Only Marcella is in the living room. She’s reading, which is unusual. She’s never been a big reader. Dad puts away a book a week, easy. He loves thrillers and spy novels, has mainlined the entire Grisham catalog. My mom always says she prefers life to books. But here she is, curled up with a cup of coffee.
I tilt my head down to read the cover, and she closes it.
Gravity’s Rainbowby Thomas Pynchon. Yikes.
“Any good?” I ask.
She looks at me, trying to decide. “It might be if I stick with it.” She pauses. “I’ve read the same chapter four times.”
My mother usually does not poke fun at herself. I find myself taking a seat down next to her.
“I don’t blame you,” I say. “I don’t think I ever got through it, either. It doesn’t seem very enjoyable.”
She laughs lightly. “It’s really not.”
She sets the book on the coffee table and shifts her body toward me.
“Dad didn’t surf this morning,” I say. I’m surprised I’m still thinking about it. Or maybe her vulnerability has given me an opening to something else.
“He’s fine,” she says, because she knows where I’m going with this. “He comes and goes—he’s not as militant as he used to be.”
“Are you sure?” That’s three days in a row, by my calculations, that he hasn’t been near the water.
“Ask him to go out with you tomorrow,” she says. “I’m sure he’d love that.”
“I thought you hate when he surfs.”
She looks up at me and exhales. “I’m learning.”
My mother is not a particularly beautiful woman. Whatever that means. She’s cute, yes, and puts herself together well, absolutely. But her features do not exactly hang together. Her hair is straw-colored and chin-length, her nose is small and wide, and her eyes are big and almost rectangular. Something about her always seems disjointed or effortful. I’ve always thought I took after her physically. A little awkward. But when she looks up at me now, I see something softer than I’ve ever seen before.
“You look nice,” I tell her.
I want to say something else, something about parenthood, maybe. The impossibility of my own—to actually tell her now. The weight that I’m carrying. Or about marriage, Leo being gone, the hard truths of commitment. Or I want to ask: “Will I be happy without a child?”
She looks up at me curiously. “You hate the way I dress,” she says.
I blink at her. “Who said that?”
She shrugs in a way that feels practiced. “I don’t know. You make it clear.”
“Mom,” I say. “You’re reaching. I just told you you look nice.”
“Well,” she says. “Thank you.” She flips her book back open.
“I called over to Bonnie’s,” she says. “Stone answered. I invited him to dinner tonight, if that’s OK.”
“Did you speak to her?” I ask.
“No. Stone said she isn’t really up for visitors right now.”
She looks at me a beat longer. I can’t tell if she’s waiting for me to tell her something—about my life, about Stone, about visiting Bonnie earlier—Does she know?But also—why does she neverask? Why is it always on me to cough up information for her to get to peruse at her liking? Aren’t mothers supposed to pry you open?
“Is he coming?” I ask.
“Yes.”
And then, as if the conversation is complete, she resettles herself and turns the page.
