Wish

A
bout an hour into the flight from New Hampshire to San Francisco the attendant came over and opened her eyes wide, like people sometimes do when they talk to friendly dogs, and said in a puffy way that she had just heard from my mom that we were heading out to California to see a great white shark, and wasn’t that amazing, she had a cousin who was a diver and he had seen sharks, but never a great white, and weren’t we scared, and she thought the cousin dove in the Caribbean, where was it, she couldn’t remember, oh, yes, the Cayman Islands, did we know the Cayman Islands, and what kind of sharks did they have there?

“Black tips and reef sharks,” Tommy, my brother, said with his short, breathy voice that made him sound like a little old man. “Maybe tigers and bulls, too. Definitely bulls.”

I nodded and let him go sharky on her. Mainly, I had my eye on my mom, who had stopped about halfway up the aisle to speak to a guy in a business suit. Mom had her phony smile on, the one she uses when she meets men, and she wore the wide, hippie-dippie skirt that didn’t really match the guy in the business suit. It was all wrong but she couldn’t see that,
never
saw that, even though he probably pegged her for what she was—a woman too friendly to guys, a woman who would always stop in a plane aisle to say hello to a potential boyfriend. A woman who didn’t notice the knot she made in foot traffic. A woman who tried to make things happen too fast.

That was our mom, Grace.

Grace Ouroussoff.

She had taken her maiden name back after our father left. He had been a furnace installer for the Dead River Company near our home in Warren, New Hampshire. I was four when he left and I don’t remember much about him except that his hands smelled of glue, or solder, and he wore a Leatherman on his belt in a nylon holster that had a tiger embossed on its face. His name was Winterson. So it was Tommy Winterson and Bee (short for Beatrice) Winterson and my mother, who had reclaimed her Russian
name. Only she didn’t really look or act Russian. Her parents had been second-generation Russian, also partially Hungarian, and sometimes they served potato pancakes and crazy Russian food that consisted mostly of cabbage in different boiling vats, and they really, really liked Easter.

But on the plane, her right hip leaning against the passenger seat, her voice so high-pitched people couldn’t help but watch, she flirted with Businessman Bob, tossing her head back and touching his shoulder. I doubted she would go out of her way to acknowledge our family connection, because that meant letting Businessman Bob know she had a fifteen-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old son. It wouldn’t take him long to do the math. Not to mention that most guys didn’t think connecting with a woman with two kids was any sort of dream come true. Most guys ran the other way when they met us; then Mom would take to her bed with a roll of toilet paper, muttering that nothing mattered and that she hated her life, and complaining that she didn’t deserve to be unhappy.