by Heidi Pitlor
Later, when Kurt came home for lunch, I was glad for the chance to take a break from failing to make progress on Lana’s book. He tugged me up out of my seat and we kissed for a good long while, which made me want to slide my hand inside the back of his jeans. Something stuck out of his jeans pocket there, and when I grabbed it, I saw that it was a folded map of Northern Maine.
“That’s Pete’s,” he said, and took it from me. He leaned in again, but I had lost the mood. I saw that he had a rash on his neck, angry, raised pimples strangling him.
“You touched a raspberry bush,” I told him.
“I don’t think so. There were just dead trees around the carport.”
“You did,” I said. As a landscaper, I had spent far more time around raspberry bushes than he had. In general, I worked far more hours than he did. “Go look in the mirror. That’s raspberry.”
“What does it matter?”
“You should wash it off with warm water and soap. It’ll get worse unless you wash it off right now.” I looked over at him. “You’re not really thinking about going all the way to Newfoundland, are you?”
“I don’t know. It was just an idea, but a good one, right? Pete and Sandra went last summer and said it’s incredible. You can see icebergs and even the Northern Lights sometimes. Want to go?”
He should have known better than to ask me such questions. “I have to go pick up Cass soon. And my mom and Ed are coming later.”
Kurt shrugged. I imagined him at the edge of some cliff, gazing out over the Atlantic at chunks of white ice floating under the vast green and purple aurora borealis, some rugged and gorgeous fisherwoman at his side. I was not simply jealous of her; I wanted to be her—unencumbered by debt, newly beloved, somewhere exotic. “You can come out to dinner with us if you want,” I said.
“I told the guys I’d shoot hoops this evening. You want me to meet up with you all afterward?”
“Maybe,” I said, and then, “Don’t worry about it.”
My mother and Ed (technically my stepfather, but always just “Ed” to me) were about to move fourteen hundred miles south to live with her cousin in Sebastian, Florida. Lottie owned a duplex, and her long-time tenants had just moved out. Kurt had not yet met my mother or Ed, and all they knew of him was that he was subletting my basement and that Ed had not been able to find his name on the national registry of sex offenders. I could not seem to form a mental image of these three people together.
“Think you should ask Pete if you can put in a few hours at his store, you know, when you’re done with Jimmy’s carport?” I said.
“He’s all staffed up right now. How’s the latest writing project going? Better than the last one?”
“That bar is pretty low.” I restrained myself from saying anything more specific. “But yeah, it’s okay.”
“You want me to cancel with the guys tonight?” he asked.
I looked at him.
“Maybe I should meet your mother and Ed before they move? Or no?”
“I don’t, I mean—” This was our dance; neither of us initiated forward motion. Maybe we both secretly feared rejection or being alone, and at our age, there was a lot at stake. It was not easy to find someone with whom you had chemistry, someone without a debilitating addiction or an unmentioned spouse and who was not some kind of, in Nick’s words, “douche nozzle.” In the end, I knew that Kurt valued his newfound freedom too much to want to make any commitments, and I hated for Cass to grow attached to someone who might just up and leave us one day. “My mom and Ed can be kind of a challenge,” I said.
“How long have they been together?”
“They met a year after my father’s aneurysm.” Kurt knew that my father had been a cabinetmaker and the three of us used to live in Brattleboro, that he had died when I was two. “We moved down to Lenox a few months later.”
“That was fast.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I have no memories of my father.”
“You don’t call Ed your father?”
“No. I probably glorified my biological father when I was a kid, and Ed as ‘Ed’ just stuck.” My father had sounded great to me. He had marched on Washington against Vietnam. He had played banjo in a bluegrass band and had volunteered regularly at a soup kitchen.
I went to throw away a wrapper that Cass had left on the floor and took stock of our place: the gunk-covered plates and bowls balanced on the counter, the plastic cups everywhere full of water that had dripped from the ceiling.
