He flipped a pancake. Right after being in the navy, where he got into cooking, he had been a short-order cook in a diner-type restaurant off I-95. This was before he met my mother and got into the construction business. When I was little, he actually would juggle a couple of pancakes with two spatulas. It made my mother and me laugh. He would flip one so it fell perfectly on my plate. Somehow all that juggling made them even more delicious.
“And so for me, with a teenage daughter,” he said, bringing over my pancakes, “it does feel like swimming in shark-infested waters.”
“I promise, I’ll warn you ahead of time before I bite,” I said as he poured out just the right amount of maple syrup and added banana, which he had sliced for me. He would do all that even when I was married and had children of my own, I thought.
“I’ll appreciate the warning. Oh, by the way, I might be running late every afternoon this week,” he said, sitting across from me. “Scheduling all these building inspectors, dealing with different contractors, meeting with the architect. This owner is taking a very detailed interest in all the construction, too. He’s a nice guy, but lately, now that this is really happening, it feels like he’s breathing down my neck sometimes. He slips in behind me like a ghost stepping back into the world.”
“Don’t most new homeowners take that sort of interest in what you’re doing?”
“Not like this,” he said. “Sometimes I get the feeling someone’s looking over Arthur Johnson’s shoulder, too.”
“What do you know about him?”
“I told you he ran a hedge fund and made a lot of money. I know as much about him as I have to, I guess. But between you and me, I think it’s ridiculous for a man that young to retire, even if he can. He’s married to a woman about twelve years younger. I picked that up. Her mother apparently worked for his father. I sort of got the impression that—” He suddenly clamped his lips together and scrunched his nose the way he would when he was about to utter a secret or a nasty comment about something or someone in front of me and stopped himself.
“What?”
He looked at me oddly, obviously hesitant to tell me what he was thinking.
“I’m not a child anymore, Dad. You don’t have to worry about offending my innocent little ears.”
“Yeah, I have to keep reminding myself. Anyway, you’ve heard worse and read worse, I’m sure,” he added, raising his eyebrows.
“Worse than what?”
“I picked up that Arthur Johnson’s father got romantically involved with Arthur’s mother-in-law after her husband died. Right after,” he added. I guess I didn’t react enough, so he said, “Minutes after. Understand?”
“Oh. She might have picked up with him a little before her husband had died?” I asked.
He nodded. “And maybe not just a little before. His wife had died just a year or so earlier, not that her still being alive might have stopped him anyway.”
The disapproval on his face was blatant. I knew he was thinking of his own tragedy and wondering how much in love with his wife Arthur Johnson’s father had been if he could move on to another woman so quickly. And wondering about it even more so when he learned about Arthur Johnson’s mother-in-law. For many reasons, a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet never drifted too far from my memory after we had read it in English class: “A second time I kill my husband dead, when second husband kisses me in bed.”
It was only natural for me to wonder if my father would fall in love with someone again. When would he be ready, if ever, to kiss another woman in his bed? It was painful for me to think about it, but I didn’t want to wish him endless loneliness, and I was especially worried about what his life would be like when I was out of the house. I had been filling out applications for college. An acceptance would come soon and ring a bell in this house. I wondered how often he thought about that. I knew he did. Maybe he had his own timetable for when he would fall in love again, and it would start when that bell rang; or maybe he was determined never to love again. Maybe he knew that line in Tennyson’s poem: “?’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
“Anyway,” he continued, now that he had committed to revealing the story, “afterward, Arthur Johnson met and spent time with his future wife because of their parents’ relationship, and both parents were pleased when they became engaged. Then they decided to do the same thing, get engaged and get married. It was a double wedding. His father married his wife’s mother at the same ceremony.”
“To save money?”
“Maybe,” he said, smiling. “When you question why someone rich looks for bargains, he always tells you that’s how he became rich. The women shopped for gowns together, and the men bought tuxedos together. They probably did get deals. They even bought similar wedding rings from the same jeweler. He gave away his son at the altar, and she gave away her daughter, and then vice versa. It was a ceremony conducted in mirrors.”
“Must have looked weird with them switching places and all.”
“I would think so, but he seemed proud of it when he talked about it. ‘I got a new mother, and she got a new father the same time we got each other,’ he told me. Families replacing families instantly,” he said, shaking his head. “Goes on a lot more these days. People accept almost everything when it comes to relationships, exes marrying exes of friends, widows marrying widowed husbands of best friends, stepbrothers marrying stepsisters. Anything goes, it seems.”
“Have you seen her?”
“Who?”
“Arthur Johnson’s young wife.”
“Yeah, once. Pretty girl. I shouldn’t say ‘girl.’ They have a fourteen-year-old son and a twelve-year-old daughter. Both attend a private school in another state and live in dormitories. Maybe they’re just not built to raise children. More bird in them.”
“Bird?”
“You know. Hatching the eggs is one thing, getting them out of the nest as soon as possible is another.”
“Bird,” I repeated, and shook my head. “You are a character, Dad.”