The Accident

I loved what I did. I pitied friends who spent their days sitting in cubicle prisons, who went home after eight hours unable to point to a single thing they’d accomplished. But I made buildings. Things you could point to as you drove down the street. And I was building them with my father, I was learning from him every day. A couple of years after I started working with him, I met Sheila on that window job, and before long we’d moved in together, something that didn’t sit well with my parents any more than it did with Fiona. But two years later we stopped living in sin, as my own mother liked to call it, in part because Mom was dying of cancer, and knowing we were legally married would give her some peace of mind.

Four years later, there was a child on the way.

Dad lived long enough to hold Kelly in his arms. After his passing, I became the boss. I felt orphaned and overwhelmed. The shoes were too big to fill, but I did my best. It was never the same without him, but I still loved what I did. I had a reason to get up in the morning. I had a purpose. I felt no need to justify the life I’d chosen to Sheila’s mother.

Sheila and I were both surprised when Fiona started seeing someone.

His name was Marcus Kingston, and while his first wife was still somewhere out in California, his second had died eight years earlier when some yahoo in a souped-up Civic ran a red light and broadsided her Lincoln. Marcus had been an importer of clothing and other goods, but had recently wound up his business when Fiona met him at a gallery opening in Darien. He’d spent a career mixing with the well-off and well connected, just the kind of people Fiona liked to be associated with.

When they decided, four years ago, to get married, Marcus sold his Norwalk house and Fiona put her place in Darien on the market. They went in together on a luxury town house that overlooked Long Island Sound.

Sheila’s theory was that Fiona woke up one morning and thought, Do I want to live the rest of my life alone? I had to admit that it had never occurred to me that Fiona might have any emotional needs. The woman put up such a chilly and independent front that one could be forgiven for thinking that she didn’t need people. But beneath that icy exterior was someone who was very lonely.

Marcus came along at the right time for her.

Sheila and I had wondered, on more than one occasion, whether Marcus’s motivations were slightly more complicated. He, too, had been on his own, and it made sense that he might want to wake up in the morning with someone next to him. But we also knew that Marcus had not sold his business for what he’d hoped to get, and that a sizable portion of his income still went to his first wife in Sacramento. Fiona, who’d been so careful-I might be inclined to say “tight”-with her money for so many years, appeared to have no problem spending it on Marcus. She’d even bought him a sailboat, which he moored in the Darien harbor.

Marcus still did some consulting here and there for importers who valued his expertise and connections. He dined out a night or two a week with these people, and liked to brag about how the business world just wouldn’t let him rest. Sheila and I had, privately, observed that he could be a bit of a blowhard, an asshole, frankly. But Fiona appeared to love him, and seemed happier with him in her life than she had been before he showed up.

They visited a lot so Fiona could see her grandchild. I could find plenty of reasons to dislike Fiona, but there was no question that she did adore Kelly. She took her shopping, to the movies, to Manhattan to visit museums and attend Broadway shows. Fiona even endured the occasional trip to the Toys “R” Us in Times Square.

“Where was this woman when I was a kid?” Sheila had asked me more than once.

Fiona and I maintained a kind of truce through these years. She didn’t like me, and I didn’t care much for her, but we remained civil. There was no out-in-the-open warfare.

That pretty much ended with Sheila’s accident.

After that, there was no holding back. Fiona blamed me. If I knew Sheila had a drinking problem, why hadn’t I done something about it? Why hadn’t I spoken to Fiona about it? Why hadn’t I forced Sheila into a program? What was I thinking, letting her drive around half the state of Connecticut, when she might very well have been under the influence?

And how often had she been drunk like that with Kelly-their granddaughter, for Christ’s sake-in the car?

“How could you not have known?” Fiona asked me at the funeral. “How the hell could you not have seen the signs?”

“There were no signs,” I told her, dazed and unhappy. “Not really.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’d say if I were you, too,” she shot back at me. “That’s what you have to believe, isn’t it? Gets you off the hook. But believe me, Glen, there had to have been signs. You just had your head too far up your ass to notice.”

“Fiona,” Marcus said, trying to pull her away.