Read an Excerpt
1
Nine months ago
Everything's changing," Pam said softly.
"It always is," Harper said, squeezing her sister's hand as they sat, uncomfortably, on folding chairs sinking heavily into the football field lawn.
Onstage, Pam's son, Patrick, gauntly handsome in his goblin-green Norseman robe, rose from the folding chair to accept his high school diploma.
Harper felt her eyes fill. How was he still not age six, elbows on the table, meticulously removing the plastic and eating two rolls of powdered mini-donuts in one sitting, his fingers, his face, even his long eyelashes, dusted white?
An average student, Patrick had devoted most of his energies to running track, to all his jobs-painting fences and mowing lawns until he was burnished brown, his arms like carved banisters. And, most of all, to the care and maintenance of his little sister, Vivian, who sat beside Harper now, chin trembling, shaking off mascara tears.
But if you looked at Patrick on that stage-so solemn, his polyester robe glinting like spun satin-you might think he was valedictorian, class president, most likely to succeed. It was the way he carried himself, so regal, very grand, and Harper wanted to cry, too, Pam sobbing beside her now.
"I'm just so proud," Pam kept saying, but Harper wondered if there was some strange kind of relief too. Relief that he'd made it, he'd graduated, and, thanks to a modest track scholarship, he was going to some college in Chicago-away, further away than any of them ever had.
When he turned to wave to them from the dais, the look on Patrick's face reminded Harper of a skittish colt, eyes darting. He'd made it through a calamitous childhood, scissored in two by his parents' ugly and endless divorce. He had gotten out. Somehow, Pam had gotten him out. Or he had gotten himself out.
So Harper decided not to see it as an omen when his diploma slipped carelessly from his long fingers as he glided across the stage, the kid behind him accidentally stepping on it, flattening it under his penny loafer.
It was only when the caps flew in the air that Harper realized her niece, Vivian, had abandoned them, a flash of chlorine-blue hair slinking behind the football stands with another girl. The two of them nearly disappearing inside their spray-painted hoodies, their bare legs poking through.
"This is going to be hard for her," Harper said.
Pam nodded gravely.
No one knew what they'd do about Vivian, once a sweet, earnest little girl who followed her big brother everywhere and loved nothing more than riding. Harper herself had put her on her first, an old gray quarter pony named Lumpy, at age five.
Now a surly sixteen with a midnight-black manicure and pierced tongue, Vivian spent most of her time riding around in strangers' cars, a vodka bottle necked between her knees, pouring for a parade of sweet-faced girls, many of whom would kick off their sparkly sneakers in Vivian's bedroom and slide under her satin comforter, licking Vivian's laughing face, insisting, if Harper opened the door, It's a slumber party, we swear.
Pam didn't seem to register any of it, but Harper marveled over their ease and comfort, Vivian and her girlfriends. Times were so different now, she wanted to say.
How do you keep track? Harper would tease her niece.
And Vivian would remind Harper in that scratchy voice of hers, thick with tar, I'm young.
But that was before her mother laid down the law on New Year's Eve-Vivian cuffed inside a patrol car, kicked out of some warehouse party in Corktown, jaw clenched and hands purple, something about a potato chip bag full of MDMA. That was before her father threatened to send her to boarding school-and not the kind you'd like, he warned in the all-caps text Vivian promptly showed Harper.
But Patrick had stepped up, taking Vivian everywhere he went, to the mall movie theater with the sticky carpeting and the neon arcade games, to National Coney Island for chili dogs or to Sanders Chocolate Shoppe for hot fudge ice cream puffs at the counter, like the hundred times Pam had taken them as little kids, as their mother had taken them.
Every day after school, Vivian sat high in the stands, watching her brother run track, pretending to do her homework while carving graffiti on a bleacher bench, but-at least-behaving, staying still, keeping, as Pam would say with a sigh, her panties on.
But now Patrick was leaving.
It'll be just me and Vivian, Pam had said that very morning, her brow damp from making a hundred mortarboard candy pops for the graduation party. Adding with a laugh, One of us is coming out in a body bag.
It wasn’t until after the ceremony that their big sister, Debra, finally appeared, her husband, Perry, trailing behind in the same linen Hickey Freeman sports jacket all the fathers in Grosse Pointe wore, trying to catch his breath.
