The Magic of Found Objects Read online

  From his profile, I already know his name is Oliver Tansey, and although he is not wearing his firefighter suit, he looks like he might have just taken it off and put on civilian clothes. I start immediately wondering if I should keep my maiden name because Phronsie Tansey may just be the most absurd name ever.

  When he sees me, he puts the paper down and uncrosses his legs and stands up with a slight smile on his face. He has lovely brown eyes. And one of those heroic clefts in his chin. A denim shirt. Jeans.

  “Phronsie Linnelle?” he says.

  “Oliver,” I say. “How nice to meet you.” My voice is only the slightest bit squeaky.

  We shake hands, and he offers to go up to get us something to drink. “Just coffee,” I say. “Venti caffè Americano with cream. No sugar. Thank you.”

  “Decaf?” he asks.

  “Why? What have you heard?” I say. He blinks in surprise, not expecting me to be so humorous, I guess, and I say, “No. Regular. Sorry. I was joking.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “I’ll try to behave myself. But maybe ask for a double shot of espresso for my Americano. Unless you’re already too frightened of me.”

  “No, no. Coming right up,” he says. Eyes crinkle in a facsimile of a smile, but he looks a little frightened maybe. See? This is a problem I keep having. Men do not seem to appreciate my jokes. Maybe all the men with my kind of humor were snapped up long ago and aren’t on dating sites.

  As he makes his way to the counter, I sit down and watch him. He’s slender and wiry. Nice butt. Probably excellent at leaping from burning buildings if that becomes necessary. He’s probably the guy you want to hold the net while people jump. But maybe not the guy you want with you at the comedy club.

  He comes back with our steaming cups and sits down across from me, smiling, and we start the business of oiling the creaky dating machinery. We both know the drill. The questions. What do you do when you have time off? Have you ever been married? Are you dating a lot these days? What’s your idea of a really fun time? Mountains or seashore? Sleep late or get up early? Wine or beer? Star Wars or Star Trek?

  When it’s my turn to talk, I veer off script. I’ve been on too many dates, and so I decide not to do the usual patter anymore. I take a deep breath, lean forward, and smile, and I start expounding about my complete lack of knowledge about the Stars—both Trek and Wars. And telling him some vaguely adorable stories about New Hampshire farm life—the day the chicken got into the kitchen and challenged the cat to a duel, and that time that someone spiked the punch at the 4-H dance—and I’m just about to ask if he believes we’re in for a zombie apocalypse sometime in the future, a fun question I just thought up, when suddenly his face changes. He puts down his cup of coffee and says to me in the voice a college admissions dean might use when he’s seen your unfortunate transcript from junior year: “Okay, well. Thank you so much. It’s been awfully nice to meet you.”

  “Um . . . yes,” I say uncertainly. He’s looking over my head at someone. I turn around, and sure enough, there’s a woman who has just come in, and she’s looking at him like she may have murder on her mind.

  “You know her?” I say, swiveling back to look at his face, which has turned the color of one of the fires he’s put out. “Should we be concerned?”

  “Yes. No,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think she’d show up.”

  “She looks mad,” I say. “Is she stalking you or something?”

  “I’m sorry. I have to go,” he says.

  She’s not making her way any closer; in fact, when I peek around, I see that she seems to have decided to lean against the window, studying him. She’s wearing all black, and her blonde hair is slicked back. She looks like she might be packing heat, if you ask me.

  “Why is she so angry? You’re allowed to be here, aren’t you?”

  “Listen, I might have married her. By mistake. We went to Vegas . . . a group trip . . . I might have had too much to drink.”

  “You married someone by mistake?” I laugh, and then I see his face and see that it’s not funny at all. He’s married, and he’s dating, and his wife is right here in the building with us. I make a quick executive decision to go to the restroom rather than walk past her, and when I come out, thank goodness they are both gone.

  Date forty-four: Lying Cheating Firefighter. This is a first: the wife showing up. It will make a good report. I might have to lead with this when I write my story about online dating.

