Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  She nodded. “It’s a nice song. Kind of…wild.”

  “Like me.”

  A smile crossed her lips, the kind that was soft, almost private, caught up with memories and shared connections, and in that moment, I felt like maybe there was hope for my mother and I, that a bridge really did exist somewhere out there, and all we had to do was find the right path to get to it. “Yes, like you,” she said.

  The angry blare of a horn sounded behind us and I jerked my attention back to the road, pulling the wheel straight again. My heart leapt in my throat, pulse jumped, breath caught, then all settled again when I realized all I’d done was stray a few inches too far to the left.

  “See?” my mother said, her voice back in full-on parental mode. “This is exactly why I don’t like to listen to music while we’re driving.”

  And just like that, the bridge disappeared into the mist.

  “If we keep stopping like this, we’ll never get to Uncle Morty’s.” We’d stopped at the Shaker Heritage Society in Albany, the Corning Museum of Glass in Syracuse, made a quick one-day detour to Niagara Falls, and were now trying to fit in one more stop before the sun went down. I was exhausted, irritated and felt like I’d done an entire week of both The Amazing Race and Survivor, all in a two-day period.

  And all the while, I wondered what was going on back home. In Nick’s head. He’d issued me, more or less, an ultimatum. I was putting distance between us, literally and figuratively. The more I did that, the more I worried that he wouldn’t be there when I got back. That there’d be no returning to the easy, comfortable relationship we’d had.

  Considering I was not going to take that next step with him—already I’d had that nice little Barry Manilow preview of my future and it scared the pants off me—I fretted about what steps he was making.

  “Your father needs to see the country, and so do I.” My mother was standing on the rough beach shores of Lake Erie, holding up the cardboard figure of my father. A howling wind curled around the lake, turning the edges of the waves to froth, then pushed at my father, as if trying to knock him over, testing my mother’s strength. “Take the picture, Hilary.”

  Reginald had opted to stay in the car. Smart pig.

  “Ma, this is crazy.” Nevertheless, I raised the digital camera and snapped the picture, capturing my father’s windswept head, just before the real, present-day wind bent it back.

  Red filled my mother’s cheeks, her hair lifted in the fierce breeze and her navy pumps sank in the damp sand. Yet she stood there, even after I shouted that I had taken the picture, clutching the cutout of her husband.

  “Ma? You coming? We have to get back on the road.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” But the wind battled against her, pushing her toward the lake, using my father as leverage, sinking her kitten heels farther into the earth. She bowed her head and pressed forward, but seemed frozen there. I slung the camera over my shoulder and hurried down the beach, sand gritting between the foam of my flip-flops. Lake Erie clearly wasn’t as friendly as the tourist brochure made it out to be, at least not on this late-May day.

  “Let me get that,” I said, taking my father from her. She gave him up without argument, then gripped my arm, her breath coming labored and short as we made our way up the beach to a bench that sat at the edge of the parking lot. “You okay?”

  “I’m perfectly fine.” That no-nonsense, lawyer tone. The dare-you-to-disagree one. I could almost believe her.

  “You don’t sound okay.”

  “Well, I am.” She took a seat on the bench. When she did, I noticed her left leg seemed swollen, larger than the other, and the skin of her foot pressed over and above her shoe, like a marshmallow.

  “Then why are you sitting down? And why is your leg puffy?”

  “I want to enjoy the scenery. And you know I have poor circulation. That car of yours is no help. Stop trying to read something into my every move.” Again, that arguing-for-the-defense voice that left no room for quarreling. I shrugged, loaded Dad in the car, then came back and sat beside her. After a few minutes of silence, she rose and climbed into the Mustang, purse in supermarket position again.

  My hand hesitated over the ignition. I could easily let this go, avoid an argument, get on the road, put some more miles behind us. “What was that about back there?”

  “Your car sits too low. I needed to stretch my legs.”

  I still didn’t believe her, but all my medical knowledge came from watching television, and shows like Grey’s Anatomy. Didn’t exactly make me a medical expert.

