Chapter 10 The Mother You Needed #2
Silence. Poor Cal didn’t know what to say, or how to extricate himself from Sad Mom. “I should go, hon.”
“OK.” He smiled at her, his little-boy face visible inside his almost-a-man face; he was a nesting doll that only she could see. Something turned over in her chest. “Thanks, Mom.”
She hung up and tilted her head back and squinted at the sky. The feeling of respite she’d had in the pool endured.
But she should go inside; she wasn’t wearing any sunscreen. Just because she’d given up injectables didn’t mean she was inviting wrinkles.
“You’re a good mom.”
Blair was startled by the matter-of-fact observation from across the pool.
She had two thoughts in quick succession.
The first was that if she’d had such a thought about Jack, she would never have verbalized it.
To have done so would have seemed too vulnerable in a way she could not quite articulate.
The second was an impulse to hope he was right, to lunge toward the idea with an urgency that felt unbecoming and destabilizing. She tried to cover by saying, breezily, “I try.”
No. That, or at least that delivery, had been wrong.
Disingenuous. They had the pool between them, which made telling the truth less daunting.
“It’s hard for me with Cal, because he and I are so different.
But I know him. I know how he thinks, and what he fears.
So I think I can rise above our inherent differences and give him good advice. But… I might be full of shit.”
“The fact that you’re entertaining the notion that you might be full of shit proves my point. You’re a good mom.”
She wanted to ask him to elaborate, to lie back and bask in his praise, but she restrained herself.
“Thanks. I miss them so much. Both of them, but Esme’s absence is a fresh wound, whereas Cal’s has scabbed over.
Cal was always more of a loner anyway. Not in a worrisome way, just that he was born sort of self-contained.
Esme and I are tight. She never really did the aloof teen phase.
She always wanted me around, at least to some degree. ”
She stopped herself there. That was more of a monologue about her kids than Jack had signed up for, or could possibly want.
“I don’t know anything about parenting,” he said, “but that seems rare.”
“I don’t know if it is or it isn’t, but it’s awesome. Was awesome. It’s weird to think about Esme going about her days and not know where she is, or what she thinks about stuff. She calls a lot, but it’s not the same.”
She let a few moments of silence pass, and when he didn’t turn his attention back to his computer, she asked, “What’s your mom like? Everyone knows your dad, and I bet everyone asks you about him”—he dipped his head in a way she interpreted as indicating agreement—“but what about your mom?”
“My mom was—is—a waitress.”
“That’s her job, but what is she like?” She wasn’t sure why she was so curious. But she was, and she’d told him about her family—her crappy parents and her awesome kids.
He looked at the sky for a long time. He was either waiting for divine inspiration or he wasn’t going to answer.
Just when she was thinking she would get up and go inside, he said, his gaze still on the sky, “She was a good mother. Maybe not as good as you, but she did her best, and her best was pretty good. I wasn’t always kind to her as a kid.
I’ve never said this out loud before, but it’s one of my greatest shames. ”
He met her eyes.
Wow. She needed to tread carefully here. “What, you were a wild child?”
“No. It’s more that I saw how my dad treated her, how he regarded her, and copied him. Not necessarily consciously. But I was conscious, from a young age, of wanting him to like me, to think well of me. My mom wasn’t… This is going to sound terribly snobbish.”
“Since when has that stopped you?” It was out before she could think better of it, and it was probably the wrong thing to say.
He huffed a wry laugh, so perhaps she hadn’t misfired. “Touché. She isn’t book smart. They met when he was a customer at her restaurant—she worked at this high-end steak house that my dad would go to if he had to be in the Twin Cities for something. She still works there.”
“Lots of people aren’t book smart.”
“Tell that to my inner sixteen-year-old who thinks he’s writing the Great American Novel.”
“You started writing In Time when you were sixteen? No wonder you’re having trouble getting the second one done.”
The laugh this time sounded more earnest. “She lives in an apartment in Minneapolis, and my dad lives on a lake a couple hours northwest of the Twin Cities.”
“When did they divorce?”
“They didn’t. They were never together.”
“Even when you were little?”
