Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  Ma chuckled, her eyes still shut. She yawned. “All right, I’ll agree but only if you promise that we’ll make it farther tomorrow.”

  “I promise.” I watched her sleep as I drove, no longer aware of the breathtaking Rockies, only of her. I kept casting worried glances from her, to Nick. I glanced in the rearview mirror at Carla and Louie’s big Green Monster that held Reginald until it became a tiny dot, then finally disappeared.

  My mother’s beloved pig, left behind. Why? What wasn’t she telling me?

  It took a long time of driving—too long—to get us out of the Rocky Mountain National State Park, and back onto a road with an exit for a motel with a neon vacancy sign.

  But by then, my mother was totally asleep, her face pale as paper. Nick kept his hand on my shoulder, comfort in his touch, support by my side. But the dread I’d felt miles before, temporarily alleviated by the hot-dog casserole and chocolate silk pie, returned anew.

  fifteen

  Later that night, I found Nick in the dark, country-music-playing bar next door to the motel, nursing a glass of ice water and a bowl of peanuts. Nothing in my world made sense anymore and I needed him to help me set it to rights. “You heavy drinker you.”

  He turned on the stool and grinned. “Hey, you drive me to it.”

  I slipped in beside him and ordered a diet soda. The bartender made a face at me. Clearly, we weren’t making any friends here. “You coming to bed?”

  “I was thinking about it.” He sipped at his glass, then toyed with the lemon. “Depends.”

  My soda arrived, I thanked the bartender, and overtipped him, which made him stop glaring. “On what?”

  “What’d you think of Carla and Louie?”

  “That’s a bit of a conversational detour.”

  “Just answer the question.”

  I shrugged, picked a peanut out of the dish and popped it into my mouth. “I thought they were borderline insane, but harmless.”

  “Did you think they were happy?”

  Happy.

  Yes, they had been happy, and I’d been envious of their happiness, as odd as it had been. I’d watched the way they’d cared for each other, laughed with each other, so easy with one another. No fences, no walls. Could it ever be like that with Nick and me?

  That people like that existed should have given me hope, but all it did was piss me off, because Carla and Louie seemed like some mountain too impossible for me to climb.

  “Aren’t all crazy people happy?” I said finally. “Especially the ones that don’t know they’re crazy?”

  He gripped his glass with both hands, staring at the ice, as if it could provide the answers I wasn’t. “For once, Hilary, be serious.”

  “I am, Nick.” I pushed the peanuts away. “What do you want from me?”

  He turned to face me. Behind the bar, three plasma screens played three different channels of ESPN, the closed captioning scrolling black tapes of wins and losses across the bottom of the screens. Every male eye in the room was glued to those TVs—except Nick’s. “I want you to tell me you really love me. I want you to tell me that you want to have that same kind of happiness we saw today.”

  “We’ve been happy, Nick. Haven’t we?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Do you remember the time we went to the New England Aquarium?”

  A deep laugh escaped him. “Yeah. Not one of my most romantic dates.”

  “One of my favorites, though. I love the ocean. Always have. It’s why I still live in Boston, even though I’m not much for winter.”

  “All the more reason to snuggle up when it gets cold.”

  How I wanted to just fall into his deep baritone voice, his strong, thick arms, the temptation of being with him, and forget what I needed to say. But these conversations were long overdue, so instead of meeting the warmth in his eyes, I fiddled with my straw. “Do you remember which exhibit was your favorite?”

  “Sure. The seals.”

  “The ones that lived outside, free and easy, in the ocean.”

  “Yeah. And you liked the blue tangs. What does this have to do with anything?”

  “It’s how I see marriage, Nick.”

  He arched a brow. “As one giant fish tank?”

  I laughed. “In a way. I don’t want to get married and feel like we’re stuck together, a couple of fish in the same tank, with no way out. No way to grow, either.”

  He wrapped his hands around his glass, staring down at the ice. “I felt that way, Hil, when you first moved in. That’s what scared me. So I panicked. Like some animal in a zoo.”