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.” Ma turned to the window, averting her too-red cheeks from my continued suspicious analysis. “Can we get going? Uncle Morty could drop dead of heart failure by the time we get to his house.”

  “Now you’re in a rush?”

  In answer, she flipped the road atlas onto her lap and began tracing our future route with her index finger. Plain, short nails. The tips accented with a white pencil that she ran beneath them every morning, part of a daily ritual she’d been doing for as long as I could remember, the nail beds polished with clear, no-nonsense Sally Hanson.

  That pretty much summed up my mother, I realized. Neat, clear and no-nonsense. Whereas I—I looked at my own hands for further clarification of how different I was—had raggedy nails. Hilary Delaney—low-maintenance, not always sensible. A mess, my mother would, and had, said.

  Up until now, Nick had liked the mess that was me. But lately, he’d wanted me to straighten, fly in the V that was the rest of middle America. Become part of the two-point-five kids suburbia flock. At some point, I’d have to choose whether to be in that group or without him, and that made my head hurt.

  It made everything hurt.

  I started pulling out of the parking lot, heading back toward Peninsula Drive. The shiny Tom Ridge Environmental Center winked back at us from a little farther down the road. I glanced at my mother, sure she’d want to see this tourist attraction, too, but she was slumped in her seat, clearly tired.

  As I drove, my cell phone rang. I reached for it, in the dish of the car’s console, but my mother was faster. “You are not going to answer that while you’re driving, Hilary. You could cause a wreck.”

  Not a single other car shared the road with us, just a bunch of crazy people on bikes who clearly didn’t notice the wind or what felt like sub-zero temperatures. The sun above was bright, I was barely driving twenty-five miles an hour. To my mother, though, that didn’t constitute a preponderance of evidence on my side, so I didn’t even bother to bring up those facts.

  I appealed to her Reginald emotions. “It’s Nick, Ma. Calling to find out where we’re stopping for the night so he can find us another porcine-friendly motel.”

  The phone rang again. My mother’s grip tightened. “I can talk to him. You drive.”

  “No, no, no. You cannot talk to Nick. If you do, you’ll—”

  “I’ll what?” She held it up, against her window, the third ring making the slim Motorola dance against the glass.

  “Give me the phone, Ma.” I needed to talk to him, make sure all was as it had been before I’d left. This wasn’t just about motel rooms. It was about checking the status quo.

  She flipped it open, as defiant as I had been in preschool. Now I saw where I got a few of my more undesirable traits. “Hello, Nick. This is Mrs. Delaney. When are you going to make an honest woman out of my daughter?”

  “Ma!” I hissed. Why did she have to add fuel to that fire?

  She ignored me. “Really? And she said no?” My mother turned a sharp glance on me. I had racked up one more disappointment in her eyes. “Oh, you are such a dear. Yes, yes, I believe we are just a few miles from that area now. Oh, they do? Wonderful. Yes, we’ll look for that exit. Oh, thank you, Nick.” Another pause. “You too, dear. Have a wonderful evening. And don’t worry, I’ll be sure to talk to Hilary. I’ll put in a good word for you. You are such a sweet boy. Good night now.”

>   Sweet boy? Nick was nearly forty, for Pete’s sake.

  She closed the phone and placed the Motorola in the empty ashtray, giving it a little pat, as if all had been settled with my future.

  I glanced at the dish with longing that bordered on pain. I would have given my right arm for a Marlboro Light right now.

  “Hilary, Nick said—”

  “Don’t say one word about my love life. I don’t ask about yours, you don’t ask about mine.” And don’t interfere in that particular discussion. Could she have made it any worse?

  “I don’t have a love life to ask about.”

  “You don’t? What about Mr. Messinger across the street?”

  My mother’s face reddened, crimson coloring from her cheeks to her chest. Reginald poked his head up, looked from one of us to the other, then went back to sleep. “He’s a neighbor, nothing more. We talk about tulips and…gardenias.”

  “That’s not what I heard.” I grinned. Mrs. Whittaker was a fountain of more than just medical gossip. “Ma, it’s okay for you to have a little romance. You may be older, but you’re not dead.”

