Chapter 10 The Mother You Needed #3
“I never invited anyone to our place. I know my mom thought it was because I was embarrassed that we lived in an apartment. She wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it was more that I didn’t want my friends and my mother to overlap.
The steak house she works at is a local institution.
It opened in the 1920s. It has wood paneling, white tablecloths, servers in dress shirts and ties—all those classic high-end signifiers.
I was irrationally afraid that my friends’ families might go there and she’d end up being their server.
But if they never met her, it wouldn’t matter. ”
Blair winced. She wanted to tell him that being embarrassed by your parents was a teenage rite of passage, but she suspected this went deeper than that. She didn’t have the power to absolve him of this.
“My dad was always saying that an education was the most important thing in life. He said it so often around my mom, and so vehemently, that you couldn’t take it as anything other than a tacit criticism of her.
He looked down on her, and he didn’t really try to hide it.
Or maybe he didn’t look down on her. Maybe he was just that… ”
“Emotionally unintelligent?”
“I hate that phrase, that concept, but yes. Have you read any of my dad’s books?”
“Most of them, yes.”
“Then you know what a master of characterization he is. It’s hard for me to accept that someone so, to use the dreaded term, emotionally unintelligent could write such nuanced characters. Not just that, but write about them sympathetically, from their own points of view.”
“But if it’s not that, then he’s just an asshole. An asshole to the mother of his child.”
“So, yes.” He cleared his throat. “She was a good mother. She just wasn’t the mother I thought I wanted.”
“But was she the mother you needed?”
“I think she was.”
“You should tell her that.”
They got into a pattern of watching an episode of The Last of Us every night. Blair was enjoying the bookending of her days: walks and TV with Jack.
In the mornings, Jack would feed the crow at the lookout point. He’d even gotten it to follow them partway home one day. She wasn’t sure why Jack Branksome of all people was interested in feeding wildlife, but it was hard not to find it charming.
In the evenings, she and Jack would settle in with dinner and TV, which Blair now knew was a huge departure for him.
The wildlife theme continued in the evenings, too: in a surprise twist, Morticia took to Jack like he was her long-lost Gomez.
Blair and Jack had continued to accommodate her by sitting side by side on one wing of the sectional, but after they ate and Jack made himself comfy, Morticia, historically about as cuddly as her namesake, would plop herself on his lap.
Blair understood. There was something strangely relaxing about hanging out with Jack.
He was still grumpy, though less so, and he was still judgmental.
But he was profoundly nonhypocritical; he didn’t do false niceties.
When he paid a compliment, he meant it. She kept the few he’d issued close to her heart.
They talked, too. Really talked. When Jack asked a question, he was interested in the answer. That, in turn, made her want to answer his questions, made her content to open herself up—most of herself, anyway—like a book. All of which meant that being in his company was, somehow, buoying.
The cyclone felt further away when he was around, and it was such a blessed relief.
The Last of Us seasons were short, so it was only a week and a bit later when they were sitting down for the last episode of season one. Blair had made the tomato cheddar pie to mark the occasion.
“Oof,” Jack said that night as Morticia jumped onto his lap the moment he sat back from his plate.
She’d been stalking him since his first bite, waiting for him to finish.
“There’s still a certain amount of cognitive dissonance involved in a cat this big.
” He scooched around until he and his feline admirer were comfy.
“Most cats are big, aren’t they? It’s house cats that are the outliers.” She picked up the remote. “I should take a picture of you. Did I or did I not once read an interview in which you said pets are for people with low self-esteem?”
“That sounds like something I’d say.”
“Does it sound like something you think?” She wasn’t sure why she was asking. Why did she care whether Jack was an animal person?
He didn’t answer, which she took as assent. Morticia let out an extraloud purr, which from her came out sounding like a sewing machine.
She rolled her eyes. “It’s like they can sense your indifference and are attracted to it.
