Scratch the Surface

In Seth’s ancient Prius—the man was an environmental engineer, after all; he spent time in sewers with acid water eating through his hazmat suit and jeans—Courtney explained that it was a minor myocardial infarction, but since there was a blockage of blood flow, they were going to put in a stent.

“No, wait, that’s not right,” she corrected herself, turning to look at her husband, who nodded in agreement, keeping his eyes on the road. “They already put the stent in.”

“They did, yes,” he agreed, reaching over to take her hand.

“Everything looks great,” she explained, sounding calmer, steadier, “and they think he might get out of the hospital either Saturday or Sunday.”

“Oh.” I released the breath it seemed like I’d been holding for hours. “So he is actually good,” I rasped before my voice went out, and my sister, wildly against the law, unclipped her seat belt, climbed into the back seat, and dropped down into the hug I was waiting to give her.

Seth pulled over as soon as he got through the light so she could sob in my arms and I could rock her back and forth until the flood subsided, first to staccato crying, and finally to hiccups. We stopped and got Starbucks on the way, because, as our mother had taught us early in life, coffee fixed everything.

My parents got married young. My father, Raymond, was a junior in college, my mother, Brynn, a freshman, when he knew she was it and asked her to marry him. She knew he was it for her too, and said yes.

For the Pruitts, my mother’s family, it seemed fast, but my grandmother always assured us that when you knew, you knew. Second-guessing your heart was a bad idea and only led to regret. So even though her youngest child, my mother, was attending Cal State Berkeley on a full scholarship for volleyball and planned to be an anthropologist, when she called and said she was marrying my father, my grandmother, grandfather, two uncles, and her aunt Cynthia got on a plane from West Virginia to fly out to California to be at the wedding. My grandmother even brought her wedding dress and took it in herself, making sure it fit my mother like a glove before she and my father saw the justice of the peace.

As for the Gallaghers, their son was clearly out of his mind. My father was on the swim team, he played golf, he was in a fraternity, and he was going to go into the family business, financial planning, just like his father and brothers. Everything was on track until, as the story went, he’d gone out drinking with some of his buddies, they got wasted, he ditched them since he’d missed lunch and was starving, and ended up at a tiny Thai restaurant at eleven at night. It was raining, the place was packed, and he had nowhere to sit. Out of the blue, he felt a tug on his hand. When he looked down, a woman he would have never noticed—pixie cut and big glasses—had slid over just enough on the bench at the indoor picnic table to give him a place to perch. He thanked her; she poured him a glass of ice water and turned and smiled at him.

“It was like the sun came out,” he told me years later when we were playing basketball in our driveway. He tucked the ball against his hip as he got a dreamy expression on his face. “Your mother’s eyes glow when she smiles, you know.”

I did know.

He was devoted to Brynn Pruitt from that moment on, and nothing in heaven or hell would change his course to make her his wife. When his family stopped paying for school, he got a job putting up drywall, took classes at night, and every summer they both worked to pay for his tuition come the fall. He changed his major to construction management, because he enjoyed the hell out of it, and his boss took him on, first as a partner, and then sold the company to him five years later.

My mother, who discovered a passion for exercise and helping others live healthy, opened fitness and physical therapy studios that offered everything from aerial silks yoga to rock wall climbing to water aerobics. Downstairs for the gym, upstairs for PT, because sometimes just hiking the stairs was enough to get the blood flowing. Her business was called Kinetic, and she put them up all over Northern California. Together she and my father did better than his family of hedge-fund managers.

My father had a soft spot for his family, though, so when they slithered—my mother’s word—back into his life, he had to explain that, while he wanted to be close again, he had no interest in having anything to do with them financially. Even a promise of being put back in his parents’ will did nothing to sway him. He didn’t need to be invited back to the house in Marin; he loved Palo Alto and his house on the street with big shade trees.