School let out in New Orleans last week.
Once school is out, Rose and Josiah don’t call ahead. They pop over when they feel like it. Phillip — their father, Celeste’s ex-husband — always calls ahead. When the children just show up, they text him from my kitchen — Dad, we’re at Omi’s — and within a minute my phone starts buzzing. Phillip, making sure it’s alright. I could set my clocks to it, it’s that precise. Omi is what they call me, by the way. Pronounced oh-mee. I have no idea where it came from. They’ve been calling me that since they could talk.
Sometimes they stay the night — a bag dropped by the door and dishes in the sink by morning. Sometimes they bring Fifi. Gladys just loves that. Rose takes Celeste’s old room. Josiah takes Jean’s.
Jean’s room still has the Cyndi Lauper and Madonna posters on the wall. Some teenage boys had posters of muscle cars, women draped across the hoods — the kind with obvious surgical enhancements and swimsuits made of fishing line. Not my Jean. My Jean was a different kind of boy, and there was never one thing wrong with that. The posters are a little faded and cracked now. Thax wouldn’t let me take them down. Now that he’s gone, I can’t bring myself to take them down. They remind me of our boy. And of the man who loved him enough to keep them there.
It’s good to have the kids here. This house thrives on life and laughter.
Phillip brought them over on Saturday morning. He, of course, called ahead. He’d called the Thursday before — the day I was out with Michael losing an earring and finding acorns in my engine — so he left a message.
He didn’t stay long — he had his parents to get to, and then the temple. Wat Wimuttayaram, every Saturday he’s home. He’s been doing this his entire life. Well — for as long as he’s been walking. He and his parents go to earn merit — which is the Buddhist understanding that what you do in this life accumulates, that what you give comes back to you. I was raised Catholic. We have a similar philosophy. Only ours came from a different teacher who used different words. Our teacher told us that we reap what we sow.
I think God might have many religions, and no single one is the right one. On Saturday mornings they bring food to feed the monks. The giving is the practice. Sometimes Josiah goes with him.
He came through the front door with a bag over one shoulder and a box of pastries from Elizabeth Street Café. I took the box, set it on the kitchen table, and told him there was coffee.
He sat down for twenty minutes. The kids had scattered into the house, the way they do. The dishwasher was running through the load I forgot to run the night before. The coffee was hot. The pastries from Elizabeth Street smelled like butter and cinnamon and diabetes waiting to knock on the door.
That’s what I want to tell you about. Those twenty minutes.
Phillip Sukhumvit is tall and slender, with dark hair that has gone salt and pepper in a way that looks incredibly distinguished rather than tired — a lot more pepper than salt. He has a shy smile, which might surprise you, for a man who spends his days in courtrooms. Dimples. Crow’s feet just beginning at the corners of his eyes, which are so dark brown they look black in certain light. He has the quality — I’ve only met a handful of people who have it — of making you feel like whatever you are about to say is the thing he most wants to hear. Michael has it too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they’re both in my life.
He asked about the packing. He asked if Gladys’s papers were in order for the flight. I have a small flat in Paris. I’m a dual citizen — it made sense once I knew we’d be making this trip every summer. The flights this year, though — Lord. I said what I say every year, only this year I meant it more: wouldn’t it be cheaper, and simpler, to just fly Celeste here instead? He smiled. He said the children needed to see their mother in her new world, not just passing through ours. He pays for all the flights over. Celeste pays for the flights back. I have never once been asked to pay for any of it. Lord knows what that man is spending this year.
I go every summer because those children deserve their mother. And because Celeste, complicated as she can be, is still mine. Their mother chose Paris. That’s a whole other story.
He asked if I needed anything before we left, and he said it the way he says most things — quietly, and like he meant it. Because he did mean it. I told him no, but thank you. Then I told him the one thing he could do was make sure they served bourbon on the flight — and winked. He looked at me, not sure if I was serious or joking. He said: you’re not supposed to be doing that anymore. I said: I know. But what my doctor doesn’t know isn’t going to kill me.
We talked about the children for a while. Rose and her ballet lessons. Josiah and his bonsai trees.
At some point I looked at this man sitting at my kitchen table and I thought what I’ve thought a few times over the last couple of years, which is: Celeste, what the hell were you thinking? This man is a catch. The genuine article.