"We weren't late," Debra insisted. "Perry couldn't make it up the stands. I can only guess you forgot to reserve us seats on the lawn. . . ."
"It doesn't matter," Pam said, winking at Harper, who tried not to laugh. That morning, they'd made a twenty-dollar bet on how quickly Debra would complain about the seating.
"Well, it matters to me," Debra started to say, then stopped herself, kissing Pam on both cheeks.
"Hell, Pammy, you did it," Perry said, squeezing Pam's arm. "By hook or by crook, you got your boy through."
"Hook and crook," Pam laughed. "And a lot of sweaty glad-handing at the PTA."
"The question is," Debra asked, looking around, fanning herself with her program, "where's the proud papa?"
It had been the big unknown, whether Patrick’s father, Doug, would show, maybe in a puff of sulfur, Pam had joked, knowing her ex-husband all too well.
"It's okay, Mom," Patrick said after the ceremony, slipping one arm around her and his other around Vivian. "He's been working a lot. I figured he might not make it."
"He could still come to the party," Vivian said softly, her eyes raccooned from crying all day, a bandage hanging loose, her brother's name newly tattooed on her calf.
"I'm sure he'll try," Harper said, curling her arm around her niece.
But you never could be sure with Doug, and part of her was relieved he hadn't yet appeared. All day she kept thinking she saw him from the corner of her eye-a flash of madras, the smell of his clove-thick aftershave. It made her nervous. It had been so long.
The sky heavy with looming rain, there was an anarchic, spooky feeling in the air as the parking lot filled with crushed graduation caps and trampled robes, with sweat-slicked parents trying to corral their whooping seniors, some of them jumping on random car hoods, a champagne bottle crashing, spattering green glass, foam.
Zigzagging through the crowd, Harper ran into her nephew Stevie, Debra's sweet burnout of a son.
"Where'd everybody go?" he asked, scratching his head.
It turned out his parents had left without him, forgotten him, as Stevie put it, laughing in his slouchy jeans, his eyes red and sad. Stevie, who had no driver's license after last year's second DUI.
Harper offered him a ride in her beat-up minivan, a cast-off of Pam's, twelve years old and two hundred thousand miles.
Nudging their way to the school exit, Harper and Stevie witnessed two separate fender benders and a dad-on-dad shoving match, a bristle of panic rolling through the lot.
"I can't believe it," Stevie said, punching the cigarette lighter. "Patrick's doing it. He's really doing it."
"Going to college?" Harper said, pulling at last onto Vernier Road.
"Getting out," Stevie said, his sunglasses falling over his nose as Harper hit the gas. "The great escape . . ."
Harper guessed the unremarkable school Patrick had squeaked into was as exotic as the Sorbonne to Stevie, still technically a freshman at Mercy College three years after his own high school graduation. Even if he'd had the grades to get into a state school, Debra and Perry couldn't have helped pay for it, not after Perry got sick.
No one knew how Pam planned to swing Patrick's tuition. Hope and lottery tickets, Pam said whenever Harper asked. Or, Hope and witchcraft. Or, Hope and dollar slots. Lately: Hope and turning tricks.
Hope and big loans, more likely. High-interest loans, car title loans, payday loans, towering credit card debt, who knew what else.
You have to give them everything, Pam had said to Harper that very morning, stuffing an envelope with a thick ripple of cash to give Patrick later that night. Everything left in her checking account minus two months' rent.
Pammy- Harper started, but what could she say?
I've never done anything, Pam said, turning her head away, sealing the envelope, but I can say I did this.
Everyone assembled at Pam’s rental house on El Dorado Drive for the party she had been planning for weeks, maybe months. Planning it like it was a wedding, a royal wedding even, and Harper half expected Patrick to arrive in a horse-drawn carriage.
Mom, you don't have to, Patrick kept assuring her, worried until the last minute that he might not make that gentleman's C in trigonometry. We can just hang out. It's cool.
But Pam was the sister who planned parties, who hosted, who threw herself into everything with the sweaty fervor of a general readying her troops for the final battle, the one to win the war. It made sense when she was married to Doug, when she was president of the Junior League and chair of the Parents' Club, when she lived in a five-bedroom, six-columned mansion on a canopied boulevard near the lake and hosted three or more parties a month-dinner parties, fundraisers, meet-and-greets, luncheons, receptions.
