Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [51]
It was as if our father was a celebrity, the one we were all waiting to see. My mother dressed up, put on makeup, and made elaborate dinners without Della’s help. She even set the dining-room table with linens. In my earliest memories, those dinners were the highlight of everyone’s week, a festive feel lingering at the table.
By the time I was five or six, Dan had become sullen and sat in hostile silence. Caroline, who had always been quiet, was more withdrawn, too. In retrospect, I could see that there was something different about my family during those last years. Or was I filtering my memory because of the news that they’d been separated? No, I didn’t think so. When I’d been much younger, maybe four or five, my parents would kiss in the front hall when Dad came home, and they would hold hands over the table. But later, during the few years before my mother’s death, they made polite small talk while I chatted on and on about school, hating the odd silence in the room.
And I remembered something else. In the months before my mom died, the Friday dinners didn’t happen anymore. I was allowed to have a grilled-cheese sandwich in front of the television, while Caroline escaped to her room or the porch swing, and Dan fled with his friends in an old Jeep.
I heard a small cough, and I realized that Matt was watching me, waiting.
“Want to let me in?” he said.
“It’s nothing really. I was just remembering how my mom used to say the same thing about keeping your strength up, and that made me think about the times when she was still around, when I was little.”
“And that’s it?” Matt looked doubtful.
“Actually, I was thinking about family dinners and how we didn’t have them anymore before she died. I found out recently that my parents were separated in the months before her death.”
“Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it?” he said. “All these women running from Will Sutter.”
“One has nothing to do with the other,” I said in a haughty tone.
Matt shot me a disbelieving look, and I dropped my eyes. I wasn’t so sure, either.
“Did Caroline keep in touch with our brother, Dan?” I asked Matt.
“Not often that I know of. She told me her brother had sent money a few times when she first moved to Portland, but I can’t remember them having any contact since we’ve been married. We made our wedding plans at the last minute, and I asked her if she wanted to wait so that she could invite some family. She said no.”
“Did she say why?”
The corners of Matt’s mouth raised a little. “She said that I was her family now.” He looked around the restaurant. He seemed to remember again that his wife wasn’t here, that his family was gone, and the happy expression evaporated.
14
The next morning, back in Manhattan, I treated myself to a cab to work, figuring that if I went into the bowels of the subway, the darkness would send me straight to sleep. The red-eye had left on time the night before, but I couldn’t rest on the plane. My mind churned with too much information, too many things to do and the lingering memory of my brother-in-law’s haunted face.
Matt and I had talked for a few more hours. We filled in the details of our lives, got to know each other better. At times, the conversation veered to Caroline, to where she might be, to what we could do to find her. Matt kept asking me for my father’s number. I told him I would have better luck speaking with my father than he would, and I promised to do that. I dreaded it.
Framed in the cab’s window, the city flew past. The morning sun hid some of the dirt; the high-rises climbed upward. I organized the day’s to-do list in my head. First, I would put out fires on any cases other than McKnight. Next, I would call an emergency meeting about McKnight, and I’d ask two attorneys to be permanently assigned to the case, including Magoo Barragan and at least one other lawyer who could devote a crazy number of hours