All Adults Here(8)
Astrid reached over and took Cecelia’s hand. “Thank you, dear. I appreciate that. Most people are in such a hurry.”
“Not me,” Cecelia said. “Absolutely no hurry whatsoever.” She closed her eyes and listened to Wesley Drewes describe the weather.
Chapter 5
Spiro’s Pancake House
Elliot heard about Barbara Baker from Olympia, who ran Spiro’s Pancake House. She hadn’t seen it happen, but she had heard the ambulance and the commotion, and she had taken out the binoculars from under the cash register. She’d seen Astrid cross the street, and thank god, Olympia said to Elliot, thank god, your mother is the perfect person for that type of thing. Everyone knew that Astrid was capable in trying circumstances. Then Olympia had watched the EMTs lift Barbara’s body onto the gurney. Elliot stared out the window as Olympia spoke, imagining the scene.
“And my mother was right there?” He pointed with his fork. “Right there?”
Olympia nodded. She was Spiro’s granddaughter and had babysat for the Strick children, which meant that she always asked personal questions and lingered too long after pouring coffee, but Elliot liked the food at Spiro’s better than anywhere else in town and so he came anyway. Why were there binoculars under the cash register? Elliot wasn’t surprised—Clapham was that sort of place, entirely too small for even the semblance of privacy. “Right there. She probably felt the breeze, you know, of the bus going so fast. You know that feeling? When you’re sitting there, and a truck goes by, and the whole street rumbles?”
Elliot felt his body give an involuntary shake. “God,” he said. “It could have been her. It could have been my mother.”
Olympia tucked her lips into her mouth and bowed her head. “It’s a tragedy.”
“I would be an orphan,” Elliot said.
Olympia put her free hand on his shoulder and left it there for a few seconds before turning her attention to her other customers.
At least twice a week, Elliot pretended to have early-morning site meetings so that he could leave home sooner and eat breakfast on his own. Meals at home were often a disaster, with chunks of oatmeal on surfaces that weren’t even remotely close to where the oatmeal had been ingested, and wet bits of scrambled egg floating in his coffee. And that was on days when the twins were more or less well behaved. He had never screamed the way Aidan and Zachary screamed, never—if he had, Astrid would have put him out on the front step. Elliot and Wendy were clearly doing things wrong, but he didn’t know how to fix it. Wendy had the patience in the family. It wasn’t sexist to say that. Surely the boys would grow out of their insanity eventually, and Elliot would again be in awe of them, as he was when they were first born and he was sure that their birth was the crowning achievement of his life, having had a part in their creation, even if it had taken a few doctors’ assistance and, of course, Wendy’s body to hold and carry and deliver. Maybe it was a blessing of childhood that most people couldn’t remember much before they were five—what good would it do to remember life as a savage toddler, totally divorced from societal norms? It was as if each human evolved from being a chimpanzee in a single lifetime. No one wanted to remember the jungle.
* * *
—
Even when he came for lunch, like today, Elliot always sat at the counter and he always ordered the same thing—eggs over easy, extra bacon, wheat toast, no potatoes. Olympia filled and refilled his water glass every time he took a sip, the cold silver pitcher sweating drops onto the stack of paper napkins next to him. WCLP was playing over the diner’s radio, as always, and had just switched from Local News with Wesley Drewes to Clap If You’ve Heard This One, the trivia show hosted by Jenna Johansson, one of his younger brother Nicky’s former girlfriends. Clapham was like that—everyone was someone’s high school love, or someone else’s mother, or your cousin’s best friend from camp. Elliot liked where he was from, and being where he was from, almost always, but he did occasionally have daydreams that were just like his own life only with no wife or kids and he went through an entire day without bumping into six people he’d known since childhood, without knowing exactly where and when he would run into them. In general, though, he thought that the longer he’d known someone, and whether they knew his family, increased the chances of people hiring him and so Clapham seemed like the best place to be.
“Large hazelnut coffee, four sugars, lot of cream,” Olympia said. “That was Barbara. For a little while, maybe ten years ago, she was into the egg whites, but not anymore. My brother said they stopped the bus just past the country fairgrounds. They set up two cop cars, and he could have crashed right through them, but he didn’t. He just slowed right down.”
“It was the actual bus driver? The school bus driver?” Elliot dragged some bacon through the yolk on his plate. He was still thinking about how many times he and his mother and his wife and his sister parked on the roundabout every week, how easily it could have been his mother, just now, flattened into oblivion. When his father died, Elliot had been too young to have accomplished anything—he’d been a larva, still full of limitless potential. That had been the tragedy, all the things that his father wouldn’t see. But if his mother died, now, today, it would be a tragedy of another kind. What more had he become? Sure, he had a wife, he had children, he had a business, a house, but Elliot thought that by the time he was in his forties he would have more. The cruelest part of becoming middle-aged was that it came on the heels of one’s own youth, not some other, better youth, and that it was too late to start over.