  “Your father is in the backseat, Hilary.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “All right, I know he isn’t really, but…well, I don’t feel comfortable discussing Mr. Messinger with you.”

  “Exactly. And I don’t feel comfortable discussing my relationship with Nick with you.”

  “Why?”

  I blew out a gust of air, instead of cursing. “Because it’s complicated, Ma.”

  “What’s complicated about it? He loves you, he wants to marry you. You call Reverend White, we book the church…”

  That icy knot formed again in my stomach, tightening into a twisted ball of frozen vines. If I hadn’t been stuck behind the wheel of a car, driving my mother and her pig across the country, I’d have run.

  Run back home, run away from these questions. Run away from giving answers I didn’t have.

  Didn’t want to provide, not to her, not to Nick, and most of all not to myself. Because that would mean looking into mental trunks best left shut.

  “Quit,” I said, softly at first, then, again, the word gaining in volume. “Quit it. Quit planning my life. My future. Just quit”

  Ma put her purse on the floor, turned in her seat and faced me. “What’s so wrong with a little planning? With looking ahead to the future? You are not getting any younger, my dear, and you need to think—”

  “I know what I need to think about!” The words exploded out of me, pent up for so many years, this little time bomb exacerbated by the close quarters of the car, the incessant woodpecker of my mother’s proximity. Why had I thought we could spend all this time together without committing murder? That simply adding a few birthdays would change our relationship? Make her see I was an adult? One capable of making decisions? “Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, what you want for my life isn’t what I want?”

  She leaned back, putting distance between us. It was only a few inches, but it felt like the Panama Canal, and guilt washed over me, fast and hard. “Yes, Hilary, I have,” she said, her voice quiet.

  And hurt.

  “Ma, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, I’m sorry. I’ll stay out of your business.” She picked up her purse, sat it back on her lap and turned to face the road again. As still and cold as the bronze statue of Red Auberach sitting miles and miles behind us in Faneuil Hall.

  seven

  “So how’s it going?”

  I was curled up in the double bed at the motel with my phone pressed to my ear, Nick’s deep, husky voice about the only comfort I had. Okay, Nick’s voice and the four-pack of wine coolers I’d picked up at the convenience store across the street from the motel. I’d been hoping for something harder, but had to settle for a quartet of bottles called Seabreeze Delight.

  “It’s not. We’re not getting along at all.”

  “You’re stuck together all day in a car. Heck, even you and I would fight.”

  “We don’t fight,” I said, suddenly missing Nick so bad, I wanted to cry. I wriggled my hips against the mattress’s lumps, trying to find a position that didn’t require Pilates to feel restful. Wishing he was here, wishing I could hit Rewind and go back to where everything had been perfect.

  “Yeah, Hil, we do fight,” he said softly. “We just don’t yell.”

  I wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but didn’t. Because I knew that would open up that can of worms I didn’t want to open, that set of capital-letter subjects I avoided like the plague—MARRIAGE, PERMANENCE, WHERE OUR RELATIONSHIP WAS GOING.

  And why I kept a toothbrush at his apartment but not a change of clothes.

  “How’s work?” I asked.

  “You’re changing the subject.” He sighed. “Okay, fine. We’ll talk about work. You know what I’m building right now? A set of cabinets for a playroom.”

  “Great. Sounds interesting. Who for? What kind of wood?”

  “The cabinets are for a family, Hil. Two parents, two kids. I’m down in their basement, measuring the space, installing the shelves, and seeing people who took a risk. Who made the leap.” How did he manage to do that? Turn every single question and conversation back to the same subject? The man was a broken record. “Nick, there are a gazillion people in the world who get married every day. And a half a gazillion who get divorced. Then they fight over those same cabinets like two Rottweilers in a butcher shop.”

  “When did you become such a pessimist?”

  I let out a gust. “It’s called being realistic, Nick.”

  “Sure it is. When you walk into Ernie’s on a Friday night and you’re out of beef, and thirty people want burgers, and the keg of Bud goes flat, do you shut the place down? Close the doors? Give up?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Then why are you giving up on us before we’ve even started?”

