Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  “Wait,” I said, reaching for her hand.

  “But, Hilary, I need to call Michael now, before he gets too worried. Just talking to you made me realize how important he is to me. I need to tell him I’ll learn to live with the minivan. I’ll try not to feel like a Mommy in it. I love him, and he’s more important than a silly old car.” But her voice caught on a sob as she said it, indicating she was still not completely okay with the minivan idea. Sally from Sandusky was clearly still holding out hope for her SUV.

  “Please, sit down. I have an idea.”

  “An idea?” She dropped into her chair again, the skirt forming a huge white puddle around her chair.

  I gave her a smile, then let out a gust of air. “Yeah. A real Cinderella, happily ever after ending for all of us.”

  Sally beamed. “Oh, those are my favorite kind.”

  nine

  Driving a minivan was on par with driving a Mack truck. Except without the fun horn to toot. I kept looking in the back, expecting to see a set of twins and a diaper bag.

  “I can’t believe you did this,” Ma said.

  “Me, either,” I muttered. Thinking of my precious red Mustang in the hands of one very happy Sally from Sandusky. Who’d driven off with a war whoop and a screech of the tires, beaming from ear to ear, and no longer needing my mother’s Kleenexes.

  “This is so much more comfortable than the Mustang. And fun, too.” A whine of electricity announced my mother shifting her seat back, allowing her to stretch out her legs. Contentment spread across her face, and all thoughts of my Mustang—and any lingering regrets about my impetuous trade in the parking lot of Cracker Barrel—disappeared.

  I’d done the right thing, and as much as I hated the van, I was glad I’d made the trade.

  Even if she refused to tell me, something wasn’t right with my mother, and clearly the vehicle trade had been the right decision. After the trip was over, I could always head to a Ford dealership and undo it.

  But until then, there was me, Ma, Reginald, Dad in the back, flat on the floor now with all that extra room, and the big old Dodge under my tutelage.

  “I still don’t understand why you did it, though.” My mother glanced at me. “You loved that car.”

  I wanted to tell her that I loved her more, but the words got lodged in my throat. “You shouldn’t be riding in a Mustang. I don’t know what I was thinking.” I turned in the seat and faced my mother. “I’m sorry, Ma.”

  “You don’t need to apologize, Hilary. I should have told you I was uncomfortable or offered to rent a bigger car.”

  “No problem, Ma. Really.” I gave her a smile, a truce. “Let’s call it a draw.”

  She laughed. “Okay. Sally sure seemed happy after she called Michael and drove off to meet him.”

  “She was leaving for her honeymoon. Everyone’s happy going on a honeymoon.”

  “Not everyone.” My mother picked at the Kate Spade clasp, flicking and unflicking it.

  “You weren’t?” Another surprise to me. I’d always thought they’d at least started their marriage on a happy note. Another chalk mark in the Why Marriage Is Not a Good Idea column. I should have been keeping notes to show Nick later.

  “I…got married fast.”

  I arched a brow at her. “You? The woman who creates a pro/con list for her grocery shopping?”

  “I do not.”

  “You did, too. When that new Stop & Shop moved into Dorchester, you posted a list on the refrigerator of reasons why you should and should not shop there.”

  “It was out of my way.”

  “But the prices were lower.”

  “Which was what finally swayed your father. He really liked shopping at the corner market.”

  “Where you bought your green beans a gazillion years ago isn’t that important to me. But I am a little surprised by this honeymoon bombshell.” I was, in fact, surprised that my mother would drop any bombshells at all. She’d opened up to me more in the last three days than she had in the last thirty-plus years. Was that all it would have taken? Forced proximity? One hell of a long road trip and we could have avoided all those shouting matches and slammed doors? The years of silence?

  “Your father was impetuous,” Ma said.

  I snorted. “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “And when he met me, he didn’t want to wait to get married.”

  “I know this story. He proposed after just three months.” My mother getting married that quickly still shocked me. Here I’d been hemming and hawing for four years, and would keep on riding that seesaw as long as I could.

