Sarah Dessen (32 page)

“Remy.” He tried to reach out and grab my hand, to calm me, but I pulled back, my wrist smacking wildly against the register, as if it wasn’t even under my control. “Come on. Just tell me—”

“Fuck you!” I screamed, and my voice sounded so shrill.

“What is the problem?” he yelled back, then ducked down, picking the picture up off the floor. He stared at it. “I don’t—”

But I was already walking across the store, toward the door. I just kept seeing my mother in my mind, floating toward me on a wave of perfume and hopefulness, trying so hard to make this, of all marriages, work. She’d been ready to settle, to give it all up, even her own voice, just to stay with this man who would not only commit adultery but save the evidence on film. Bastard. I hated him. I hated Dexter. I had come so close to wanting to be wrong about the possibilities of what the heart could really do. Give me proof, I’d said, and she had tried. It’s not tangible, she’d said, you can’t mark it so clearly. But against love, the case was solid. Easily argued. And you could, indeed, hold it in your hand.

I pulled into the driveway and cut the engine, then just sat there as the A/C whined to a stop. I was dreading what I had to do. I knew that someone else might not have said anything, just letting the marriage, sham that it was, take its course. But I couldn’t allow that. I wouldn’t have been able to leave knowing that my mother was stuck here, living with that kind of deception. As a firm believer in the rip-it-off-like-a-Band-Aid school of bad news, I had to tell her.

As I walked up the driveway to the front porch, however, something was off. I couldn’t say exactly what: it was more of a hunch, unexplainable. Even before I came upon the Ensure cans, which were scattered across the front walk, some in the grass, some rolled under the bushes, one just sitting upright on the steps, as if waiting to be retrieved, I had a feeling I was too late.

I pushed open the front door, then felt it hit against something: another can. They were everywhere, scattered across the foyer as I crossed it, going into the kitchen.

“Mom?” I said, and listened to my voice bounce off the countertops and cabinets, back at me. No response. On the table, I could see the food stacked for our big family dinner: steaks, corn on the cob, most of it still in the plastic bags from the supermarket. Next to them, a stack of mail, with one envelope, addressed to my mother in clean block writing, ripped open.

I moved across the room, stepping over another Ensure, to the doorway of her study. The curtain was hanging down, the old busy-don’t-bother-me sign, but this time I pushed it aside and walked right through.

She was sitting in her chair, in front of the typewriter. Sticking out of it was a copy of the picture I’d thrown at Dexter. It was positioned the same way a sheet of paper would have been right before she rolled it in.

My mother, strangely, seemed very calm. Whatever fury had caused the explosion and scattering of Ensure cans had obviously passed, leaving her sitting there with a stoic expression as she considered Patty’s face, so pouty and posed, staring back at her.

“Mom?” I said again, and then I reached out my hand and put it over hers, carefully. “Are you okay?”

She swallowed, and nodded. I could tell she’d been crying. Her mascara was smeared, black smudgy arcs underneath both her eyes. This, I thought, was the most disturbing thing of all. Even in the worst of circumstances, my mother always looked put together.

“They took it in my own room,” she said. “This picture. On my bed.”

“I know,” I said. She turned her head, looking at me quizzically, and I backtracked, knowing it was best to keep the fact that yet another copy existed to myself. “I mean, that’s the quilt, right? Behind her.”

She turned her gaze back to the snapshot, and for a second we both just looked at it, the only sound that of the refrigerator ice machine cheerfully spitting out a new batch of cubes in the next room. “I
missed
him,” she said finally.

I put my hand over hers and sat down, pulling my chair closer. “I know,” I said softly. “You came back from Florida feeling really good, and then you find out he’s such a rat bastard that he—”

“No,” she said distractedly, interrupting me. “I
missed
him. All those Ensures, and not a one made contact. I have terrible aim.” And then she sighed. “Even just one would have made it better. Somehow.”

It took a second for this to sink in. “You threw all those cans?” I asked her.

“I was very upset,” she explained. Then she sniffled, wiping her nose with a Kleenex she was gripping in her other hand. “Oh, Remy. My heart is just breaking.”

Whatever humor I might have been able to see in her pelting Don with empty Ensures—and it was funny, no question—left me as she said this.

She sniffled again, and clenched her fingers around mine, holding on tight. “What now?” she said, waving her Kleenex in a helpless way, the white blurring past my vision. “Where am I supposed to go from here?”

My ulcer, long dormant, rumbled in my stomach, as if answering this call. Here I was, so close to my getaway, and now my mother was adrift again, needing me most. I felt another flash of hate for Don, so selfish, leaving me with a mess to deal with while he slipped away scot-free. I wished I had been here when it all came down, because I did have a good arm. I wouldn’t have missed. Not a chance.

“Well,” I said to her, “first, you should probably call that lawyer. Mr. Jacobs. Or Johnson. Did he take anything with him?”

“Just one bag,” she said, wiping at her eyes again.

I could already feel it happening, the neat click as I shifted into crisis management mode. It wasn’t like it had been that long since Martin left. The path might have grown over a bit, but it was still there. “Okay,” I continued, “so we’ll need to tell him he has to set up a specific time to come back and get everything. He can’t just come whenever he feels like it, and one of us should be here. And we should probably get in touch with the bank, just to be safe, and put a freeze on your joint account. Not that he doesn’t have money of his own, but people do weird stuff in the first few days, right?”