  I didn’t say anything for a while. He was right. Nights like that happened at Ernie’s all the time. We ran out of the special just when a party of ten came in, expecting to find that exact thing on the menu. A delivery driver got lost, and an expected shipment arrived late. The air-conditioning broke down on the hottest night on record in Boston.

  I’d learned to take it all in stride. To improvise. Because shutting the doors meant losing money. In the long run, that hurt Ernie’s more than figuring out some way to make everyone happy.

  “And when I find a knot in a piece of wood that’s supposed to be perfect,” Nick went on, “I work around it. I see it as part of the design. A touch of something unique. I work with what I have, Hilary. I don’t give up just because it’s not perfect.”

  “You gave up on us once.”

  The phone line crackled, tension cutting across the miles. Nick drew in a breath, let it out again. “That was a long time ago. Things are different now.”

  “I’m supposed to believe you? Why? I moved in, canceled my lease, talked cabinets with you, Nick. A future.” Albeit, not one with marriage, more a joining of appliances and furniture. It had been a huge step for me, one that I had contemplated and fretted over for weeks, but Nick had cajoled and tempted, and finally, I’d relented. “And what did you do, Nick?”

  He didn’t have to answer. We both knew how that had ended. He’d done the Man Dance, panicking within a month, and we’d broken up. I’d found my own place, and maintained my space ever since.

  Then, six months ago, he’d started the same talk. Only this time, with a more serious edge, the permanent, gold-bands-and-marriage-licenses type. Now, I was the one who was as skittish as a horse in the starting gate. What if the same thing happened? What if it was worse this time?

  “I’m ready for more now, Hilary. I have been for a long time. You know that,” Nick said. “Everyone grows up eventually and I’d like us to.”

  “I’m happy with the way things are. Why can’t you be?”

  He sighed. “Because I can’t keep doing this. I need to kn
ow where we’re heading.”

  “I’m heading west, young man.”

  But Nick didn’t laugh. I took a bigger gulp of the Seabreeze Delight. Silly thing didn’t leave me any more delighted. It was too sweet, too fruity, and oddly made me wish for some wheat toast to temper the taste.

  “I have to go, Hil. I’m going out tonight.”

  A wild, crazy surge of jealousy rose in my throat. Three hundred questions crowded my mind at once, like voices in an insane asylum—who with? Where to? Why now? What time are you coming back? What will you do?

  And who will you do it with?

  Never before had I cared or asked Nick about what he did when he wasn’t with me. I figured I had no right to make demands on him if I wanted no reins on me. It had to be the distance, the emotional tornado stirred up by my mother. Or the aggravation of dealing with THAT PIG all day because I found myself asking words that I knew I shouldn’t. “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere. Just out with some friends.” Then, I could hear him smile. See that smile across the phone line, and it made me want to take back the question, to close that gap in my armor, a gap I knew he’d seen. “Why? Are you worried about me?”

  I took a sip of wine cooler, making him wait before I answered. Pretending I didn’t care; hadn’t been bothered one iota by what he’d said. “Nope, not at all. Just making conversation.”

  “You’re a bad liar, Hilary. You should be able to trust me by now anyway. And, you love me. One of these days you’ll realize that. Hopefully sooner rather than later. I’m running out of patience.”

  Then he was gone. I hung on to the cell phone, the cold metal against my ear for a long, long time, until David Letterman ended and the Seabreeze Delight finally stopped delighting and let me sleep.

  I woke up the next morning and vowed to do better, like a seventh-grader with a failing math grade. Only this wasn’t pre-algebra, and this wasn’t about just mastering the solution to x.

  It was my mother. And she didn’t grade on a bell curve.

  The clock on the bedside table rolled from seven fifty-nine to eight. The phone hadn’t rung. No one had knocked on my door, bearing an egg-white omelet or some other equally healthy way to start my day. I showered, pulled on a clean pair of jeans and a non-holey T-shirt, slipped into my flip-flops after rinsing off the remaining sand in the sink, then headed out of my room and over to the one next door. “Ma?” I called, rapping on the wood.