What would come of this place once my mother and Ed had moved to Florida, when they were no longer here to judge me? Also, they had been babysitting Cass most Mondays. Sometimes my mother slid me money if she could afford it—a twenty or two here and there, not a ton, but enough to make a difference at the time. What would happen when Bertie was no longer able to watch Cass—and if Kurt moved on?
I heard the old Mercury Sable in the driveway. “They’re here, they’re here,” I told Cass in a vampire-y voice, an attempt to establish a fun tone for what would likely be an un-fun evening. I play-bit his neck, but bore down harder than I had intended and Cass started to cry.
“What’s wrong with him?” Ed asked as he came in. Ed was an opinionated man with a pillow face in which was buried a trace of handsomeness. An insurance adjuster, he was primarily interested in railing against high taxes and their neighbors, an artist couple who led drumming circles in their condo complex. “Is he hurt?”
“He’s fine,” I said.
“He doesn’t look fine.” The subtext: You are the parent. Toughen him up. Get him a good father already. You have no one to blame but yourself for his behavior.
“Everyone ready to go?” I asked.
“Maybe he just needs to eat,” my mother said. “Did he nap today?”
“Off we go,” I said, and guided everyone outside.
Ed drove us to Lenox, down Church Street, past the patisserie, the wine bar, the Gifted Child toy store, to a farm-to-table place called Tabitha’s that a celebrity chef from New York had recently opened. The restaurant had moved in where a local bank used to be, but one would never know this. The walls inside had been stripped and covered in rough wood paneling. Everything was striking and elemental: the exposed concrete floor, the metal tables, the paintings that hung on the walls, black canvases each with a slash of blue or green paint at the center.
A hale, college-aged woman seated us at a booth beneath an industrial lamp. “My name is Serafina,” she said, handing us menus attached to slabs of heavy slate. She wore a floor-length dress that resembled an abstract painting.
“Can you guys really afford this place?” I said after she left and I got a look at the prices on the menu. They had been saving and living frugally for years in order to move south.
“It’s a special night,” my mother said. “We don’t move down to Florida every day.” She ran her fingers through her mahogany-colored hair. She was a tidy, attractive, intelligent woman. She had just worked her last day at Tanglewood. Her predilections for contemporary Japanese art and ephemeral food trends had never stopped grating on me. “Don’t you have any nicer clothes?” she asked, eying my army jacket. I’d had it since college.
“No one dresses up to go out to eat anymore,” I said.
“Maybe you could find a blazer or a pretty blouse. They’ve got some cute stuff at the outlets right now.”
I reminded myself that concern was how my mother conveyed love. I was not all that different.
“How’s that new preschool going?” Ed asked Cass.
“He just started. Might be too soon to tell,” I said.
“Are you making lots of friends?”
“No,” Cass said.
“Not even one? Sometimes it just takes one, kiddo,” Ed said.
The preschool teacher had told me that on his first day, Cass had thrown sand at a little girl named Maribel and hoarded all the plastic shovels in the sandbox.
“You love the clay and the coloring,” I said, and I nudged Ca
ss to add more.
“Yeah, I like clay. I got to finger-paint. I made an elephant.”
“Terrific!” my mother said. “What kind of elephant?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What was its name? Did he have a job?” she tried. I looked at her. She had no natural ability to make conversation with a four-year-old.
“What’s everyone ordering?” I asked.
My mother said, “I think I’ll have the quail.” She had more lines around her mouth now. I would have those lines someday. I already had a few.
Cass crawled onto my lap, a tight fit in this booth, but I wrapped my arm around his chest and took in his warmth. I would miss this when he grew too big to sit on my lap, too big for me to hold and pretend to eat his hair.
He began to shake salt across the table. A man seated next to us turned to watch him.
“Cass. We don’t do that.” I took the salt shaker from his hand and set it back on the table.
“Do you want our bed?” my mother asked me. “Lottie’s got one there. No use paying to move ours.”
