Everybody Has Everything

“How old’s the kid?”

“Two. A boy. Fi

“Todd Banks and his wife, you know them? They’ve been trying to adopt from China, but it’s totally fucking impossible right now.”

“I guess we’re lucky,” said James, and Doug didn’t notice the sarcasm in his voice, or let it be. (But a gnawing thought now: What about China? What about the baby in China, separated from them by only a few signatures and uncut checks?)

“That is fucking crazy, man. How’s Ana?”

“She’s okay. Good.”

Mark Pullen, sitting on James’s other side, leaned in. “Did you hear that? Alice sold her screenplay.”

James turned to her.

“I didn’t even know you wrote,” he said, trying to add a smile to the observation.

“I don’t really. It’s a comedy about catering for the rich and famous. I wrote it in three weeks.” She beamed. Mark, her husband, put an arm around her. He directed commercials, and in all the years that James had known him, he’d never heard him aspire to anything else.

Alice Mitchell had only ever been kind to James, and her peanut brittle was a phenomenon. But he hated her a little in that moment.

“She’s being modest. She’s a great writer,” said Mark. “We just got back from L.A., and the producer said she had a voice like Nora Ephron.”

“ ‘Like Nora Ephron before she got boring.’ It was more of an insult to Nora Ephron than a compliment to me.” Alice kept smiling, so wide and bright that James could hardly look upon it.

He stood up suddenly, searching his pockets for cash.

“Alice, I’m thrilled for you,” said James, leaning down and giving her a kiss on the cheek.

“See you Friday?” shouted Doug as James walked off, waving over his shoulder. James didn’t answer.

At home, he dropped his gear in the hall and walked quickly up the stairs to Fi

After he’d showered and crawled into bed next to Ana, sleeping soundly, James had a thought: This might be temporary. Fi

James turned over these scenarios in the dark, still feeling Fi

“Should we wait out here?” James always looked for a reason not to go into the nursing home. Usually he would arrive after Ana, with coffees purchased in slow motion, or drop her off to circle the block several times under the guise of looking for parking. This time, of course, with Fi

But he was right, of course, that no child would want to come into this place, especially when there was a playground across the street. A few patients had been wheeled there, and they sat with their wheelchairs pointed toward the jungle gym like it was a television. Knit blankets sausaged their legs. Their faces ranged from glazed to sleeping. A nurse, jacket over her green uniform, huddled and smoked, ashing behind her back.

“Come in and say hi. She’d like it,” said Ana. James nodded.

It had taken forty-five minutes to reach the home. Ana had carefully chosen this old age home, in a quiet, unvisited patch of the city. It had a good reputation, but that wasn’t why Ana selected it: Placing her mother in a home closer to their house was unthinkable. Ana couldn’t imagine being out on one of her night jogs and ru

She had been feeling responsible for her mother most of her life. That responsibility trailed faintly after her, a tissue on her heel, slightly shameful. Even as a child tucked away in her room where the window looked at a brick wall, and on that wall she could see India, where her father always talked about going. She pictured cows and ci

Her father moved to Costa Rica, and the letters never again mentioned this boy, or his mother. Ana got older and stopped opening them. And as if her father knew the audience had left the theater, they stopped coming. Silence, now, for eight years.

So Ana and her mother became a pair. Ana went with her mother to the courthouse and, in front of the judge, erased her father’s name, took her mother’s. There was love, but also the bottle. Once her father left, Ana’s mother navigated them toward the smallest apartments in “better neighborhoods,” a phrase peeled from the walls of her own childhood in a riverside university town. Her mother had been a child in a house that could properly be called a mansion, with a small circular swimming pool and a brainless Doberman pinscher that barked at the bushes. Ana spent weeks there in the summer heat. She saw her grandmother’s long, teenage fingernails on her curved hand, shot through with purple veins; her grandfather’s highwaisted pants, his box of war medals.

They wept when Ana waved good-bye in the driveway, days before September. Her mother sat sober and stared straight ahead, shaking hands clenching the wheel.

“You don’t know what they’re really like,” she said, when Ana began to echo their wails, dramatically reaching a hand through the open window as her mother revved and reversed. “You’ll never know, thank God.”

Before entering the nursing home, there was the unbuckling and the gathering of gear that had spread across the car during the drive—water bottle, diaper bag, book, octopus toy. Fi

Fi

Ana signed her name in the reception book. “Hi, Lana,” she said.

“Hi, Ms. Laframboise,” said the nurse loudly. Lana spoke to the patients the way she, Ana, spoke to Fi

Ana sca