Chapter 67

67

My father told me he was going to drop me off at my mother’s house on Sunday for lunch. I was stunned. We hadn’t spoken much about her in the two years since she left, and I hadn’t seen her since the time at the diner with Mrs. Ellington. He told me she had called the week before and extended the invitation. I didn’t seem to have a choice, the way he told me about it, but I remember wanting to go despite her betrayal—I was curious. Maybe he was, too.

When she opened the door she looked past me to the driveway, searching for my father through the reflection on his windshield. She watched the car until it turned off the street and then looked down at me. I wore my hair a different way, in two long braids, and my face was speckled with new freckles from the summer sun.

“Nice to see you,” she said, as though we’d run into each other at the grocery store.

I followed her in. Her house, modest on the outside, was filled with fancy items I hadn’t seen before, not even at the Ellingtons’. Proper runners on the tables and glass statues on pedestals and pictures lit from above with their own special lamps. None of it felt real to me. It felt like a set, like actors would sweep in any minute and take over the stage. Richard called for us and she shuffled me to the kitchen, where he handed me a dark pink drink in a cocktail glass.

“I made you a Shirley Temple.” I took it from his huge hand and they watched me have a sip.

“This is Richard. Richard, this is Blythe.” She sat at the table and looked around her kitchen, prompting me to do the same. Everything looked pristine, unused. Maybe it was.

“I’ve ordered some sandwiches.”

Richard stared at me and then back at my mother. She raised her eyebrows at him as if to say, Happy now?

He asked me a few questions about the first week of school and told me he liked my name, and then excused himself to make a call. My mother unwrapped our lunch from cellophane and asked me what I had been up to. For the past two years, or just this weekend? I wanted to ask. But it was clear that we were supposed to pretend—just like the house she had set up. Just like this life she had wanted to show me for some reason. She leaned over the counter to reach a knife and her blouse touched a blob of mayonnaise.

“Shit,” she hissed and rubbed at the stain with a dish towel. “I’ve worn this once.”

I ate my turkey sandwich and listened to them talk about somewhere on the coast of France. They’d gone for the summer. I wondered where all the money came from, why they lived in that boring house in that mediocre neighborhood a half hour outside the city. I’d always imagined she left us for an urban, bohemian life full of people who were as beautiful as she was. That was clearly not Richard. But he certainly didn’t match the glass statues and the elegant china either. He looked as out of place as I knew she was.

Her hair and her skin and her lips and her clothes were different—even her voice. New textures and smells and pitches. Every part of her that I’d once known had become glossy and coated and smelled like a department store. I later saw piles of tissue and fancy shopping bags folded in her closet from stores I hadn’t heard of before. She’d given me a haphazard tour of the house, after which we lingered in the bedroom. There weren’t any pills on her bedside table. I noticed she had a small suitcase in the corner, open, her things strewn on top. She saw me staring at it.

“I haven’t had a chance to unpack. We stay in the city a lot. Richard has business there. We lived there for a while, actually.” She took off her stained silk blouse and looked through her closet for something else to wear. She sighed. “I hate it here, but—”

But what?I wondered. Her bra was black and lacy. I had a humiliating urge to put my face between her breasts, just to smell her skin, as if that crevice could possibly have reminded me of childhood.

Later that afternoon, after I came down quietly from the bathroom, I watched from the hallway as Richard grabbed her waist from behind and pulled her into him. She reached up and put her fingers in his waxy, graying hair.

“I missed you. Don’t disappear like that again,” he said. She pulled her hand away from his.

“I wish you hadn’t called him.”

“Well, it worked to get you home, didn’t it?”

Richard had invited me over, not my mother. I was a ploy to get her back from the city. But there must have been a small part of her that wanted to see me, that still cared what my father and I thought of her.

I counted to ten and walked into the kitchen. My father would be back soon. I thanked them for lunch and watched for his car from the window. I waited for her to say something—Come back soon. I’m glad you came. I’ve missed you.

She waved good-bye to me from outside the doorway, making sure to give my father a chance to have a good look at her.

He never asked me about the visit—not the house, not Richard, not what she served for lunch. But at dinner, as we did the last of the dishes together in silence, I said to him: “It wasn’t you who made her unhappy.” I needed him to know. He didn’t reply—he folded the damp dish towel on the counter and he left the kitchen.

That was the last time I saw my mother.