Around the Bend (5 page)

“Your father is in the backseat, Hilary.”

I rolled my eyes.

“All right, I know he isn’t really, but…well, I don’t feel comfortable discussing Mr. Messinger with you.”

“Exactly. And I don’t feel comfortable discussing my relationship with Nick with you.”

“Why?”

I blew out a gust of air, instead of cursing. “Because it’s complicated, Ma.”

“What’s complicated about it? He loves you, he wants to marry you. You call Reverend White, we book the church…”

That icy knot formed again in my stomach, tightening into a twisted ball of frozen vines. If I hadn’t been stuck behind the wheel of a car, driving my mother and her pig across the country, I’d have run.

Run back home, run away from these questions. Run away from giving answers I didn’t have.

Didn’t want to provide, not to her, not to Nick, and most of all not to myself. Because that would mean looking into mental trunks best left shut.

“Quit,” I said, softly at first, then, again, the word gaining in volume. “Quit it. Quit planning my life. My future. Just
quit
”

Ma put her purse on the floor, turned in her seat and faced
me. “What’s so wrong with a little planning? With looking ahead to the future? You are not getting any younger, my dear, and you need to think—”

“I know what I need to think about!” The words exploded out of me, pent up for so many years, this little time bomb exacerbated by the close quarters of the car, the incessant woodpecker of my mother’s proximity. Why had I thought we could spend all this time together without committing murder? That simply adding a few birthdays would change our relationship? Make her see I was an adult? One capable of making decisions? “Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, what
you
want for my life isn’t what
I
want?”

She leaned back, putting distance between us. It was only a few inches, but it felt like the Panama Canal, and guilt washed over me, fast and hard. “Yes, Hilary, I have,” she said, her voice quiet.

And hurt.

“Ma, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“No, I’m sorry. I’ll stay out of your business.” She picked up her purse, sat it back on her lap and turned to face the road again. As still and cold as the bronze statue of Red Auberach sitting miles and miles behind us in Faneuil Hall.

“So how’s it going?”

I was curled up in the double bed at the motel with my phone pressed to my ear, Nick’s deep, husky voice about the only comfort I had. Okay, Nick’s voice and the four-pack of wine coolers I’d picked up at the convenience store across the street from the motel. I’d been hoping for something harder, but had to settle for a quartet of bottles called Seabreeze Delight.

“It’s not. We’re not getting along at all.”

“You’re stuck together all day in a car. Heck, even you and I would fight.”

“We don’t fight,” I said, suddenly missing Nick so bad, I wanted to cry. I wriggled my hips against the mattress’s lumps, trying to find a position that didn’t require Pilates to feel restful. Wishing he was here, wishing I could hit Rewind and go back to where everything had been perfect.

“Yeah, Hil, we do fight,” he said softly. “We just don’t yell.”

I wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but didn’t. Because I knew that would open up that can of worms I didn’t
want to open, that set of capital-letter subjects I avoided like the plague—MARRIAGE, PERMANENCE, WHERE OUR RELATIONSHIP WAS GOING.

And why I kept a toothbrush at his apartment but not a change of clothes.

“How’s work?” I asked.

“You’re changing the subject.” He sighed. “Okay, fine. We’ll talk about work. You know what I’m building right now? A set of cabinets for a playroom.”

“Great. Sounds interesting. Who for? What kind of wood?”

“The cabinets are for a family, Hil. Two parents, two kids. I’m down in their basement, measuring the space, installing the shelves, and seeing people who took a risk. Who made the leap.” How did he manage to do that? Turn every single question and conversation back to the same subject? The man was a broken record. “Nick, there are a gazillion people in the world who get married every day. And a half a gazillion who get divorced. Then they fight over those same cabinets like two Rottweilers in a butcher shop.”

“When did you become such a pessimist?”

I let out a gust. “It’s called being realistic, Nick.”

“Sure it is. When you walk into Ernie’s on a Friday night and you’re out of beef, and thirty people want burgers, and the keg of Bud goes flat, do you shut the place down? Close the doors? Give up?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Then why are you giving up on us before we’ve even started?”

I didn’t say anything for a while. He was right. Nights like that happened at Ernie’s all the time. We ran out of the special just when a party of ten came in, expecting to find that exact
thing on the menu. A delivery driver got lost, and an expected shipment arrived late. The air-conditioning broke down on the hottest night on record in Boston.

I’d learned to take it all in stride. To improvise. Because shutting the doors meant losing money. In the long run, that hurt Ernie’s more than figuring out some way to make everyone happy.

“And when I find a knot in a piece of wood that’s supposed to be perfect,” Nick went on, “I work around it. I see it as part of the design. A touch of something unique. I work with what I have, Hilary. I don’t give up just because it’s not perfect.”

“
You
gave up on us once.”

