“Happy birthday to you.”
It’s the worst song ever written, in Kelley’s opinion. Nobody sings it well. One person, maybe, in history. The woman in the white dress. What was her name?
“Happy birthday to you.”
Kelley will not live until his next birthday, which means he will not have to sit like a dumb mute while people sing to him terribly off-key. Another small point of gratitude. He cried when he was small and his assembled friends sang to him in Perrysburg, Ohio. Frances snapped a picture of little Kelley in tears with the white cake from Wixey Bakery; she relished showing this photo to the girls Kelley brought home. She showed it to Margaret.
Where is Margaret? Kelley wonders again. Then he remembers that she declined the invite. She is retiring from broadcasting next month, so there are no more vacation days. He will see her at Thanksgiving. Hopefully.
“Happy birthday, dear Bart.”
Bartholomew James Quinn, born at 4:30 a.m., October 31, 1995, weighing eight pounds eleven ounces, measuring twenty-three inches long. Mitzi had pushed for ninety minutes without drugs. Without any drugs! She wanted to be present for every instant of the experience, and Kelley remembers the expression on her face when Bart was out, whole and healthy, wailing on her chest. She was radiant, exhilarated.
“Happy birthday to you!”
Bart takes a deep breath, then he turns his gaze to the geisha and blows the candles—all forty of them—out in one breath. The crowd erupts in applause and whistles.
Kelley closes his eyes. Let the kid have his wish, he prays. Please, whatever it is, let that wish come true.
AVA
Potter offers to cancel his Tuesday-afternoon seminar on the nautical novel and come with Ava to Nantucket, but she tells him she thinks it will be best if she goes alone. Potter is hurt, she can tell, and every sentence she utters as an explanation—“My whole family will be there,” “My father is sick,” “It will be an emotionally fraught time”—serves to make things worse.
“Isn’t that why you have a partner?” Potter asks. “So there’s someone to share the emotionally fraught times? So you have support? I like your family, and if you’ll forgive my hubris, I think they like me, too.”
“They do like you,” Ava says. And it’s true: they do. They like Potter so much that Potter could go to the party and Ava could stay in New York and everyone would be just as happy, if not more so.
“So why don’t you tell me what’s really going on?” Potter says.
Because she can’t, that’s why!
She has felt a shift since PJ’s visit. Maybe it’s a blip or maybe it’s something more substantial; Ava can’t tell. She feels like she failed. PJ hated her. What’s harder to admit is that Ava also feels that Potter failed. His parenting was rusty, she knows that, but he came across as weak and ineffectual, two words she never dreamed she would pin to his name.
Ava had thought—and not unreasonably—that Potter was the real thing. The man she would marry. Meeting PJ was, in essence, the last frontier to conquer before they moved the relationship forward into lifelong commitment.
But it all went so horribly, horribly wrong. The only bright spot was Ava’s unexpected rapprochement with Harrison, Trish’s boyfriend, an unlikely ally if ever there was one. Ava was too shy to tell Potter about her conversation with Harrison. After Harrison and Trish left with PJ, Ava went back upstairs to see Potter, who seemed relieved that PJ was gone. Relieved that his only child, whom he never saw, had been unceremoniously removed from his care. He squeezed Ava and said, “I don’t want you to dwell on what happened. None of this was your fault.”
Of course it wasn’t Ava’s fault! She had barely interacted with the kid. PJ had seemed turned against Ava from the get-go. Maybe Trish had spoken ill of Ava, which hardly seemed fair, as the two had never met. Maybe PJ harbors hurt or angry feelings because Potter is never around. But he seems a little young to resent that. Trish took him to California when he was two, so he would have no memory of Potter and Trish together—and he seems to have bonded wonderfully with Harrison.
You need to spend more time with PJ, Ava wants to tell Potter. Visit him more. Get to know him one-on-one. Forge a father-son relationship. Potter acted like an incompetent babysitter.
And as for Ava, a concrete step she can take is to have a candid one-on-one conversation with the person she believes will best understand her predicament: Mitzi. The conversation is Ava’s main motivation for traveling all the way to Nantucket for Bart’s party.
Once she has arrived at home, she realizes there are other benefits. She gets to spend time with her siblings, and she gets to see her father—who looks a little better than Ava expected. She gets to hug Bart after he blows out the candles and meet the girl suddenly attached to Bart’s side. The girl has come dressed in an exquisite geisha costume. Ava so admires it that she makes a mental note to find a similar one for herself for next year.
Imagine her surprise when she discovers the girl at Bart’s side is Allegra Pancik, her former student. Ava had Allegra and her twin sister, Hope, in her first year of teaching; they were in the fifth grade. Allegra was unremarkable, but Hope showed enormous promise as a musician and went on to play the flute all through high school.
“Hi, Miss Quinn,” Allegra says. She offers Ava her hand.
“Allegra, good to see you!” Ava says. “How old are you now?”
“Nineteen,” Allegra says.
Nineteen. Ava can’t believe her students are now old enough for Bart to date.
The real payoff for Ava happens after the party. She stays until the end because Mitzi stays until the end, even though Kelley leaves with his hospice nurse, Patrick, and Jennifer shortly after cake is served. Isabelle and Kevin head home to relieve their babysitter, and Bart disappears with Allegra Pancik. Hence, it’s just Mitzi, Ava, and the last few party stragglers.
“Do you need me to help you clean up?” Ava asks Mitzi.
“The caterers will do it,” Mitzi says. “Come on outside. I want to have a cigarette while we wait for the cab.”
“Ohhh… kay,” Ava says. She knows Mitzi started smoking when she left Kelley to live with George the Santa Claus, but she thought she’d quit. Now, apparently, she’s back at it. Ava can’t really blame her, can she? Watching Kelley’s health deteriorate must be tough.
They stand out in front of the VFW in the crisp fall air, and Mitzi lights up.
“Only late at night,” she tells Ava. “After your father is asleep. Or after I’ve been drinking.”
Ava holds up her hands. “No judgment here.”
“Thank you,” Mitzi says with a relieved smile. “It’s too bad Potter couldn’t get away.”
“He could get away,” Ava says. “He wanted to come, but I asked him not to.”
“Oh no!” Mitzi says. “Trouble in paradise?” She laughs. “Forgive me for saying that. I’m too old to believe that anyone’s relationship is paradise.”
“We had a challenging weekend,” Ava says. “His ex-wife and her boyfriend were in New York for a Shakespeare conference, and they left PJ, Potter’s son, with us. Well, with Potter. And Potter wanted to introduce PJ to me.”
“Naturally,” Mitzi says. “How’d it go?”
“On a scale of one to ten it was a negative thirty,” Ava says. She tells Mitzi about PJ screaming Friday night, about the video game on Saturday at the Museum of Natural History, about PJ texting his mother to say that Ava had touched him inappropriately.
“Good heavens,” Mitzi says. “What a nightmare!”
“Nightmare,” Ava concurs. She takes a deep breath and inhales some of Mitzi’s secondhand smoke, which isn’t unpleasant or unwelcome. “How did you do it, handling the three of us?”
“Ha!” Mitzi says. “The worst year of my life was my first year married to Kelley. Do you not remember?”
“Not really,” Ava says. “Bits and pieces.” She tries to hearken back. She was ten when they moved to Nantucket with Kelley. The boys were teenagers. Patrick was fine in Ava’s memory, Kevin less so—until he met Norah Vale. But what memories does Ava have of herself?