But those days were gone, long gone, which was maybe why this party meant far more, why it had the weight of a coronation, the eerie desperation of D-Day.
It’s beautiful,” Harper told her, barely catching her sister as she flitted in and out of the house with trays, bags of ice, bug spray.
"I tried," Pam said with a sigh, the back of her hand on her forehead like a soap opera actress. "I just want him to remember it forever."
They both stood for a minute to take it all in: the backyard glimmering with candles and string lights, Norseman-green-and-gold balloons, a half-dozen rented tables draped with gold linen, branches strung with miniature graduation cap streamers, garlands shimmying with graduation tassels, the ancient elm tree thick with bright paper lanterns: Class of 2008!
More than twenty years ago, Harper and her sisters had celebrated their own graduations on the grand lawn of the Hunt Club, formal affairs that ended with all the parents drunk, their chairs tipping onto the grass, and all the kids escaping to the after-parties in paneled basements and rec rooms all through Grosse Pointe.
Now, as the auto industry's fortunes sank, most graduation parties resembled this one, stuffed into the backyard of Pam's split-level rental house on the optimistically named El Dorado Drive, a street that would forever remain aspirational, close as it was to the shaggier St. Clair Shores, a different county near the water, strange smells forever rising from the storm sewer drain. That ten-mile drain's giving everyone cancer, everyone always said. But would the people who live there even know the difference?
But somehow Pam made it all work, as she always did.
You never even noticed the pitted aluminum siding, the yellowing lawn, the painted-over window latches and sagging gutters.
All you saw was Pam's magic.
Within an hour, more than a hundred people had arrived, many of them with go-cups, roadies, what her parents used to call “driving drinks” for the ten-minute car ride to a party.
They needn't have bothered. Pam had set up a potting-bench-turned-makeshift-bar for the adults, who rarely left it, but soon enough one of the Styrofoam coolers disappeared, only to find its way to someone's van and another to the basement, and by six o'clock, half the teenagers bore telltale rum-punch-red tongues.
One by three, three by six, they came and in every other hand an envelope for Patrick. Some of the adults-like Marty, Pam's divorce attorney-just pulled out their wallet as soon as they saw Patrick, slapping bills into his hand like he was the maître d' at the Stork Club.
Harper hoped her nephew would do the right thing with all those checks, those fluttering bills tufting loose from the card holder sleeves. But she feared somehow he wouldn't, didn't understand money or what it meant, only that his parents never stopped arguing about it and piling up debt.
But who was Harper to talk, anyway.
How many Bishop sisters,” Perry shouted out, “does it take to carry a cake?”
And everyone laughed as Harper, Pam, and Debra lugged their mother's sterling silver cake tray across the yard to Patrick, his graduation robe ballooning behind him in the June breeze.
On the tray sat the teetering party centerpiece: the "Money Cake," a towering creation that had taken Pam hours to make, rolling dozens of crisp dollar bills around toilet paper dowels and glue-gunning them to a Styrofoam pillar at least three feet high.
Everyone gasped as they saw it, pulling out their digital cameras, their disposable cameras to capture the spectacle. Money Cake! Money Cake!
"They're all the rage this year," Debra said, clearly relieved that all her son, Stevie, had wanted when he graduated was all-you-can-eat Buddy's Pizza, a rented slushie machine, and a keg of beer pumping for all who surrendered their keys at the door.
"Jesus," Patrick said, running a finger along the dollar bills wrapped tight as their grandfather's Dunhills. "Mom, Jesus."
"May the road ahead be paved with gold," Pam said, throwing her arms around her son, "and the wind forever at your back."
"I don't think that's how it goes," Perry whispered to Harper.
"May the road ahead be paved with gold," Harper replied, lighting a cigarette, "but we're stuck on a cul-de-sac."
Everything felt both glorious and painful, Harper thought, like all family events.
"The beauteous Bishop sisters," Perry said, taking a picture of them under the string lights wrapped tight around the elm tree. "The blond Bishop sisters, the bodacious Bishop sisters, the bountiful, the bona fide, the bold, the brilliant . . ."
"That's enough, honey," Debra said at last, taking the camera with one hand, his Scotch and soda with the other.
"Patrick's the best thing I ever did," Pam whispered to Harper, thankfully out of her daughter's hearing.