The phone line crackled, tension cutting across the miles. Nick drew in a breath, let it out again. “That was a long time ago. Things are different now.”

“I’m supposed to believe you? Why? I moved in, canceled my lease, talked cabinets with you, Nick. A future.” Albeit, not one with marriage, more a joining of appliances and furniture. It had been a huge step for me, one that I had contemplated and fretted over for weeks, but Nick had cajoled and tempted, and finally, I’d relented. “And what did you do, Nick?”

He didn’t have to answer. We both knew how that had ended. He’d done the Man Dance, panicking within a month, and we’d broken up. I’d found my own place, and maintained my space ever since.

Then, six months ago, he’d started the same talk. Only this time, with a more serious edge, the permanent, gold-bands-and-marriage-licenses type. Now, I was the one who was as skittish as a horse in the starting gate. What if the same thing happened? What if it was worse this time?

“I’m ready for more now, Hilary. I have been for a long time. You know that,” Nick said. “Everyone grows up eventually and I’d like us to.”

“I’m happy with the way things are. Why can’t you be?”

He sighed. “Because I can’t keep doing this. I need to know where we’re heading.”

“I’m heading west, young man.”

But Nick didn’t laugh. I took a bigger gulp of the Seabreeze Delight. Silly thing didn’t leave me any more delighted. It was too sweet, too fruity, and oddly made me wish for some wheat toast to temper the taste.

“I have to go, Hil. I’m going out tonight.”

A wild, crazy surge of jealousy rose in my throat. Three hundred questions crowded my mind at once, like voices in an insane asylum—who with? Where to? Why now? What time are you coming back? What will you do?

And who will you do it with?

Never before had I cared or asked Nick about what he did when he wasn’t with me. I figured I had no right to make demands on him if I wanted no reins on me. It had to be the distance, the emotional tornado stirred up by my mother. Or the aggravation of dealing with THAT PIG all day because I found myself asking words that I knew I shouldn’t. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere. Just out with some friends.” Then, I could hear him smile. See that smile across the phone line, and it made me want to take back the question, to close that gap in my armor, a gap I knew he’d seen. “Why? Are you worried about me?”

I took a sip of wine cooler, making him wait before I answered. Pretending I didn’t care; hadn’t been bothered one iota by what he’d said. “Nope, not at all. Just making conversation.”

“You’re a bad liar, Hilary. You should be able to trust me by now anyway. And, you love me. One of these days you’ll realize that. Hopefully sooner rather than later. I’m running out of patience.”

Then he was gone. I hung on to the cell phone, the cold metal against my ear for a long, long time, until David Letterman ended and the Seabreeze Delight finally stopped delighting and let me sleep.

I woke up the next morning and vowed to do better, like a seventh-grader with a failing math grade. Only this wasn’t pre-algebra, and this wasn’t about just mastering the solution to x.

It was my mother. And she didn’t grade on a bell curve.

The clock on the bedside table rolled from seven fifty-nine to eight. The phone hadn’t rung. No one had knocked on my door, bearing an egg-white omelet or some other equally healthy way to start my day. I showered, pulled on a clean pair of jeans and a non-holey T-shirt, slipped into my flip-flops after rinsing off the remaining sand in the sink, then headed out of my room and over to the one next door. “Ma?” I called, rapping on the wood.

“Coming,” she called back, the tone in her voice too high, like a rookie opera singer reaching for a note she couldn’t carry.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” Another falsetto note, this one even shakier. A sense of foreboding whispered through me.

“Let me in.” I tried the knob, a futile exercise.

“I’m not dressed.”

“Ma, let me in.” The dread doubled now, tightened in my throat, wrapped around my chest, and with a whoosh of memory sent me spiraling back five years.

To another door I couldn’t open, another calling of fine on the other end, when things hadn’t been fine at all.

Not at all.

“Now, Ma. Open the door.
Please.”

I tried the knob, but the door held fast. “Let me in.” More urgent, my hand working the knob, even as I knew it wasn’t going anywhere. Her voice on the other end, muffled, but finally, an “I’m coming,” and then, the sound of metal clicking against metal, chambers sliding into place, and then it gave way, allowing me entry.

“See? I told you. I’m perfectly fine.” She stood in her room, one hand gripping the back of a dark blue armchair, the cheap kind with a printed finish to cover for food stains. Sweat marched across her brow, and even in the dim light from the bedside lamp I could see a flush in her cheeks that had nothing to do with Maybelline.

Relief rolled over me, then anger, then worry, like tides coming in at the end of a long day. I wanted to shake her, to make her sit down, to give her some eggs. But most of all, to get her to stop covering up. It was something our family had always done too damned well. “You’re not fine. You’re sick. We should stay here today. Take a rest.”