  “One of the pacing lions, huh?”

  He chuckled. “Yeah.” Then he shrugged, turned his dark eyes to meet mine, and a smile crossed his lips, the smile that I could draw in my sleep, the one that had caught my heart the first time I met him. “Do you remember the trip you took to that restaurant convention in December?”

  Ernie had sent me, to network with vendors, attend some training and grab freebies. There was nothing he liked more than a few free neon Coors Light lamps to hang on his wall. “Nothing beats being paid to go to Orlando in the middle of winter.”

  “It was the longest four days of my life.” Nick reached across the bar, took one of my hands in his own. I loved the way his hands felt. Honest hands, the hands of a man who worked hard. “When you were gone, I realized what it would be like without you. And it sucked.”

  I laughed. “Always the romantic, Nick.”

  “Don’t joke.” His face was so serious, it could have been a da Vinci painting. “Not every marriage ends in failure, Hil.”

  “I know everyone walks down the aisle thinking the rest of their lives together will be wonderful, but…” I drew in a breath, let it out. “It doesn’t always turn out that way.”

  “You’re talking about your father.”

  Those five words sat between us, heavy and fat. I wanted to ignore them, to push them away, but couldn’t. “Yeah.”

  I’d told Nick the story of my father’s suicide a long time ago. We’d talked about it that one time, then Nick had left the subject alone. He’d told me it was mine to open up again. But I never did.

  In a way, I wished he had pushed me to talk about it more. Because all this dancing around the hard stuff was making my feet hurt.

  “Have you talked to your mother?”

  “About my dad?” I snorted. “No. Not really. That’s a taboo subject.”

  “How do you ever expect to escape the tank if you don’t talk about what’s putting you there in the first place?” he asked. “Wasn’t that the whole problem in your house? No one ever talked about anything? Your father shut down?”

  “He didn’t shut down. He just…” My voice trailed off. How to explain the way my father’s light had dimmed, then gone out? “Okay, maybe he did.”

  “Remember the sharks,” Nick said, “how they circled and circled, and never stopped swimming? You wondered if they ever felt exhausted, and whether they noticed how beautiful the water was because they were so busy swimming and swimming. That’s you, Hil. You’re too busy running to slow down and notice what’s waiting for you.”

  Suddenly, all his patience, coupled with the way he kept pushing me for more, came to a head. Nick kept waiting—and wanting. But what was he giving me in return?

  I felt pulled in two hundred different directions at once, and I was sick of it.

  “And what, you’re Joe Perfect?” I said, drawing my hands out of his. “All this time, we’ve been dating and you haven’t said word one about wanting a marital commitment until now. All of a sudden you want me to turn into Martha Stewart and you’re going to be Boy Next Door. But you haven’t changed a thing in your own life, Nick. You haven’t traded in the motorcycle, quit the band, bought a house, taken out an investment fund or done a single thing that screams grown-up, settle down in suburbia. Yet you want me to become a Stepford wife overnight.”

  He recoiled. “I never said that.”

  “You we
re the one talking about kids and a dog the other day. A picket fence, for God’s sake. But I don’t see you making any moves in that direction. It’s all, ‘Hilary, make some changes. Hilary, grow up.’ What about you, Nick? A man who wants to settle down needs to rearrange his priorities, too.”

  “My priorities are just fine.”

  I shook my head, angry not just at him but at all the pressure caving in on me at once. It seemed as if my head would explode, and part of me knew I was taking it out on Nick but another part wanted him to back off, to give me back my space and stop laying these heavy questions on my doorstep. “Yeah, that’s why you’re going out at night without me. That’s a man with his priorities in the right order. That’s why you’re still playing in a rock-and-roll band at forty.”

  He jerked back, and I knew I’d hurt him, but the words were out and I couldn’t stuff those tissues back into the box. “So you think getting married is all about giving up your dreams? Staying home every night and watching 20/20?”