  Chalk up another point for Judd.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My stepmother calls me on the phone when I’m getting on the subway to go back home. “I’ll have to call you back, Mags,” I say, “I’m going underground,” which sounds pleasantly ominous, I think.

  I don’t think she hears me because she says, “Oh, Phronsie, your father—” and then sure enough, the service goes off, and the subway is whisking me off in a subterranean rush. I turn my phone over and over in my hand, stare at the overhead ads for hair transplants, look at a woman across from me kissing a baby’s head. I would like to kiss that baby’s head myself.

  Let’s see. Your father . . . what? Your father . . . is dead? Your father . . . loves you so much even though he never acts like it? Your father . . . is the hardest man I’ve ever had to deal with, and I wish he’d never left your mother and come back to me . . . ?

  Any of these feel possible.

  I feel all the pricklings of dread coming over me. It’s been a tough few years for him and for Maggie, worse than usual in a series of routine hard ones. This was the year they had to make the difficult decision to sell off a lot of the farmland. Government subsidies had dried up, the price of milk had gone down, the prices for feed had skyrocketed. Add to that years of bad weather—springtime snowstorms, followed by floods and then hot, dry summers—so that when developers with money moved in closer, it was harder to say no. Friends were selling and moving away. My father clenched his jaw and said no way. He’d keep going.

  And he had good reason, I suppose. The farm had been bought by his great-great-grandfather Hiram Linnelle and kept in the family for well over a century. We were all raised on the stories, told with a kind of stubborn New Hampshire pride. We are the Linnelle family. We survive everything. Each generation worked the land, growing corn, raising cows and chickens, facing hardships. Everybody succeeding at it, more or less, until my dad.

  Yet for years, he kept plugging away at it because he had to. How would it look if he was the one who let it all go to hell? He invested in equipment. Added a little farm stand. He got up early in the mornings, he stayed out in the barn or in the fields until late at night; he worked alongside the field hands, planting and fertilizing and organizing. He was always tired, always sunburned, always halfway fed up, ready to explode. He had a way of taking off his hat and rubbing his hands across his hair real fast, like he had some demons in there he was trying to evict by force.

  Did he ever stop and look around him and just appreciate the place? I don’t know. After all, it’s a beautiful piece of land, our farm, with its stately white clapboard farmhouse, and two ponds and a little stream that meanders along around the back. There are gigantic oak trees that shade the house and also hand out acorns like they’re generous benefactors inviting the squirrels to a feast. And there are two barns, one of which my dad turned into a home for his mother, Bunny, after he married Maggie and needed the main house for our little family. The Bunny Barn sits next to the sunflower field, behind the main house, so for most of the year, a person can stand on tiptoes in our kitchen and see Bunny’s windows and the little trellis that runs up the side of her barn, dotted with morning glories.

  But life was never easy. As everyone kept explaining to me and Hendrix, this family enterprise was both our duty and our privilege. Not everyone had land. We were People of the Land. The lucky ones. Maggie, who was a teacher during the school year, spent her evenings doing the books and paying the bills, and her summers were devoted to selling sunflowers and
corn and eggs at the farm stand. Hendrix and I worked there, too, from the time we were old enough to toddle out to people’s cars with their bags of produce. Maggie and I made little dream catchers in the summer and we baked pies and fried up apple cider doughnuts in the fall. There was a field of Fraser firs that we sold at Christmas.

  Hendrix and I were responsible for feeding chickens, collecting eggs, bringing cows in and out of the barn, taking care of the baby goats, and picking the flowers. Maggie cooked dinner every night, helped us with our homework, and invited our friends to come over for parties. There were hayrides and ice-skating parties, swimming in the pond, and sleeping out at night under the stars. Sort of your basic, idyllic, hardworking childhood home situation.