  My mother fiddled with the clasp again and cleared her throat. “I might have fibbed a bit on that.”

  “Fibbed?” I nearly took out a Honda in the next lane. Rosemary Delaney, attorney of the year, who had, as far as I knew, never told a lie in her life. “You?”

  “You were young, Hilary. We couldn’t very well tell you we got married after our first date.”

  “You what?” And now I did swerve, into the next lane, meriting a strong honking from the other cars, before coming to a screeching halt in the breakdown lane. My heart leapt into my throat, beating fast and furious, half from the near collision, half from the shock of my mother’s admission. “First date?”

  The words didn’t get any less shocking when I repeated them. Nor did their meaning.

  No way I could have done that. Well, okay, there was a time—

  A time when I’d been that insane, but I’d grown up since then. I wasn’t that rash anymore. I thought out my decisions, like I was doing now with Nick. Of course, he called it stalling, but I called it being smart. Instead of rushing into a mistake that would only add to the divorce statistics later.

  “I liked that about your father. His impetuousness.”

  “You?” I closed my eyes, but still had the sensation of an electric chair coursing through me. Maybe I hadn’t just traded the Mustang with Sally from Sandusky. Maybe I’d also traded in my maternal relative. “Ma, you don’t like surprises. Dad and I threw you a birthday party without telling you and you were so mad, you walked out of the house. It took Dad twenty minutes to convince you to come back. You lay out your breakfast dishes the night before. Plan your Christmas shopping for next year on December twenty-sixth. You’re like the poster child for structured.”

  “Which was why I married your father. He helped me loosen up.”

  I turned and stared at her. Gaped, really. “I think I missed that part, where you loosened up.”

  “I never said I was good at it. Just that he tried.”

  I shut my mouth, then opened it again. “And your first step after joining Control Freaks Anonymous was to get married on your first date?”

  “You’d have to have known your father back then. He was—” at this, a soft, private smile took over her face, swiping years off my mother’s countenance, reducing her age instantly by fifteen years “—handsome, so, so handsome. And very persuasive.”

  I glanced in the rearview mirror at the image of my father, lying flat on the floor, beside a sleeping potbellied pig, and looking about as persuasive as a term paper. “Dad never struck me as the forceful type, Ma.”

  “Oh, he had his ways of talking me into things. Crazy ideas.” She let out a laugh and her gaze strayed to some far-off place I couldn’t see. “Driving to the country in the middle of the day, then going skinny-dipping in some lake we stumbled upon. It could have been public or private, or a huge watering hole, for all we knew. But your dad, he talked me into it. Next thing I knew, I was taking off my—”

  “Eww, Ma, too much information.”

  She flushed, jerked out of the memory, and back into her stern no-nonsense self. “Well, yes. You know what I mean.”

  “Were you drunk?”

  “When we went skinny-dipping?”

  I shuddered. Already I had way too many mental pictures of that day. “When you got married.”

  “No. Why would I be?”

  “Ma, I�
��ve seen pictures of Dad when he was young and he was no Viggo Mortensen.”

  “Who?”

  “James Dean,” I said, translating into a star term she knew. “I just can’t see you running off to Vegas and eloping on your first date.”

  “Well, there’s a lot about me you don’t know, Hilary.” She plopped the purse back on her lap, hands again in the driving-to-the-grocery position, and stared straight ahead. “Now, can we get going?”

  I shook my head, reached for the gearshift, but paused before putting the baby RV into gear. There was a lot about me that she didn’t know, too, to be fair. “Why are you telling me all of this now?”

  Quiet filled the space between us, its weight heavier than the storm clouds gathering along the corn fields lining the road. My mother started to say something, then Reginald inserted his snout between us and let out something akin to a bark. “Time for a potty break.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “There’s something smelly in here, and I haven’t quite figured out what.”

  But my mother was keeping mum, and left me to deal with her pig, instead of the stories she hadn’t told. The gaps left in what she had said.

