Chapter Two
“It’s … nice.” Max didn’t sound like he meant it.
He hadn’t picked Vista View—that would be Alice again—and he’d been sad in a way his sisters hadn’t to lose the house he’d grown up in.
If you’re the baby of the family, you’re the baby of the family, even if you’re forty-three.
But he sounded like he was trying to mean it, so I tried too.
“It’s … big,” I landed on. In Texas, “big” is almost always a compliment.
We were standing a few feet from the entrance, watching a fake waterfall trickle over fake river rock, trying to work up the resolve to go inside. Upstairs, movers were arranging what remained of my furniture without me, but I couldn’t seem to get past the forecourt.
The building was both of those things, nice and big.
It’s just that nice and big aren’t really what you’re looking for in a home, are they?
Vista View was polished and bland and inoffensive for floor upon floor, hallway upon hallway, door after door after door.
It was like moving back into your college dorm, if your college dorm had been a Hampton Inn.
I was used to living alone. I was used to living alone in a rambling hundred-year-old house, whose every inch of warped quarter-round I knew like I knew the three humans I’d raised there.
Its walls had been covered in artwork and paint nicks, both from when the kids were little, its floors with more nicks and faded rugs whose intricate patterns I could sketch with my eyes closed.
But rugs were not allowed at Vista View—never mind I’d spent fifty years not tripping over them, they were now deemed too great a risk—and there wasn’t room for a lifetime’s worth of beloved novels and throw pillows and my mother’s china.
And I was used to living alone.
“Four hundred people.” My son whistled. Only a few were in evidence, but the brochure assured us they were legion. I had to tip my head all the way back to see the top of the building, and it sprawled away in every direction. “So there must be someone here you’ll like.”
This makes me sound like a misanthrope, which I’m not. My standards have just gotten higher as I’ve aged. Which at this point makes them stratospheric.
“Four hundred old people,” I said. That being the difference between a retirement home and a college dorm. Between a retirement home and a Hampton Inn, for that matter. Old people are fine. Nothing but old people, however, is an unsettling consolidation.
“I love old people.” Max did sound like he meant that. “They’re wise.”
“More like wizened,” I said.
“And anyway, you’re not old. You’re just moving into an apartment. I live in an apartment.”
Yes, it was an apartment, but the shower had a seat in it and a cord you could pull in case of emergencies. Yes, it was located in the independent-living section, but Vista View also had assisted living, memory care, and a nursing wing. And I was too old to navigate a slope as slippery as that one.
“There’s a van into town just because parking’s a pain in the ass.” Max squeezed my arm and kindly didn’t mention my license-in-pieces. “There’s a dining room just because cooking dinner every night is also a pain in the ass.”
“So everyone here is old and lazy,” I said.
“Would you two move?” a voice interrupted behind us. “You’ve been standing in front of the entrance for twenty minutes. You keep tripping the doors and letting out all the air-conditioning.”
We turned around.
“Hi, Dad,” said Max.
“See, here’s an example,” I said, “of old and lazy.”
Among Vista View’s many indignities, this one was going to be hardest to stomach: My ex-husband was a resident already. Roger and I hadn’t lived together in twenty-five years. Now there would be only two floors between us, which hardly seemed sufficient.
“Hi, sweetheart.” Roger slung an arm around Max and kissed him on the cheek. “You drew the short straw?”
Max looked confused but unalarmed. His father talking nonsense had nothing to do with senescence.
“You’re the one who had to take off work to get your mother through move-in day,” Roger clarified, “instead of Darcy and Alice?”
“Alice had an important meeting,” we three chorused.
“And Darcy’s home supervising Lola and Lucas,” Max added.
Our granddaughter and her first serious boyfriend were spending a lot of time together in her bedroom after school. Darcy insisted they leave the door open, but that only worked if she was home too.
“Besides, I’m the strongest.” Max flexed his biceps like a body builder in a cartoon.
He’s a professional arm wrestler, which, yes, there is such a thing and I was also surprised.
It turns out there are two kinds of professional athletes: the kind that get paid millions of dollars a year plus signing bonuses and incentives and endorsement deals, and then the kind Max is.
He’s a professional arm wrestler and a professional director of communications and social media for a multinational financial analytics and diversified data solutions management consultancy firm.
I don’t know what that is, but I do know which job pays his bills.
His second career also means one of his arms is noticeably bigger than the other.
I am used to that, though. What was strange was that this grown man, with his lopsided muscles and his graying facial hair and the crinkles that appeared around his eyes when he smiled and didn’t entirely fade anymore when he stopped, was my baby boy.
His older sisters were also adults, of course.
They also had muscles and crinkles around their eyes.
But the progression from young woman to grown-up is somehow incremental—maybe softened by makeup and hair dye, maybe just familiar because I’d traversed it myself—whereas the progression from young man to grown-up is like falling off a cliff. Not for the young man. For his mother.
I felt too young to be surrounded by so many people whose babies were adults. I felt too old to be the new kid. But if Vista View was to be my last move, my last home, I needed to stop feeling too young and too old and start settling in. Quickly. It’s not like I had all the time in the world.
“Well, I’m out. I already paid my dues with this one.” Roger nodded his head in my direction and winked at our son. “Overpaid, actually. But when you’re done, come by and have a beer.”
Max promised. Roger wafted away, Rogerly.
Our son smiled at me. “Now aren’t you glad this place is so big?”