“Nope. They had their fling. She got pregnant.”
“Kind of like Reggie and me.”
“Except you and Reggie got married. My dad always maintained that he was a loner, that he needed solitude to work—what you would call the cocoon approach to writing. I would go stay with him for six weeks in the summer. My mom and I would usually go to his place for Christmas. Sometimes he’d stay at ours if he had to be in town for something else. ”
“How very evolved of them. The poster people for healthy co-parenting.”
“I don’t know that they were just co-parenting, though.
I said just now that they had their fling, but I’m not sure that’s all it was.
On the rare occasions we were all together, they slept in the same room—when my dad was in Minneapolis for a book event, say.
Or when my mom dropped me off for my summer visit—she would stay a couple days before she headed home. ”
“Ah. Well, if it worked for them…”
“It worked for my dad. You know what else worked for him? A similar arrangement he had with the librarian in the town closest to his cabin.”
“Ah.”
“No kids came of that one, though.” He paused. “As far as I know. But we would go into town once a week for his grocery run, and we’d usually have dinner with her. Mary was her name.” He shrugged. “She was nice. She was always giving me books. But I knew I wasn’t supposed to tell my mom about her.”
“So you didn’t.”
“I didn’t. And the stupid thing is I can’t remember if my dad told me not to tell her or if I just knew.
“I took to reading as an escape, like you did. My mom wasn’t much of a reader. She was always wanting me to watch TV with her, but I always told her I would rather read.”
“Ah, things are becoming clearer. Also, I feel a certain amount of solidarity with your mom.” She was trying to keep things light, but not too light. She was trying to keep them in a sweet spot that would keep him talking.
“As I said, I’m not proud of it. But I knew my dad would ask about my reading—to his credit, we did talk on the phone every Sunday night during the school year.
He would ask about my reading, and it wasn’t good if I was on the same book two weeks in a row.
He would ask about books, but he never asked about TV or movies.
If a TV show got mentioned, in a general sense, he would always say, ‘Television makes small minds smaller.’”
Yikes. “You must have been lonely.”
His brow furrowed. “How do you mean?”
“Lonely. Longing for the company of other people.”
“Why would I have been lonely?”
“Because you were an only child living at any given time with only one parent, one of whom sounds like he was, at best, putting a lot of outsize expectations on a kid, the other with whom he didn’t have a lot in common.”
He shrugged. “It was normal for me.”
Maybe it was time to quit while she was ahead.
Jack had told her a lot of stuff, but it felt like he was about to revert to form and clam up.
And she was still relaxed, which was a miracle given the first half of the day.
She stood up. It had been strange to have this conversation from so far away, one of them on either side of the pool.
But as before, the distance felt like part of the reason they could have this conversation.
“The funny thing about my parents,” Jack said, and Blair, already at her patio doors, turned, “is that my mom is the one who encouraged me to write. I used to write these silly little stories when I was young. I used to write them on whatever paper I could find—the backs of receipts or junk-mail envelopes. One day, she came home from work with a notebook for me. It was hardback, and it seemed very formal. I remember being impressed with myself. I carried it around with me pretty much everywhere. Then, later, when I was sixteen, she pushed me to do a summer school creative writing course instead of getting a job—a job that would have helped with the household finances. She caught me looking at this catalog and saw that I’d bookmarked a certain class, and before I knew it, she’d enrolled me. ”
“Aww, she sounds great.” She sounded like the kind of mother that Blair strove to be, a mother who saw her kids for what they were and tried to help them be more of that.
“Right. But instead of being thankful, being decent, I spent the majority of my high school years holed up in my room, interacting with her as little as possible.”
“Isn’t that just teenagers, though?”
“Is it?”
“Cal was like that. Not Esme.”
“I went to private school, which my dad paid for. My school was full of rich kids. They all either had mothers who stayed home or who had big careers. One extreme or the other. The mother of one of my friends was a state senator. Other kids had mothers who were lawyers or professors or doctors. But then I had this friend whose mom didn’t work, and she picked him up every day even though he lived a ten-minute walk from school.
And every time I went over there after school, there were homemade cookies waiting for us.