She didn’t answer me, instead just staring out the window at the backyard, where the trees were swaying, just slightly.

“Look, I’ll find that lawyer’s number,” I said, standing up. “He’s probably not in, with it being a Saturday and all, but at least we could leave a message, so he’d get back to you first thing—”

“Remy.”

I stopped, midbreath, and realized she’d turned her head to look at me. “Yes?”

“Oh, honey,” she said quietly. “It’s okay.”

“Mom,” I said. “I know you’re upset, but it’s important that we—”

She reached over for my hand, pulling me back into my chair. “I think,” she said, and then stopped. A breath, and then she said, “I think it’s time I handle this myself.”

“Oh,” I said. Weird, but my first thought was that I was somewhat offended. “I just thought—”

She smiled at me, very weakly, and then patted my hand. “I know,” she said. “But you’ve dealt with enough, don’t you think?”

I just sat there. This was it, what I’d always wanted. The official out, the moment I was finally set free. But it didn’t feel the way I’d thought it would. Instead of a wash of victory, I felt strangely alone, as if everything fell away suddenly, leaving me with only the sound of my own heart beating. It scared me.

It was almost as if she sensed this, saw it on my face. “Remy,” she said softly, “it’s all going to be all right. It’s time you worry about yourself, for a change. I can take it from here.”

“Why now?” I asked her.

“It feels right,” she replied simply. “Don’t you feel it? It just feels . . . okay.”

Did I feel it? Everything seemed so tangled, all at once. But then in my mind, I saw something. The country, spread out so wide, with my mother and me separated not only by our difference of opinions, but also by miles and miles of space, too far to cross with just a look or a touch. My mother was down, but not out. And she might have denied me some of my childhood, or the childhood I’d thought I deserved, but it wasn’t too late for her to give something in return. An even trade, years for years. Those passed for those to come.

But for now, I scooted closer, until we were touching. Knee to knee, arm to arm, forehead to forehead. I leaned into her for once, instead of away, appreciating the pull I felt there, something almost magnetic that held us to each other. I knew it would always be there, no matter how much of the world I put between us. That strong sense of what we shared, good and bad, that led us to here, where my own story began.

“He couldn’t,” my mother said when I asked her this. “He loves her.”

“He’s an asshole,” I said.

“It was unfortunate,” she agreed. She was taking it so well, but I wondered if she was just still in shock. “Everything, in the end, comes down to timing.”

I considered this as I piled the steaks onto a plate, then went out to the fancy new grill, opening it up. After struggling for about fifteen minutes with the high-tech, supposed-to-be-moron-proof ignition system, I decided I liked having my eyebrows intact and instead dug out our old Weber grill from behind a stack of lawn chairs. A few handfuls of charcoal, some fluid, and I was in business.

As I poked at the coals, I kept thinking about Dexter. If once he had been a loose end, now it was a full hanging string, capable of pulling everything apart with one good tug. Chalk it up to another bad boyfriend story, one more added to the canon. It was where I’d intended him to be, all along.

I was in the kitchen, arranging some chips and salsa on a plate, when Chris and Jennifer Anne pulled up. They came across the lawn, carrying her trademark Tupperware, and they were holding hands. I could only imagine how Jennifer Anne, who’d found my cynicism about this marriage to be completely abhorrent, would react to this latest family news. Chris, I figured, would instantly move into protective mode for my mother’s sake while privately feeling grateful to have his bread back, butts and all.

They came in the front door, chatting and laughing. They sounded positively giddy, in fact. As they got closer to the kitchen. I looked up, noticing they were both flushed, and Jennifer Anne was as relaxed as I’d ever seen her, as if she’d had a double dose of self-esteem affirmations that day. Chris looked pretty happy too, at least until he saw the empty space on the wall over the breakfast table.

“Oh, man,” he said, his face falling. Next to him, Jennifer Anne was still grinning. “What’s going on?”

“Well,” I said. “Actually—”

“We’re engaged!” Jennifer Anne shrieked, thrusting her left hand out in front of her.

“—Don’s got a mistress, and he’s left to be with her,” I finished.

For a minute, there was total silence as Jennifer Anne caught up with what I’d said, and I backtracked, clumsily, finally hearing her news. Then, at the same time, we both blurted out, “What?”

“Oh, my God,” Chris groaned, stumbling back against the fridge with a thud.

“You’re engaged?” I said.

“It’s just—” Jennifer Anne said, putting a hand to her face. Now I could see a ring on her finger: a good-size diamond, so sparkly as it caught the light shining from over the sink.

“Wonderful,” I heard my mother say, and turning around I saw she’d come in behind me, and was now standing there, her eyes a bit watery, but smiling. “Oh, my. It’s just
wonderful.
”

It says something about my mother, and her utter and total belief in the love stories she not only wrote but lived, that she was able to say this then, not two hours after her fifth marriage had dissolved in a puddle of deceit, bad clichés, and discarded Ensure cans. As I watched her move across the room, pulling Jennifer Anne into her arms, I felt an appreciation for her I would not have been capable of three months earlier. My mother was strong, in all the ways I was weak. She fell, she hurt, she felt. She lived. And for all the tumble of her experiences, she still had hope. Maybe this next time would do the trick. Or maybe not. But unless you stepped into the game, you would never know.