A Watershed Year by Susan Schoenberger Read Free Book Online Page B

greater gift than the opening of the door,” he would say. “It takes a strong person to accept assistance.”
    Inside Friendly’s, the hostess showed them to a booth, helping park Mavis on the open end.
    “Two Fribbles, please,” Lucy said when the waitress arrived. “One chocolate, one vanilla.”
    “Chocolate gives me gas,” Mavis told the waitress.
    Lucy held a water glass up to Mavis’s mouth and tipped it past her dentures. She hoped Mavis would be able to handle a straw.
    “Guess what,” Lucy said, wiping Mavis’s mouth with a wad of paper napkins. “I’m going to adopt a little boy from Russia.”
    “A Commie?” Mavis said, frowning. “Mean, those Commies. Heartless.”
    “No, a little boy. He’s almost four. His name is Azamat, but we’ll call him Mat. Want to see his picture?”
    Lucy took the worn photo from her purse and smoothed it out on the table. Mavis’s nose almost touched it as she examined the face and began, suddenly, to cry.
    “Looks just like my dear Willard. Oh, I do miss him,” she said, weeping loudly, though without tears.
    “Who’s Willard, Nana?”
    “What’s that?” She had stopped crying.
    “Who’s Willard?”
    “Who?”
    When the Fribbles arrived, Mavis demonstrated what she could do with a straw, sucking up the blended ice cream with more power than Lucy could muster, and Lucy realized that she’d probably been sucking her meals through straws for the past ten years.
    “So I’m going to be a mother,” Lucy said, smiling at Mavis as she drained the last of her Fribble.
    “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” Mavis said.
    “What does that mean?”
    “And you’re still not married, so you’ll be all by yourself. A boy needs a father.”
    Lucy was surprised to hear such doubts from Mavis, who, she assumed, had been only half listening.
    “I know it won’t be easy, but I can help him,” Lucy said. “I can save him from a place where he’d have no future. I can give him a better life.”
    Mavis raised her eyebrows, then went back to her Fribble without another word.
    On the way back to the nursing home, Mavis fell asleep, slumping against Lucy’s arm as she drove. It reminded her of Mavis’sone hundredth birthday party, an absurdly elaborate affair at the Sheraton. Mavis’s hair had been teased into a froth infused with tiny sparkles. Her nails had been painted bright red, and she wore a purple satin pantsuit Rosalee had purchased in Macy’s preteen department. The band played Sicilian folk songs, and the mayor of Towson danced with the children.
    But before the cake had been cut, Mavis fell asleep in her wheelchair and missed all the speeches. Rosalee and Bertie had to wheel her back to the hotel kitchen because Molly had cried, thinking she was dead. Harlan was at the party too, just after his first round of chemotherapy. He spent most of the evening talking sports with her uncles. He still had most of his hair then—though he kept touching his head as though he thought it might fall out publicly and all at once—but he didn’t have the energy to dance.

four
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    L ucy had been waiting for Harlan’s e-mail, anticipating it for days, and yet when it came, she still felt a chill at seeing his name appear in her in-box as she ate an English muffin and drank her coffee before class.
    Dear Lucy,
    I don’t know about you, but February was always one of the hardest months for me. The holidays are long past; it’s drab and gray, with spring still months away. Back in my teaching assistant days at Rutgers, the students would get into a funk where they started debating every grade. “But according to the rubric, this is really a B-minus, not a C-plus.”
    February was also the month my father died, and I get a little melancholy when I imagine how my life would have been different if an eighty-five-year-old driver hadn’t crossed the center line. I was only twelve, and I had to watch my mom turn into a basket case as Dad’s coma stretched on