I raised an eyebrow at her. “Adjust?”
She blushed, making me feel more and more like a beast. “You know, to being back. After everything.
“Right,” I said, looking down at my file of sales orders. “A lot of catch-up,” I said, nearly cringing as I did.
Shari had the good grace to make her exit, shutting the door firmly behind her.
I sank down in my chair, shoved the file away and put my face in my hands.
The truth was, I didn’t feel like doing anything.
Fortunately, before I could fall into a heap of something that felt vaguely like pity—though I wasn’t clear on what /had to feel sorry about—the phone rang. Assuming it was a client, I picked up, prepared to placate whoever hadn’t received their order this week, and was surprised to find my mother on the other end.
But I shouldn’t have been surprised, knowing my mother.
“Sage, I didn’t think you’d be in today…”
“Why wouldn’t I be in?”
“Well, wasn’t the funeral yesterday?”
The operative word being yesterday. But my mother was of the school where mourning required at least a lifetime to be done properly. She’d been putting up memorials to Hope ever since my sister had died seventeen years ago. There was the annual “Keep Hope Alive” theater festival in my hometown to raise money for a children’s theater fund in Hope’s name. Though Hope had only been eleven when she died, she had shared my mother’s love of acting. The “Keep Hope Alive” theater fund was a nice gesture, but my mother—and my father, who did lights for the show every year—should have been concentrating their efforts on keeping themselves alive. Between my mother’s nonpaying gig at the repertory theater and my father’s sporadic sales—he was a painter, the kind who made a meager living selling beach scenes in the local gifts shops—they were barely surviving. Which reminded me…
“Did you make that doctor’s appointment?”
“Doctor’s appointment?”
“To have those tests done?”
“Oh, right. Well, Sage, you’ll never believe it, but the pain just went away. It was like a miracle.”
What was really a miracle was that my mother had lived this long, considering she and my father had forsaken all the necessities of life—like health insurance—in the name of living the same life they had when they met in a commune in the sixties. They had left the commune shortly after I was born, even gave in to bourgeois life enough to marry some time after my second birthday and settle down—as much as two bohemians who still thought it was the sixties could settle down—in a small house in Babylon, Long Island. The house was the only thing that saved them, really. They’d bought it for a song when Babylon was more undesirable marina than valuable waterfront real estate.
I sighed, long and deep.“Mom, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it checked out. I sent you a check over a month ago to pay for the exam.“
“Oh, Sage, I really did appreciate your gift. We put that money to good use,” she said happily. “We had the floors fixed in Charlie’s apartment. After the laundry room flooded, they were all warped, and you know Charlie’s got that bum leg…”
I wanted to argue that Charlie, their longtime tenant who lived in the basement, should perhaps pay for his own new floors, considering that he hadn’t paid his rent in the three months since he lost his job. But it was pointless. My parents were of the belief that what goes around comes around. The problem was, it seemed there was often more going than coming.
As if she picked the thought out of my head, my mother continued, “Don’t worry, Sage. We only paid for the materials. Charlie did the work himself. He’s so handy that way. We’re lucky to have him. Do you know he’s going to repaint the living room for us with some of his friends? We’re going to have a little paint party. Barbecue. You should come out for it.”
No thanks. I generally avoided the frequent parties my parents threw, mostly because I found them stressful. The last time I had given in and attended, one of their hippie friends—after one too many bong hits—had gotten it into his head to start a bonfire in the yard and nearly set the tool shed on fire in the process. It was too much work to be around my parents and their friends because someone had to be the sane one, and in their circle of hippie artist (read: jobless) friends, somehow it always wound up being me.
“Oh, but you’ll probably be out at Fire Island,” she continued, her tone going pensive. The fact that I had, for the past three summers, foregone quality time with my parents in favor of a share with my friends at Fire Island was the only point of contention between me and my otherwise “live and let live” mother. Mostly because it made her “baby girl’s” visits less frequent during the summer months, and since I was my parents’ last remaining child, it was my duty to keep up the family front.
“Is your boss even going to open the house?” my mother asked now.
“I don’t know what Tom’s plans are,” I said. She had voiced the question that had been sitting in the back of my mind all this time. I know it was wrong to wonder about such things in light of recent events, but the truth -was, the beach was all I had to look forward to in the summer. And now, I thought, eyeing the stack of work that had built up during my absence, I wondered if I had anything to look forward to this weekend.
“Look, Mom, I’ve got to go,” I said, knowing it was better at the moment to immerse