  Or would have been—except that through it all, my father strode through our lives with a pained expression on his face, like there was some horrible secret wound festering in the center of him, something that was wrestling his soul to the ground. There was no joy in his face when he looked out at the farm, no moments when I’d be outside with him and simply feel he was taking it all in, basking in his love of the land.

  He wasn’t happy. My theory is that he never really wanted the farm life in the first place. Here he was, a cherished only child, a hardworking, innocent, chores-doing kid who won prizes in 4-H for the best goats, and so it was simply a given that he would take over the farm someday. No one ever asked him if that was what he wanted. Because if he didn’t take it, who else would keep it going? But then, just as that transfer was about to happen—right after he’d graduated from high school and was ready to take over a lot of the farm operations—he decided to just take a little tiny weekend off. A no-big-deal road trip with his buddy.

  The two of them headed to a farmer’s field outside of Woodstock, New York, for that little weekend concert, having no idea that his whole life was about to turn upside down.

  He hadn’t even arrived at the concert yet when—BAM!—he discovered Tenaj, followed by days of free love and freedom and music. And then, so quickly after that—another BAM! And another! Babies! Two of us!

  I can just picture it. He must have been reeling from the shock of it all. Falling in love, veering off course from his intended life, and then coping with the shock of having Hendrix and me, born when he was just nineteen years old. It must have felt like he’d driven over a cliff. The country wedding, the baffled fury of his parents. All of it had to have roiled inside his good-boy soul, his stern New Hampshire upbringing.

  It’s tempting to believe the family myth that he spent the next few years trying to get back to the stability that had been the hallmark of his childhood. That he regretted what had happened.

  But I’m the writer in the family, and I think differently.

  I think he was madly in love with Tenaj. Sure, he had a girlfriend back home, but I think he loved my mom in a whole new heart-stopping way, and I think he embraced his new freedom-loving life as a hippie, playing the guitar and painting houses for a living. I can picture him coming home each day to his mystical little wife and his two conceived-in-love infants and thinking this was the way life should be. Free and easy, filled with music and sunshiny magic—nothing like the farm life with its demands and disappointments, its headaches and its hard work.

  I’ll bet he never wanted to go back.

  But then, when Hendrix and I were nearly two, our grandfather died, and that’s when my dad’s dream world came crashing down. My grandmother needed him to come back home. Somebody had to run the farm. She wasn’t one for letting it all go, selling it off to strangers, was she? No, she needed him back, and she made him return. And, just like that, it turned out the whole Woodstock thing had been a little detour after all. Like an extended vacation, the kind where you acquire a wife and a couple of kids without even meaning to.

  He brought us back with him, all three of us, and according to stories I’ve heard, my mom lived with him and Bunny in the farmhouse and worked alongside them at the little farm stand. Among the pies and the ears of corn, she offered her hippie-type artwork for sale: tie-dyed shirts, macramé, and the jewelry she made from objects she found.

  Bunny has told me that Tenaj, bless her heart, tried hard to be accepted in town—but nobody was having it. Nobody liked her or made her feel welcome. She was a sweet little thing, my mama, and talented and creative, Bunny said, but they didn’t want to buy her little found-object art. They didn’t want to invite her to their coffee klatches. They were on the Maggie Team.

  Bunny might have secretly been on the Maggie Team, too. Surely Tenaj wasn’t what she had in mind for her son. Maggie was much more aligned with the values Bunny would have held. But Bunny told me once that her only concern was that her son be happy. If he had a wife and children, then she was determined to accept his choice, and look for the good in the situation. She was not going to risk losing her son and her grandchildren simply because he’d fallen in love with somebody who was different.

  But the upstanding folks of Pemberton, New Hampshire, weren’t quite as generous. The way they saw it, Maggie, as the beloved townie girlfriend, had the prior claim to Robert Linnelle—and there was no way they were going to accept this hippie girl as Robert’s wife. Anyway, after looking this interloper over carefully, they figured that Tenaj had clearly been a mistake. And too bad about us babies . . . such unfortunate carelessness. A nice hometown boy getting taken advantage of that way. He’d have to come to his senses, they said.

