“Hi, Mom.”
“Hello, Vanessa. I was just thinking about you.” Louise wasn’t going to tell her one and only daughter how she’d been thinking about her. Keep it nice if you can had been drilled into her when she was a little girl. She’d tried to drill it into Vanessa, too, but she hadn’t had much luck. “What’s going on?” Something had to be; Vanessa didn’t call her to pass the time of day.
“Hagop’s moving to Denver.” Her daughter couldn’t have sounded more tragic if she’d just watched a crowded orphanage go up in flames.
“Is he?” Louise tried to hold her voice as flat as she could. She didn’t know why Vanessa had taken up with a man old enough to be her father. Well, she knew some of the reason: Hagop wasn’t Bryce Miller and wasn’t anything like Bryce Miller. She made no effort to tell that to Vanessa. She knew useless when she saw it.
“Yeah,” Vanessa said. “The business climate is better there. That’s what he says. Lower taxes, fewer hassles, the whole nine yards.” She paused. Now she’s going to tell me whatever she really calltell me, Louise thought. Vanessa let the pause stretch long enough for the thought to form very clearly. Then she said, “So I’m going with him.”
“To Denver?” Louise exclaimed. “To live?” Vanessa had lived in or near San Atanasio her whole life. She thought a shopping expedition to South Coast Plaza in Orange County was like a safari in Burkina Faso.
But she said, “That’s right. I’ve already started looking for jobs online. I’m sick of working for this idiot, anyway-am I ever.”
Are you sick of your paycheck? Louise had had some sudden, painful lessons about money since she’d stopped banking Colin’s checks on the tenth and twenty-fifth of every month. But Vanessa was good with computers. She’d find something with more certainty to it than arranging dried flowers. Louise was liable to have to find something like that herself, dammit.
“I thought I should probably tell you,” Vanessa said, and by her tone of voice she’d been in some doubt.
“What does, uh, Hagop”-funny name! — “think about you packing up and moving to be with him?”
“He was surprised,” Vanessa said. I’ll bet he was, her mother thought. She went on, “But he got used to the idea okay.”
“Did he?” Louise had wondered if the older man was leaving town not least to get away. Maybe not. Something else occurred to her: “Have you told your father yet?”
“Oh, sure,” Vanessa said carelessly. “He doesn’t want me to do it.”
“I know he’s not crazy about Hagop…” Louise wasn’t, either, but didn’t want her opinions associated with Colin’s.
“It wasn’t that.” Now her daughter sounded impatient. Vanessa was good at that. “He kept going on that Denver was too close to what’s cooking under Yellowstone Park. Is he okay? He sounded kind of, I don’t know, loopy about it.”
“Oh.” Now Louise understood what was going on. “You don’t need to lose any sleep about him, I don’t think. He’s got a, ah, lady friend who studies volcanoes, so no wonder he’s all excited about them.”
“But there aren’t any volcanoes in Yellowstone, are there?”
“I don’t know. But that’s what this woman, girl, whatever she is, studies.” Louise’s spies-people from the old neighborhood-were sure about that. Come to think of it, Marshall had said something about it, too. Louise hadn’t put it together with the other till now.
Vanessa went on with her own train of thought, the way she often did: “Besides, Denver’s, like, four hundred miles from Yellowstone. More, even. I looked on a map. Dad must not have. He doesn’t usually freak out over nothing, but he sure did this time.”
“Okay.” Louise was thinking about Denver a different way. It was one more milepost marking how the family was fragmenting, with all the people going their own way. Modern families did that. It was part of how things worked. Rob spent so much time on the road with his silly band, he was like a stranger when he did drift back into town.
“Listen, Mom, I’ve gotta go. Break’s about over,” Vanessa said. “I’ll try to come by before I move, or maybe we can have lunch or something. ’Bye.”
“ ’Bye,” Louise echoed, but she was talking to a dead phone. She sighed again and stowed hers in her handbag. She’d spent upwardsf twenty years- the best years of my life, she thought, sincerely if not originally- raising the kids. And for what? To see them scatter to the winds, the way kids did. From their point of view, it was as if she hadn’t done a goddamn thing.
Which meant… what? She frowned. Thinking about What Stuff Meant-in capital letters-wasn’t something she did every day, or every week, either. Her style had always been more along the lines of do whatever you do, then see what happens next.
Besides, frowning wasn’t a good plan, not if the man in your bed was younger than you were. Wrinkles stayed. Deliberately, she made her face relax. Teo was so sweet. He said he appreciated all the things she knew, all the things she did with a lack of inhibition that amazed her when she noticed it. Had Colin ever noticed? Had he cared? Not likely!
Well, if she wasn’t going to live for her kids, who was she going to live for? She surprised herself by answering the question out loud: “For me, that’s who. And you know what else? It’s about time!”
She started to pull the compact out of her purse, then stopped. To scope herself out at close range with that teeny-tiny mirror, she’d have to put on her reading glasses. She didn’t want to be reminded that she needed reading glasses, not right now she didn’t. She walked into the bathroom instead.
Yes, that was better. She could inspect herself here at a distance her eyes were able to handle on their own. Okay, she had fine lines at the corners of those eyes. Okay, some of the lines on her forehead weren’t so fine. Time went by, no matter how little you wanted it to. And she’d spent a lot of afternoons tanning when she was younger. She’d looked terrific then. Her skin would be smoother and softer now if she hadn’t.
Her hair was perfect. That was a line from an old song, but she couldn’t come up with the rest of it. She was, by God, still a honey blonde. If she had some gray roots, that was between her and the Clairol people. And she kept the bottle with her tampons and pads, where Teo wouldn’t stumble over it.
What she really hated was the sag under her chin. It wasn’t bad, not yet, but it was there. And her upper arms flopped sometimes. She’d had a high-school English teacher whose arm did the shimmy whenever she wrote on the board. The kids, heartless with youth, had laughed at her. It didn’t seem so funny any more.
“My boobs sag, too,” Louise said sadly. With a bra, it didn’t show. But there were times, important times, when you weren’t wearing a bra. And Teo’s mouth and fingers would know her flesh was less resilient than it had been when Colin started pawing her. Nurse three kids and that was what happened.
She turned around and looked back at herself over her shoulder. Her ass was too damn wide. That also came from having three kids… and from having all the years she did her best not to think about.
She was what she was. Most of the parts still worked most of the time. With as many miles as she had on her, and some of the bumpy roads her life had banged over, how could she ask for more? How? Simple. She wanted everything to work the way it had when she was Vanessa’s age. That wasn’t gonna happen, but she wanted it anyhow. Who didn’t?
When she went back to the front room, she turned on the Food Network. She wasn’t a great cook-Colin had once accused her of being able to burn water-but she liked watching whizzes put meals together. I could do that, she’d think, even if she was one of the people for whom God cn Hamburger Helper. They made everything look so easy, though. If TVs came with smell attachments… Wow!
After a while, she punched the remote. She didn’t flip through channels the way a man would, but she wasn’t locked in. MSNBC said the Iranians were doing something or other the President didn’t like. Louise went back to the Food Network, and then on to Oxygen. The Iranians had been doing things Presidents didn’t like for, well, for ever.
Footsteps on the stairs. Louise brightened. She knew those light, bright steps. A key went into the lock, and then into the dead bolt. The door opened. In bounced Teo, as fresh as when he’d left this morning-literally, because he’d showered again at the gym.
Louise smiled a thousand-watt smile. “Darling!” she said, and all but threw herself into his arms.
“So how are those Greek poets?” Colin asked Bryce Miller. They sat across the dining-room table from each