Their old queen-sized bed probably would not fit in my bedroom. “You should donate it to Habitat for Humanity.”
“Habi-what for what?” Ed said. “The Vadhrises’ son will take it if you don’t want it. He’s moving to Boston soon.” The Vadhrises had been their neighbors for decades. The two couples had united in their frustrations with their drumming-circle neighbors.
“Cass, what are you going to have for dinner?” my mother asked.
The children’s menu had two items. Thankfully one was mac ‘n’ Gruyère, and although I guessed that Cass might take issue with a cheese that was not heavily processed, I held out hope. “He’ll have the mac n’ cheese,” I said. If he didn’t hear the word Gruyère, maybe he would eat it.
“And what about some veggies?” she said to him.
“Unlikely,” I said.
“Cass, when was the last time you ate your veggies? Let’s see, there are green beans that were grown on a farm right down the road from here. Or cauliflower gratin or yummy roasted squash.”
Cass grabbed the salt shaker again and hurled it at Ed’s shoulder.
“Hey!” I said. “No throwing.”
“I didn’t,” Cass lied, and dropped his head. Maybe he had been aiming for my mother.
Ed slammed the table with his fist. “He could have gotten me in the face.”
This would be the image that they would take to Florida: Cass behaving like a pill in a nice restaurant; my responding ineffectively. I considered giving him a time out, but where? I burst from the booth with him in tow. “Do you guys have coloring pages and crayons or anything?” I asked Serafina, who was leading a young couple between the tables.
“Yes, sorry, okay,” she said, maybe more to the couple than to me. After seating them, she stood by their table and chatted for a time. The man, who looked to be in his twenties, had what might have been an ironic beard that thinned to a hairy cloud at his chest. The woman’s head was shaved, and her pretty face was somehow made more so by a dark gap between her front teeth. Both wore jeans and oversized, lumpy sweaters. Maybe they were two of the farmers who provided their crops or whatever to this place, and Serafina felt that she had to dote on them. The crayons and paper never came.
The meal progressed in this way. Ed was given a ribeye instead of the swordfish he’d ordered. My mother complained that the quail had been “brutally overcooked.” Ed again pressed Cass about preschool and his loser status there. I spilled my glass of lemon water across the table. Ed asked how Bertie’s health was, did Cass have any friends in our neighborhood, was I dating anyone, was I subbing these days?
When our waitress asked if we would like coffee or dessert, I answered for all of us: “No.”
My mother said, “Allie. You seem stressed out. Do you have any work right now?”
“It’s okay to admit if things are tough,” Ed said, rubbing the place on his shoulder where the salt shaker had made contact.
“I want to go home,” Cass said.
“We need to wait for the check,” my mother told him. “The check tells us how much we have to pay for our dinner. And then we’ll pay it and sign what’s called a receipt and then we can go home. What else did you paint at preschool?”
“I drew a lion.”
“What kind of lion?” she asked.
“Mom,” I said. “Give me a break.”
“Allie,” Ed barked.
Serafina brought an unlabeled bottle of wine to the farmers’ table and swept her long hair behind one shoulder as she filled three glasses.
“Does your lion have lion friends and a job?” my mother said, undeterred.
“The lion is very popular. He’s an architect and his favorite color is blue,” I said.
“Don’t take that tone,” Ed said.
Cass reached for the pepper shaker and I snatched it from him. “I have a new project,” I said. Tomorrow they would be gone, and I hated to leave off with them on such a sour note. I hated for them to think that I was a mediocre parent and that work had stalled out again. “A new book.”
“Oh?” my mother said.
“My client is really one of the most important women in this country right now.” I understood this was already too much information. They knew that I was a ghostwriter, but rarely, if ever, for whom or for what pay, despite Ed’s best efforts at uncovering this information. Sometimes I gave them very vague clues about my clients, maybe more to satisfy the gnawing isolation that came with anonymity than their curiosity.
“Hillary Clinton?” my mother asked earnestly.
