“It’s fun to see you back in Connecticut. I thought maybe you were done with us.”
“Planes fly west, you know.” It was an old argument. When Patrick moved to Los Angeles he flew home regularly for years, every six months or so until he stopped. It was the show, it was his schedule. Everyone assumed fame had changed him. And, to some extent, it had. It gave him the confidence to call out hypocrisy where he saw it. He came home, no one came to see him. After a while he began to wonder: What was the point?
“You’re off the hook, by the way. I talked to Darren. We agreed he and I should take the children for the summer.”
Patrick’s whole body loosened, like he’d just walked out of ninety minutes of Reiki. Oh, thank god.
“They should stay in Connecticut to be closer to their friends,” she continued.
“Like Audra Brackett. And whomever Grant pals around with.”
“Who?”
Patrick blew right past her question. “It was farcical,” he offered. “The very idea.”
“I mean, can you imagine?” Clara laughed, and she never laughed. Patrick always thought he would welcome it, the sound of his sister’s laughter; instead, he was immediately put off. “It was good of you to come.” She placed her hand on his forearm and gave it a condescending squeeze.
Patrick had delivered the eulogy. He’d written two on the plane; he gave the version he knew others wanted to hear. About Sara the wife, Sara the mother, Sara the very definition of family. The other was for the Sara he knew. Sara the loyal, Sara the thrill seeker, Sara the irreverent, Sara the brother-fucker. It would have amused him, sharing old stories. The time he took her to the Ramrod, a Boston leather bar, and people mistook her for a drag queen. The time they were arrested for sneaking into the Granary Burying Ground after dark to make rubbings of the gravestones. The time she screamed obscenities in the face of religious protesters the first time they attended Pride. He came close to pulling the second eulogy out of his jacket pocket. But in the end it was for his Sara, not theirs, so he left it in his breast pocket, where it sat directly over his heart.
“Still. Greg asked me to take the kids. Not you.”
Clara pulled her hand away. “Greg was probably high at the time.”
“We don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“It’s not a requirement, is all I’m saying.”
“A requirement of what?”
“Our being related. A lot of people just love their family.”
“I love my family.”
“Okay.”
“I do!”
Patrick fluttered his lips. “You don’t like us very much.”
“You two don’t make it easy.” Clara, the oldest, had always viewed Patrick and Greg as twin nuisances, equal bothers to an otherwise orderly existence.
Patrick shrugged and looked out over the cemetery.
“Anyhow, I have the next few months off. I was going to teach summer school, but my friend Anita is going on maternity leave in the fall, so she was more than happy to take on additional classes before then.”
He was only half listening. “Who?”
“Anita. My friend Anita.”
Patrick surveyed the crowd; it seemed they didn’t know what to do. No one wanted to leave, but everyone looked pained to stay. “Greg has a point, wanting the kids near him.”
Clara didn’t like the look in his eye; he was piecing together a puzzle. “Would you stop? You don’t even want to do this. Let’s not kid ourselves. I’m giving you an out.”
Patrick didn’t know what he found more irksome, the fact that she knew he would want a way out, or that under any other circumstance he would take it. He patted himself down; the second eulogy in his pocket crinkled, like Sara asking him a favor.
“Patrick.”
“Clara.” Patrick locked eyes with his sister. “The kids mentioned they didn’t have many friends. That their house had become too sad. Is that true?”
“You know other kids. They’re afraid of anyone who is going through something . . . different. It will sort itself out.”
“What about your kids?”
“What about my kids?”
“Don’t they spend time together?” Patrick asked. He hadn’t really grown up around cousins, but shouldn’t they be forced to be friends?
“They’re teenagers.”
An image was emerging of Maisie and Grant as loners, just like him. Perhaps he couldn’t be a guardian to these kids, but, cousins be damned, as their uncle he could be a friend. “Wait, did you say Darren agreed you could take the kids? Or you should.”