“Mom?” I call out when I get the apartment door open. “Can you tell Perry not to set the door to automatically lock when it shuts? I keep getting locked out.” Houdini yanks me toward his food bowl while I unclip his leash. “His poop was soft again.”
Mom isn’t in the kitchen, but there’s a full continental breakfast spread on the island. Had I missed a memo about hosting a brunch for a half a dozen friends?
If that’s the case, I’ll have to get dressed and make a quick exit. Nothing makes me feel like more of a loser than when my mom has her book club over and I get pummeled with questions likehow are you doing?(fine/terrible),where are you working now?(getting ready for grad school/bartending in a coconut shell bra top),you should catch up with [insert son or daughter I went to high school or college with and have nothing in common with and no desire to talk to](oh my God, yes!/I have them muted on severalsocial platforms). Then I’ll either have to hear about how amazing their child is doingorlisten to them bemoan their lack of progress.
I envy the way my mom managed to kickstart her life after she divorced my dad. She changed careers, bought the condo, took up new hobbies. During my junior year winter break, Mom sat me down and told me—after a few minutes of vague buildup that made me nervous about a health scare—she’d been dating women for the last few months. For the first time, we were two adults having a real conversation about her life, separate from her role as my parent. I felt so proud of her. We both cried and hugged. It felt like we’d opened a door into a new phase of our mother-daughter relationship.
And then we never had a talk like that again.
“Mom?” I remove my sneakers. There’s no answer, but over the sound of Houdini lapping up water from his bowl, I hear my mom’s slightly muffled voice. She must be on the phone.
Houdini apparently hears it, too, because he waddles across the living room, toward the office.
Dammit.She went in there after all.
I follow Houdini, a low-grade sense of unease swirling in my gut, knowing that I’m bound to find my mother’s “helpful” sticky notes affixed to my laptop, or a printout of an article with tips for “emerging adults.”
I hear some shuffling around, Mom’s familiar laugh, and then…a deep voice.
“You could do floor-to-ceiling bookshelves—”
“What do you think about one of those ladders on wheels?” Mom asks.
I halt a couple of feet back from the door frame, torn between self-righteously bursting in and the irresistible desire to eavesdrop.
Peeking in, I catch a glimpse of my mother gesturing at the space occupied by the daybed and the toppled long boxes that I’ve only partially cleanedup.
“You’d have to rip out the carpet and install hardwood flooring,” the deep voice replies. He sounds like a contractor—someone my mom would recommend to one of her real estate clients trying to do last-minute projects to make their houses sell faster. There’s something familiar about his voice.
“Oh, watch your step,” Mom says. “My daughter has some kind of…project going on here.”
“It’s okay,” he responds. “I have a kid whose floor is already covered in art supplies and stuffed animals.”
Despite my indignation, I manage to keep quiet until I see Mom head for the window.
“I’m going to open the shade and let some light in so you can actually see,” she says. “It’s so dim in—”
“Don’t!” I yell, bursting in like I’m making a desperate attempt to stop an execution. “Just leave it. The sunlight damages the books!”
“Jesus, you scared me,” Mom says, clutching her chest. “Aren’t the boxes supposed to protect them?”
Houdini barks at me, an intruder in my own room, as I kneel on the floor, gathering up the issues that I hadn’t gotten around to putting away.
“The boxes don’t provide UV protection,” I say more testily than the situation requires. “This whole box vibrated right off the top shelf when that asshole moved in next door and started the loudest construction project of all time.”
“Oh.” I’d forgotten about the source of the deep voice until now. “That was me.”
I look up from my pile of Batman issues. “You’re the neighbor?”
“You’re the water lion trainer?”
7
One of the problems withmeeting someone at a pool when you don’t have your glasses on is that it’s hard to recognize the clothed version of them when you can actually see.
The glasses-off version of the ringmaster was virtually indistinguishable from the other weekend dads at the pool: beard, bare-chested dad bod, Ray-Ban Wayfarers.
The glasses-on man standing in my bedroom has a striking face: that broad nose that looks like it got broken and never healed right, dark brown eyes, a little scar on his prominent brow. He could be a character actor from the golden age of Hollywood if he wasn’t wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the Rutgers University logo.