  And so he capitulated, I think. It’s a very old story: if I were writing the story of his life—and someday I just might—I’d say he gave up the woman he really loved as well as the dream of being free and living a life with art and music and tie-dye. Became the farmer everyone expected him to be.

  No surprise, I suppose, that after a while my parents split up, and my mom took Hendrix and me back to Woodstock with her. Later, there was a big battle for him to get us back, but that’s a whole other story.

  Things went bad for my dad as the years went on. He developed an ulcer. A farmhand embezzled some money. Four calves mysteriously died. A flood made it impossible to plant one summer on the largest field, followed by two years of drought. The government subsidies stopped.

  Then, after I’d been in New York for seven years, Bunny got sick and had to be moved to a memory care facility.

  That spring a developer came up with a number that couldn’t be turned away.

  My father signed the papers. We all came home for that because Maggie said he needed us around him. To support him. Instead, he raged at us. Told us to go back to our “real lives.” To forget where we came from. He said all kinds of things Maggie assured us he didn’t mean. And since then, although he’s apologized, he’s grown quieter and more morose. His hands shake a little now, and he seems to be hitting the bourbon harder than I remembered.

  Your father . . . your father . . .

  Misses you.

  Loves you.

  Wishes he’d been better to you.

  Wishes you’d never been born.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I call Maggie back as soon as the subway comes above ground.

  “Tell me,” I say, all out of breath as soon as she answers. I brace myself in case hospitals are going to be involved. Or worse. “Is everything all right with Dad? What’s going on?”

  “Oh. Sorry. It’s not such a big deal,” she says. “I’m just . . . you know. Making mountains out of molehills, as your father would say.” The big sigh that follows tells me everything I need to know. I get it. Nothing serious really, but just a lot of . . . stuff to worry about. There was an early morning frost a week or so ago, and my father slipped on some black ice and twisted his ankle. Nothing to be done for it, she says, just another one of those things involving my father refusing to take care of himself. He wouldn’t go to the doctor, even though he can barely put any weight on that ankle. On and on. “It’s the usual with him,” she says. “I’m telling you so you can join with me worrying about gangrene setting in.”<
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  “Shall we schedule the fitting for the artificial limb yet?” I say, and she laughs.

  I get my worrying talent from Maggie. We always joke that even though we’re not genetically related, somehow I inherited her worry gene. She’s the one I can call up when I have a scratchy throat and by the end of the call, we’ll somehow have cheered ourselves up by imagining all the other diseases it probably isn’t. Brain cancer, for instance.

  “So, I’m hoping Thanksgiving will make your dad feel better,” says Maggie now. “You know how he gets when the weather gets cold anyway, and he’s taking it extra hard now that the construction has started. Every time they’re out there pouring another damn foundation, he goes into one of his funks. But you kids will cheer him up.”

  Maggie knows perfectly well that I can do nothing that would cheer him up; that is, unless I had a personality transplant, time-traveled back to a past that never existed, and was a different sort of daughter, born to a different sort of mother. Didn’t work in New York, hadn’t ever dated the boys I dated, didn’t marry the guy I could only stay married to for eight months. Had been content to sell sunflowers and milk cows and feed chickens and keep the accounts for the farm. Had married some local guy who liked to fix stuff. Had a bunch of blond-haired, trouble-free children who would call him Gramps and to whom he could teach a love of tractors.

  A thought flickers in my head. If I married Judd, my father would be proud. Judd has always been somebody who could make him smile. My dad always said he was the best of the bunch of kids Hendrix and I ran around with. Strong, practical, and hardworking. Why couldn’t I fall for a guy like that? That’s what he wanted to know. Why did I always have to like the dangerous ones?

  “Hey,” I tell her. “I’m doing a little survey about love and marriage. Do you think marriage can work if the two people aren’t in love but are just really, really good friends?”