  “All I’m saying is you can’t have everything. You can’t expect me to be the only one changing here. You want the picket-fence life, Nick, you have to at least be willing to be home at night to latch the gate. That’s what marriage is about. Change and sacrifice. It won’t always make you happy, and the sooner you realize that, the better off we’ll both be.”

  Hadn’t I seen that with Karen and Jerry? My parents? Sally from Sandusky? Even Carla and Louie had sacrificed and changed for each other.

  “What about you? If I make these changes, these sacrifices, will you come along for the ride?”

  I couldn’t answer him. What if I did that and we didn’t end up like Carla and Louie and instead ended up miserable? And fifteen years down the road, I was the one holding a gun to my head behind a locked door—or Nick was?

  I did love Nick, but trusting him—forever—meant walking down a road I was too afraid to traverse.

  So I reverted to my safety zone, the one where sarcasm and jokes were my best friends. “You want me to get in an RV with you and travel the country making blue-ribbon hot-dog casseroles like them?”

  “That isn’t what I meant and you know it.” He shook his head and pushed the water aside. “I’m tired of this game, Hilary. I’m tired of asking you a straight question about marriage and getting a zig-zag answer.”

  “Then quit asking me, Nick! You already know my answer. Why are you being so damned selfish? Can’t you see I have enough on my plate to deal with right now?”

  “You think me wanting to spend the rest of my life with you is selfish?” A glacier formed in Nick’s gaze. He rose. “I thought I could stick with you until California, but I can’t. I’m done, Hilary. I’m going home. I’m sorry.”

  He walked out of the bar. The ice in my glass cracked.

  And so did my heart.

  I raised my hand and rapped on the door, hard enough to hurt my knuckles. It took a while before it was opened. There she stood in her robe and slippers, the last person in the world I’d ever expected to ask for advice.

  “I need to ask you a question.”

  Ma waved me in without a comment. The room seemed so silent without her pig. She looked lonelier than ever before and again I wanted to ask why she had given him away, but she still didn’t look ready to talk about it.

  We took up seats at the little round maple table by the window. Below us, Colorado blinked and flickered, a city view—a city whose name I had forgotten after all these days on the road. It was beautiful out there, beautiful in a much different way from the Rockies. Typical city in the night, lights twinkling, cars rushing by, the red-and-white parade of evening traffic. It could have been any city anywhere in America.

  Ma poured us each a glass of ice water, crossing her legs as she always had, then uncrossing them, as if she’d suddenly remembered the doctor’s warnings about doing anything that might mess with her circulation.

  I hesitated. This was new territory, me asking her for advice. More often, she gave it without being asked, and I ran from the words, doing the exact opposite of what she told me to do.

  I drummed my fingers on the table. Sipped from my glass. Glanced out the window. Watched several cars go through a stoplight. Admired the stars. The moon. In short, looked at everything.

  And dealt with nothing.

  “What is it, Hilary? Why are you here, at half past ten at night?”

  I sighed. I’d come here for a reason and avoiding it wasn’t going to make the reason go away. “Nick.”

  My mother didn’t say anything, just waited.

  “He asked me to marry him.” She already knew this, and I knew it, but it seemed easier to bridge the subject by offering up something everyone already knew. And it helped me delay getting to the meat of things. I was very good at the delaying part. I’d done it with Nick for four years—delaying the answer to why I didn’t want to get married, why I had never committed to him beyond plans for next weekend.

  Heck, I’d delayed giving my mother answers, too, for thirty-plus years. I hadn’t talked about the hard subjects, the bad choices I’d made.

  The choices I hadn’t made at all.

  Like why I’d never used my psychology degree. Why I’d never advanced beyond working at Ernie’s. Why I hadn’t advanced in my life in general.

  I drew in a breath, held it, then let it go.

  “I don’t want to get married.”

  My mother nodded. “I gathered that. You telling him no was a pretty big clue.”

  “It’s not that I don’t like the idea of marriage, for other people. Just not for me.”

  “And not with Nick.”

  “I don’t mind the idea of marrying Nick,” I said, and as I did, I realized that was true. The idea of Nick in general was a good one. “I love Nick. And he loves me. That’s never been the issue.”