“She said ‘important,’ not ‘annoying,’ ” Ed said, laughing.
I shot daggers at him. He did not love “the bloviator”—Ed had been hoping for Jeb Bush—but he truly despised Clinton, and I feared attitudes like his might win out in the end. Thankfully the polls had her winning. “You think someone would be writing a book for Hillary Clinton less than two months before she becomes president?” I said.
“You are in a real mood,” my mother snapped.
Loud but gentle music came on, a slow, lilting classical guitar and cello likely composed with the sole intent of relaxing its listeners. Miraculously, it seemed to work on Cass. He turned his back on the salt and pepper shakers and leaned into my shoulder.
“Not that anyone asked, but I’m thinking I just won’t vote this year,” Ed said. “To be honest, I can’t stand the sight of either one of them.”
“What? You have to vote,” I said.
He waved me away.
At long last, Serafina left a small wooden folder with the bill on the table.
“So what’s the book about?” my mother asked.
“Mom.”
“Is it really going to matter if you tell us?” she asked. “Who’s going to find out?”
“It’s a memoir of, well, it’s about parenting.” I had to change the subject. “Who did you hire to move you?”
“Adam Carmichael. Wasn’t he a year or two behind you in school? He has a moving company now.”
I nodded. Adam had been a coke dealer when he was sixteen. The thought of him shooting the breeze with my mother gave me pause.
Ed looked over at me. “I hope this very important woman is paying you well.”
“Is it Michelle Obama?” my mother asked. “Or that lady who runs Facebook? Sounds exciting whoever it is.”
“It’s a good project,” I said.
We rose and walked past the farmers, now enjoying a plate of shriveled mushrooms, and out of the restaurant.
The evening sky was the deep wild blue that I had only seen in Western Mass. The moon was a coral marble. I squeezed Cass’s soft fingers and began to whistle, “Oh my darling, Clementine, ” our bedtime song when he was a baby.
“Soon you won’t have to deal with my last-minute pleas for babysitting,” I said to my mother and fastened Cass into the car seat.
“Do you have anyone who can
come to stay with him overnight if you have to go away? Any friends in town?” Ed asked. We’d had this conversation before.
“Bertie can. She watched him when I had to go to New York for a meeting last month.”
“Anyone else?” my mother asked gently. She was well aware of Bertie’s age and her waning memory.
There was Kurt, but I did not want to explain him and what he was and was not. I could hardly explain these things myself. “We’ll be fine,” I said.
The darkened, jagged trees sped by on our way back to Lee. The car bumped over a few small potholes as we passed Laurel Lake. A memory came to me of a trip I took with them when I was eleven, my first and last plane ride with them. The three of us had flown to Jamaica for my uncle’s wedding. Uncle Nathan had dropped out of college to follow the Grateful Dead and no one heard from him for a few years, not until he called one day and told my mother that he had become a tour guide in Jamaica and was engaged to marry a tourist he had met there. We stayed near Montego Bay in one of a handful of tents in the woods across a two-lane road from a spit of beach. In the large tent where I would stay with my parents was an air mattress, a wine crate, and a plastic baggie of incense.
Nathan and Setti, his bride-to-be, organized a dinner picnic on the beach that first night. Even now, I remembered someone playing guitar and a small group of people singing about kinky reggae and Jah love. Adults danced near a crackling bonfire. Feral mutts chased each other into the low waves, and I saw a few people with dreadlocks swimming naked as the sunlight oozed purple and copper into the water.
Nathan and Setti had on all their clothes and sat together by the fire. I could not help staring at their long and tangled sun-bleached hair, their fingers or toes always touching, her crystal eyes, his dark eyelashes.
“Time for bed,” my mother had said immediately after we had finished eating.
When I protested, Setti offered to keep an eye on me and walk me back to our hut soon. My mother pulled her cardigan tight around her shoulders as she and Ed headed back across the road, his arm through hers.