that one day he and Claire might move here, when they had a child, perhaps. It felt quite far from New York, more than the fourteen miles he had traveled to get here.
He went down the steps from the platform to the sidewalk and crossed the street. Bagels—no one would object to that. In the shop he began to order: everything, garlic, pumpernickel, onion—then remembered a time a year or so ago when he and Claire had come out to Rockwell for brunch, bearing smoked sturgeon and lox from Barney Greengrass, to find that Charlie had purchased only plain and, good lord, cinnamon crunch bagels. “Kids,” Charlie had said and smiled apologetically.
“Do you have cinnamon crunch?” Ben asked now.
Their house was easy to find. Clutching the warm, lumpy paper sack of bagels in one hand, the rustling plastic bag of gaudy presents in the other, with his satchel slung over his shoulder, Ben set off into the neighborhood. Though the ground seemed dry, clumps of snow, like errant tufts of cotton, dotted the dead curbside grass. Through the naked trees that lined the sidewalks, the houses along the way were starkly visible. A front porch here, a picture window there, hanging planters, a child’s bike: every home contained promise and mystery. As he used to do when he was a child, Ben fantasized about the lives behind each door, ascribing to each a glowing fire, a simmering soup, burbling children—idealized tableaus of domestic tranquility.
Nearing the Granvilles’ front walk, Ben slowed. He lingered before the gate of their white picket fence (really! A suburban cliché come to apparently unironic life), wanting to postpone the inevitable rush of feeling. For the first time, he considered the obligation that his presence would impose on Charlie to host him, the sadness and shame that Alison would be forced to express in response to his own unfiltered emotions (Alison—who loved children, who devoted her life to children), the patronizing futility of his sympathy.
He was, he realized in that moment, there for himself, not for them.
Claire was right. He was too myopic to see it until now. He was here to assuage his own guilt, to make himself feel better. To put his own mind at ease. What did he possibly have to say to a woman who’d just been in a fatal accident, to two confused small children, to a friend with whom he had fallen out of touch? What foolish posturing. The Zabar’s basket was one thing. Showing up on their doorstep with bagels and cheap toys was quite another.
And yet here