“Ready to make a move?” Taj drops his half-eaten burger on his plate. They never finish the bad junk food, and to be honest it always does leave them feeling a little ill, just like their mother promised it would when they were kids. It’s her fault. She’s cruelly spoiled their palates with all her quality food.
Allegra thinks of Cherry Lockwood’s apology card: I’m so sorry our paths crossed in the way they did. There was no reason for what I said to you.
But what if there was a reason their paths had crossed?
Jonny told her one of his earliest flight instructors said that the difference between a pilot and an aviator is lightness of touch. An aviator doesn’t yank or jerk the controls. An aviator doesn’t move the controls. He—or she—applies pressure, and only ever as much pressure as needed.
Allegra crumples her napkin and drops it on her paper plate. She doesn’t lean forward, toward her brother, she leans back. Not too serious, but no jokes.
Her tone is as light as a fingertip.
She says, “Taj.”
Chapter 126
When you live with someone you love, you share all your most trivial concerns: what time should we eat, what time should we leave, what should we watch, I thought they said that rug would be delivered by now, we’ve run out of black pepper, do I have time for a shower, can you buy dishwashing soap, are you tired, are you hungry, did you see the news about that politician, that atrocity, that accident, that disaster, you won’t believe what I just read, I’m going to bed, listen to this, it’s so funny, are you eating the rest of that, I’m calling about that rug, what time will you be home, I’ll meet you there, I’ll see you when I’m back, will you have eaten, I won’t have eaten, we made the right decision about that rug…on and on it goes, an endless daily stream of tiny decisions and opinions and thoughts shared, and you don’t even know it’s keeping you alive.
Without Ned I had to find a new structure for my week and my life. I had to find people with whom I could share trivial concerns, because they must be shared—obviously not that I needed pepper, but you must have one person in your life to whom you can complain about the frustration of your local store continually changing the damned location of the damned condiments. (Why? Leave them be!)
Ivy and I set up a time for a weekly phone call. It’s her Sunday evening in America, my Monday morning in Australia, and we talk for up to an hour, often about childhood memories, like the time Mr. Madigan took care of his friend’s cattle dog, who was thrilled when Miss Piper “walked” her dairy cows by the house and within minutes had efficiently rounded them all up into Mr. Madigan’s backyard, where they crashed about demolishing his wife’s garden, while Miss Piper shouted, “Buttercup! Buttercup!” What a hullabaloo.
Those calls bring back the barefoot freckle-nosed mulberry stain–fingered version of me that existed before men and grief and heartbreak. She’s still here! Although I’m not sure I could climb a tree the way I once did so effortlessly.
Tuesday is aqua aerobics with Mira, followed by non-compulsory coffee.
Mira generously lets me share her beautiful family, who have moved back to Hobart, and often invites me to family events (I do not go to every event, don’t worry, just now and then). One Sunday Bridie was struggling with her math homework, and I said, “I could maybe help you, Bridie.”
She whispered, “I’m too dumb for math.”
It broke my heart and I can’t tell you how much it made me miss Ned. You know I am not good with children, but I decided I would go through his notebooks and look for ideas that might help me help Bridie. He never went anywhere without a small hardback notebook in his pocket, where he could jot down ideas and thoughts and lesson plans, even after he retired.
He kept the notebooks in a shoebox. There were more than forty of them.
I picked one at random and noticed the acronym “OGT” kept appearing, and I was initially puzzled until I remembered a long-ago conversation with Jill and Bert, when Jill had mentioned “gratitude journaling.” It was meant to be so good for you, reduces inflammation, can help you live longer, and so on, and Ned said, “I’ve been doing that for years.” He said he went through a period after his divorce when he got very down, some days he had to drag himself out of bed, and he decided he would try to find “one good thing” every day and write it down. He still did it most days, he said. I had forgotten that. If I hadn’t looked through the notebooks I might never have remembered.
He didn’t date his notebooks (annoying man), so I never knew what year I would find myself in when I picked up a notebook, but so often the “one good thing” involved me.
Cherry’s eyes
Cherry in the blue dress
Cherry yelling at the camel
Cherry’s legs
Rainy day, talking to Cherry about memories of our dads
Singing with Cherry in the car
Cherry in the green straw hat
Sunflowers in Tuscany, talking about the Fibonacci sequence with Cherry
Cherry says she’d share the door with me
Long talk with Cherry about mathematical Platonism and her mum and God
—
I can’t remember a green straw hat (seems unlikely to me, it was probably blue) but so many of his One Good Things brought back memories.
Like that long talk about “mathematical Platonism.”
We lay in bed on a Sunday morning because we had nowhere to be and talked about the belief that mathematical truths are discovered, not invented, because they already exist, which, if correct, means reality must extend beyond the physical world. We talked about the idea that math is a sense like sight and touch, and if that is true, well, then, was it also possible my mother possessed another sense that gave her the ability to access another reality? I wondered if my love of math and her love of the spiritual could therefore coalesce in a way far more beautiful and mysterious than my cynical belief that she used data and probability to make her predictions, no different from an actuarial table.
And then we wondered if we were just stumbling our way toward God or enlightenment, or was that just a way of saying we didn’t know, and it was all so interesting, but then Ned sat bolt upright and clapped his hand to his forehead, because he remembered we did have to be somewhere: Aldi was having a special on camp chairs.
I remember us running about madly, throwing on our clothes, and a testy argument in the car about air vents.
From the sublime to the mundane, all before breakfast.
—
By the way, I wasn’t always the One Good Thing.
Sometimes it was steak.
Sometimes it was Golf with Bert.