” Edward shared Morticia’s enthusiasm for Jack, leaping joyfully at his feet as they took off on their walks.
Edward was too sensitive for The Last of Us, though, and hid in Blair’s bedroom once the TV got turned on, otherwise he’d probably be competing for real estate on Jack’s lap.
“So that’s a wrap on season one,” Blair said as she clicked off the TV after the show was over. “Did you hate it?”
“I didn’t hate it. I felt it could have been tightened a bit, but that third episode about the life of those doomsday prepper men could have been a stage play—an award-winning stage play.”
“Right?” She’d loved that one, too. “It did win Emmys and other awards.”
“I have to say”—Jack stroked the purring machine in his lap, inspiring her to turn up the volume—“there might be something to the passive consumption of other people’s narratives. At night, anyway, after a day spent actively struggling to produce your own narrative.”
“What do you usually do at night?”
“Write. Try to write.” He paused. “Not write.”
She smiled. That was what she meant about him being nonhypocritical. He judged himself as harshly as—more harshly than—he judged others.
“OK, so say you’re not writing some evening. What would you do then?”
“Read.”
She rolled her eyes. “You should try The Bear.”
“I’ve read about The Bear.”
Right, because that was the kind of show The New Yorker wrote about without any condescension. “OK, let’s take a break from mushroom zombies and do the first season of The Bear next. It’s your kind of show.”
Wait. Had she overstepped by presuming he would want to continue their TV watching?
She didn’t want to give it up. It had turned into a lifeline. A bit of human contact on her turf that felt safe.
“How is it my kind of show?”
“It’s super intense and sometimes stressful and the main character is way up in his own head.”
“Thanks a lot.”
She wasn’t doing a good job selling this. “But also extremely compelling and of the highest quality.”
He snorted. “Thanks, but I think this interlude of TV is going to be a one-off for me. I should get back to trying to write in the evenings.”
Darn. “Maybe I should try writing in the evenings.” Blair sat up straight and looked around. Where had that come from? That was a thought that had literally never entered Blair’s head before.
“You should,” Jack said mildly. “You clearly have a sense of what works or doesn’t, just based on your analysis of this show.”
“I do?”
He shrugged. “I’m no screenwriter, but seems so. You should write a new script for Green Light.”
“Oh my gosh, no. I can’t do that. That wasn’t what I meant.”
Was it?
“Suit yourself.”
“I just meant that maybe I should do something more productive with my evenings than watch TV. Maybe you’re rubbing off on me.
“I’m not a writer,” she added, thinking back to Professor Blaine. To Seth Sider, from whom she’d taken a screenwriting workshop when she started thinking about starting Moonpics.
“So you keep saying,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
He held up his hands. Right. He’d spoken mildly, so why did Blair feel so defensive? She closed her eyes briefly and reopened them.
“Does your neck hurt?”
She opened her eyes. “What?”
“Your neck. You’re always rubbing it like it hurts.”
She stood. “I should clean up.”
He did, too. “Let me help.”
“That’s OK.” She didn’t want him to help.
There was something happening to her lately, something that was different from the cyclone but also felt like it was related somehow.
One of the ways this new… thing was manifesting was with dishes.
It was hard for her to leave dishes sitting in the kitchen, to not undertake the cleanup before eating.
The only reason she managed was that she didn’t want to look like a nutjob in front of Jack.
And then when it was finally cleanup time, she wanted to do the dishes by hand, even though she had installed new appliances when she’d reoccupied the house, including a state-of-the-art dishwasher.
She didn’t know how to explain that she wanted—needed—to do the dishes by hand.
It was the same impulse that made her fold and refold her quilts until the edges lined up perfectly.
“Seriously,” Jack said. “Don’t you know the rule that the person who cooks doesn’t have to clean?”
“I don’t know that rule.” She made a shooing motion and risked telling him the truth, or at least part of it. “You’ll just do it wrong. Skedaddle.”