I didn’t say this out loud. I’ve learned in my seventy-eight years which thoughts are for the porch and which are for the kitchen table, and that particular thought belongs firmly on the porch.
I’ve known Phillip for almost thirty years. I met him when he was in college, not long after he started dating Celeste. Even then, he knew exactly what he was going to do with his life — he wanted to be a public defender. That certainty has never moved. Not once, in all this time.
I didn’t fully appreciate what that meant until I understood what it had cost him.
The first offer came early in the marriage. Phelps Dunbar, a firm in the Canal District, called him in for a conversation that turned into an offer that was, by any reasonable measure, a significant sum of money. He thanked them. He said no. He went back to the public defender’s office and continued representing people who couldn’t afford to be represented.
The second offer came after the twins were born. Baker Donelson — a larger firm, a larger number, a corner office that I’m told had a view. He considered it for exactly as long as he had considered the first offer. He said no.
The third offer came four months after Thax died. Jones Walker, on St. Charles Avenue. More than five times what the public defender’s office pays him, and a path to partnership. The kind of offer most people wait their whole careers for.
He said no.
When Celeste found out about Jones Walker, she filed for divorce.
These things I learned well after the fact. Phillip never said a word about any of them. Celeste divulged them while trying to get me to take her side.
Her daddy died four months before Phillip’s last offer. Her world had gone topsy turvy. I try to remember that.
I want to be careful here. Celeste is my daughter and I love her very, very much. This isn’t a trial. She believed Phillip lacked ambition. That might be a fair thing to believe, if what you mean by ambition is the drive to accumulate more. If what you mean by ambition is choosing the same life three times over, even when the world keeps offering you a better-paying one — then Phillip Sukhumvit is one of the most ambitious people I’ve ever met.
The people who come to Phillip’s desk don’t have anywhere else to turn to. They’ve reached the end of their road. He shows up for them. Boy does he show up for them. He’s been showing up for them for over thirty years, at a salary that Celeste could never make peace with.
My Aunt Yvette can overflow with wisdom at times. Some of it’s good. A lot of it’s questionable. But every now and then she says something that could only come from a life as richly and thoroughly lived as hers: some people are rich in money and some people are rich in sleep. She, lucky her, is rich in both.
Phillip sleeps fine. I think. I don’t share his bed, but that skin — just a few wisps of crow’s feet at his age? That man sleeps like a log.
The twenty minutes ended. He stood up. He said: call me when you need a break from the kids. I’ll come bring them home. He thanked me for the coffee. I thanked him for the sweets and the conversation. I walked him out.
At the door he paused, the way he sometimes does, and asked again if there was anything at all that I needed.
I told him we were fine. We were going to Dat Dawg for lunch — Josiah’s latest culinary obsession is gourmet hot dogs. My mama would be horrified. Then we’d walk around the Quarter a bit.
He smiled — that shy smile — and made sure I hadn’t forgotten. If you need anything, call me.
And then he went to pick up his parents, to bring them to temple so the three of them could earn merit.
I went back inside. Gladys had found the empty box that once carried decadent Vietnamese pastries — in the garbage — and was investigating it with her nose. She knows she’s not supposed to be in the garbage. A nice handsome Buddhist visitor doesn’t change the rules. I picked her up and moved her to the sofa. Now, when I think of a lack of ambition, Gladys pops into my head. Once she determines a box that once held goodies is empty, she has no further interest in the world. She lay on that sofa for most of the rest of the day. I poured myself a second cup of coffee.
Cher, I’ve been trying most of this week to find the right word for what Phillip Sukhumvit has. I don’t know if there is one — at least not in Mama’s perfect French, or in my not-so-perfect English.
He just keeps showing up. Thirty years. Three times no. And every Monday morning, back to the same hard cases nobody else will take.
Phillip Sukhumvit has turned down more money than most people ever see. He’s given more time than most people ever give. He goes to temple on Saturdays and he shows up to his desk on Mondays and seven days a week he is, quietly, without ever making a production of it, exactly who his soul has told him to be.
Lord knows that’s not something you divorce.
Come back soon, cher. But call first.