  I walked along the edge of the highway with Reginald, thinking about Nick, and never feeling as far away from him before as I did right now.

  My mother had been deeply in love with my father once. Eloped with him on their first date. I’d glimpsed a side of her I’d never seen before, and for just a second, I envied that rush of happiness she’d had with my father—

  But look how that had turned out.

  Reginald ducked behind a shrub and I wondered what other secrets my mother was keeping. And whether I wanted to hear them at all.

  ten

  True to his word, Nick went out again. Or, pretended to and didn’t answer his phone. I went to bed in a cheesy motel room—the only place I could find off the highway that didn’t blink an eye at a potbellied pig—with my cell in my hands and an empty spot in my stomach that had nothing to do with the lukewarm spaghetti we’d eaten at a nearby diner.

  Bright Indiana sunshine streamed through the window, straight into my eyes. No room-darkening shades here, nothing between me and the farmer’s daily crop joy but a flimsy wheat-patterned curtain that stopped halfway to shut. I groaned, rolled over, pressed my forearm to my head, and then revisited the gnawing vacancy beside me and inside me.

  Nick.

  Blindly, I patted the bed until I hit the small, hard security of my cell phone. I peeked open one eye, pressed the speed dial for his apartment, then waited through the rings. One. Two. Three. Four.

  And was sent to his voice mail, his chipper short greeting, set to the strains of his band practicing in the background. “Not here, dude. Leave a message. I’ll catch you later.”

  “Hey, Nick,” I said, forcing brightness into my voice. I was cool with this. I’d done it a hundred times before, and this time was no different. Then why did my heart lurch, and feel like someone had taken a twisty tie to my aorta? “Just calling to say hi. We’re off to, oh…I don’t know, wherever the hell somewhere across the country is. The pig isn’t bacon yet, so I take that as a good sign. I’ll, ah—” and I paused. What was I going to do? Call him later? Wait for his call?

  I’d been thrust into that awkward position of WAITING ON A MAN. I’d taken a Bikram Yoga class once, part of some Bohemian phase I’d gone through, where class members were essentially tortured for ninety minutes in a room kept at a hundred and four degrees and performed things like the “warrior” pose and the “corpse” pose.

  WAITING ON A MAN—that capital-letter, awful thing I’d vowed never to do again—made Bikram Yoga look like Richard Simmons’ Sweating to the Oldies with a dash of Emeril’s trademark “Bam!”

  I clicked my phone shut without finishing the sentence. If I’d known Nick’s voice mail password, I would have called back and deleted the message entirely.

  Idiot.

  I smacked myself in the head with the Motorola. But it didn’t feel any better.

  I didn’t know what I wanted out of our relationship but it definitely wasn’t this limbo, this uncertainty. This pain.

  I didn’t do pain well at all. I was my father’s daughter, after all, which meant I liked things fun and light, not deep and meaningful. None of the straitjackets that came with commitment.

  My mother had married my father hoping he’d loosen her up. If anything, marriage had made her tighter than a ball of twine. If I married Nick, would I end up the same way? Would he?

  If Nick would just leave well enough alone…then we could stay the same. I didn’t want to mess with our recipe and sour the batter.

  But that didn’t stop me from missing him like crazy and wishing he’d just answer the damned phone. I cursed again. I hated that I needed the reassurance of his voice. It meant I cared. That I was vulnerable.

  That I could be hurt. And that was the one road I tried never to travel.

  After a shower and a change of clothes, I realized I hadn’t heard from my mother, either. It was nearly nine and this was the second day in a row when she hadn’t been at my door, bright and early, ready to go. I packed up, loaded my bag in the van, then headed over to her door. “Ma? You ready?”

  No response.

  “Ma?”

  Nothing more than some grunting and shuffling from Reginald. I knocked harder, calling her name louder. I paused, pressed my ear to her door. Reginald, making every noise a pig was capable of—and a few I didn’t know he could make—was scraping at the door now. Damn thing probably desperately seeking a shrub.