  My mother put out her hands. “Then what is the problem?”

  I sipped at the ice water, looked out the window some more, and glanced down at the traffic for an answer. But I didn’t find a solution in the Mazdas and Toyotas below me, or above us, in the stars, or even gleaming back in the scuffed finish of the table.

  The answer, I knew, was inside myself.

  It wasn’t a place I liked to visit very often.

  I sat in the uncomfortable armchair for a long time, silent, waiting for Ma to butt in, to give me her two cents. But not a word came. I turned, surprised. “What, no answer for me? No listing of all the reasons I don’t want to get married? I would have thought you’d be ready to tell me. That’s why I came here. So you could tell me what to do.”

  My mother sighed and rose. She seemed to be in pain again and took her time crossing to the bed. She sank onto the corner of the double, eased into it really. She splayed her hands across the comforter, glancing down at her neat, no-nonsense manicure for a moment before catching my gaze. “Hilary, I’m not going to tell you what to do, not anymore. You’re old enough to make your own decisions. And frankly, I don’t know if I have the right decisions for you anymore, or the right advice to give. I don’t even know if I have it for me anymore, either. Not really.”

  I sat back against the chair, the hard wood hurting my shoulder blades, almost cutting into the skin beneath my T-shirt. “What do you mean you’re not going to tell me what to do? That’s your specialty, Ma.”

  A weak smile swept over her face, not the full version of herself. “That hasn’t worked out so well, now has it? All my advice hasn’t actually led anywhere.”

  “That’s because my specialty is doing the exact opposite.” I returned her smile with a watered down version of my own. “And look where that got me.”

  She drew in a breath, smoothed over the comforter again, then looked at me. Really looked at me, her gaze so piercing, so deep, that I knew she was seeing me in a way she never had before. She seemed to peer past the T-shirts she hated, the flip-flops, the raggedy jeans, the unfulfilled life, and see the daughter I was, for better or worse. I shifted in my seat, un
comfortable, bracing myself for her judgment.

  “Hilary,” she said, biting her lip, then going on, the words coming out of her with a catch on the end of the syllables, “I am so proud of you, of the woman that you have become—”

  A lump formed in my throat, thick and hard. I didn’t think I could ever swallow again. I had never heard those words from my mother before. For a second, I wanted to tell her to stop, to not finish the sentence, because I wasn’t sure I could hear it, as weird as that sounded. I didn’t want her to add a but, to take it back with a conjunction that could sweep it all away.

  She didn’t do that. She went on, not even aware that three decades of unspent emotions were clogging my throat and stinging my eyes, completely oblivious to how utterly unprepared I was to hear her speak these words.

  “—You may not have become what I thought I wanted.” She let out a little laugh. “Okay, not at all what I had dreamed, what I imagined or what I planned when I got out my silly little spreadsheets and lists. But you became what you wanted to be, which is exactly what should have happened. You were living your life, not mine. And well…it turned out not to be so bad in the end. You’re happy, right?”

  “Yeah. I am.” But was I? Hadn’t there been this ache for more? This constant wondering if this was all there was? And yet, fear held me back from moving from my spot, as if holding on to the bus could keep it from moving to the next stop.

  My mother’s smile widened, this one strengthening and becoming more like the usual Rosemary Delaney. “If there’s anything I have learned in this week we’ve been together on the road, it’s that that’s what’s important. That we’re truly happy, not just pretending to be.” She looked down again at the bedding, tracing the outline of a green leaf with a finger, her nail skating along the edge of the reed-and-lily-pad pattern. “We get so few of those days. So few when we are really happy.” She lifted her gaze to mine. “And we had some of those days, didn’t we? Not just this week, but before?”

  I rose, crossing to the bed, sinking down beside her. “Of course we did, Ma.”

  Her eyes glistened, and I wondered again at this woman that I didn’t seem to know, who hurt, like everyone else, and who maybe had a few secrets of her own, a need to be loved, to be told it was going to be okay, just like I did.