A flicker of movement, and an almost imperceptible push off from the chair, like a swimmer who didn’t want to get caught cheating in the pool. A few measured steps to where Reginald lay on a quilted blanket, his name embroidered in bright blue letters underneath his snout. A Zip-Loc of pig chow sat beside a monogrammed ceramic bowl. My mother bent to open it, and a sound, almost a mew, escaped her. Betraying something I’d never heard before.

Weakness.

“Ma?”

She drew in a sharp, quick breath. “I’m not sick.” But she wouldn’t look at me when she said it and she had yet to get the pig chow. Her hand reached out, searching blindly for the edge of the bed, banging in a widening circle, grasping at the ugly brown and peach floral quilt, curling around it in a rosette, before hauling herself to the corner of the bed.

I didn’t wait or argue. I crossed the room, dumped what looked like a reasonable amount of feed into Reginald’s bowl and then faced my mother, hands on my hips. Roles reversed. Me, the irresponsible one, giving her the grown-up glare. “You look anything but fine. And we are not getting in that car until you tell me what’s wrong.”

“Noth—” She cut off the word when she saw it wasn’t getting her anywhere. “I’m tired. You try getting to sixty-seven and see how you feel.”

“You’re lying.” I should know. I’d become an expert, just ask Nick.

“I’m not.” She drew herself up, dared me to disagree. All traces of weakness disappeared, to the point where I could almost think I’d imagined it. She got to her feet, brushed off her dark blue traveling suit, but I noticed she’d traded her pumps for slippers, and her leg still had that water-logged look. Again, I questioned the wisdom of travel.

“Are you ready to go?” Ma said, clear and chipper as always.

I glanced again at her leg. “I really think we should—”

“Get in the car, Hilary. We have a lot of road to cover today.” And just like that, my temporary rule as leader was toppled.

I opened my mouth to protest, shut it when my mother
brushed past me, her packed suitcase in hand, Reginald at her feet. I packed up his bed and bowl, grabbed his package of food and fell into line behind the pig.

I think God put Ohio—flat, plain, filled with nothing but corn and cows—in the United States to torture me. It was hours before we saw anything remotely interesting.

I drove and drove, missing Nick, my mind playing awful tricks, flashing scenarios about where he’d gone last night—without me. Why was I worried? Nick had never given me reason to doubt his fidelity, but something about the distance, about his pressure for us to commit, had my mind conjuring up images it never had before.

Was I playing with fire by not committing to him?

I knew that answer as well as I knew my shoe size, but that didn’t make me any more anxious to rush into marriage prison. Things were, in my opinion, already perfect between Nick and me. I couldn’t understand why he wanted to mess them up with a gold band and a marriage license.

We’d been together for four years, brought together by an entertainment center. I’d moved into my apartment, bought a TV that was too big for the console I’d found at a garage sale and decided to grow up and buy a real piece of furniture. Someone had recommended Nick, and the next thing I knew, I had a custom oak cabinet and the carpenter in my living room.

It wasn’t the way he worked that I fell for; it was the way he worked the wood, made it shape and mold to his will. He had a patience that I admired, a quietness about his spirit. I’d never met anyone who was both gentle and strong, who could confront me and give me room in the same breath.

And it helped that he not only looked damned good without a shirt, but that when he kissed me, the world turned upside down.

He called me just as my mother and I pulled into Cleveland. I don’t know what had me more excited—the familiar ring tone that meant Nick was on the phone, or the sight of
something
besides the vast desolation of Ohio.

That something was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which even got Nick excited. “Get me a picture of The Clash exhibit, will you?” he said, with no mention of last night’s conversation. “And Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. Just one snapshot, so I can hang it on my wall and drool.”

Nick and his buddies played at Ernie’s on Thursday nights, a garage band they’d put together three years ago when Kevin Linton had had a midlife crisis and realized he’d never experienced his dream of becoming Jon Bon Jovi. Nick played electric guitar—and he was good, very good, as good at coaxing music from the instrument as he was at coaxing beauty from wood.

“Do you want me to see if they have a miniature reproduction of Hendrix’s guitar in the gift shop?” I asked, happy to keep things on this conversational level. “That way you can carry it around for good mojo or something.”

“If you get me one, I’ll love you forever.”

We’d gone all these years without saying those words, or at least not saying them seriously, but now that tone had returned to Nick’s voice. Again. It hung on the last four words, weighing them down, talking about a lot more than a plastic replica of the late-sixties rebel’s strumming machine.

An ordinary woman would have thrilled to hear those
words. Not me. Because I knew I was supposed to say the same thing back, and with those words came
expectations
, the very thing I sucked at. “Nick, I have to go.”

“Sure,” he said, but I could hear the hurt in his voice. And it had nothing at all to do with souvenirs.

I hung up the cell, put it in the ashtray, then stared at it for a second, my fingers lingering as if I could touch Nick, too.