  “Ma! Answer me.”

  “Hilary?” She called my name so faintly, I almost didn’t hear it.

  “Let me in.”

  No response. Just Reginald and his oink-bark-scrape noises. Dread returned with his haunting grip, curling around me with familiarity, rooting me to the concrete stoop for one long, terrifying second. I thought of my father, of how I’d called to him and how he hadn’t answered with his voice, only with that terrible click, and then the explosion—

  My mouth went dry, my hand still fisted against the door. Time ground to a halt, and it seemed even Reginald stopped moving.

  “Help me, Hilary.” The words, faint, almost childlike, caught in a sob.

  I threw myself against the door, but the cheap motel had scrimped on everything but the damned locks. Reginald let out a yelp, and I could hear his hooves as he scrambled backwards. Again, I slammed into the wood, but the door held, a steadfast pine soldier between me and my mother. My vision clouded, obscured by the memory of my father behind another door that wouldn’t open and me, too late, too slow.

  “I’ll be back! I have to get a key! Don’t move. Don’t do anything!”

  I hoped she knew what I meant. I could only pray she listened.

  I spun so fast, my flip-flops flew off my feet, scattering onto the concrete like sparrows. I shot toward the motel office, blasting through the glass door, screaming on my way in for help, for somebody with a key and an ambulance, knowing without being told that whatever was behind that door—

  Wasn’t good.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  We’d been sitting in a semi-private curtained area in the emergency room of what I was relieved to see was a large and bustling Indiana hospital for two hours, while the hospital staff tended to people who had more pressing needs.

  As much as I wanted to grab the nursing staff and force them to help my mother, even I had to admit that a woman who had impaled herself on a kitchen knife—I didn’t ask how—was more of an emergency than my mother’s cut leg, which had been bleeding like a sieve until now. She’d cut herself getting out of the shower, nicked it badly on the sharp edge of the cheap shower doors, and nearly passed out, a combination, the doctors told her, from her Coumadin dose being too high, her blood being too thin, and her doing too much when she should have been taking it easy.

  Classic Rosemary Delaney, I could have told them, although I was
still reeling from the blood I’d seen, the way it had coated the bathroom floor, my mother, her leg, her hands, and how it had nearly made me pass out, too. For a long, awful second, I’d stood there in her room, with a very nervous, green-faced motel manager beside me, sure she was dead, sure I was looking at a horror film remake of my worst memory, before I’d spun back into action and called 9–1–1.

  But now, in the pristine, white, antiseptic hospital, it seemed as if all of that hadn’t happened. My mother’s medication would be adjusted, she’d take care of herself—or I’d yell at her—and we’d go home tomorrow.

  Uncle Morty, and the division of my late grandmother’s possessions, would just have to wait.

  While I’d been waiting in the emergency room, I’d left another message on Nick’s machine, then called Karen, and talked to her, telling her about my mother. A half hour of spilling my guts to my best friend had left me feeling much better, and shored up for the battle ahead with my mother.

  Who was being stubborn. Big surprise there.

  “I didn’t want—” my mother waved a hand at me, then at the IVs, the bandage wrapped around her leg “—this.”

  “The hospital? The huge Band-Aid?”

  “You. Worrying. Hovering.”

  I sank onto her bed, covered her hand with mine. Regardless of the words we’d flung at each other over the years, the wall that remained between us, she was my mother and I loved her. “Ma, that comes with the DNA.”

  A smile crossed her lips. “Yeah, it does. I had a lot of those nights myself.”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t exactly an easy kid.”

  “Yeah, well, that was a million years ago.”

  I leaned closer, staring at her. Wishing I could read her mind as easily as she seemed to read mine. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You just had an opportunity to run down the list of my bad choices, to pick apart all the mistakes I have made, and I know I have quite the list. You have me, right here, apology in hand, and you wipe the slate clean, just like that?”