by Phoebe Fox
Maybe my mom got so used to fulfilling that role, she didn’t know how to do what my dad did—to just relax and be herself. Maybe she was afraid that if she let go of her firm hold of the reins, no one would be guiding the wagon.
Instead of replacing me in my mother’s affections, the way I’d always felt...maybe Sasha just gave my mom what she needed—the chance to let down her guard and be herself with someone she didn’t feel wholly, all-encompassingly responsible for.
I let the CD play out as I finished cutting in the room and then started rolling the paint onto the walls, listening only sporadically to their talk about the play amid the cacophony of thoughts teeming in my head.
That night I called my father.
He asked how things were going with me, and I knew he knew about Stu and Sasha. Of course—how had I not seen that before? The family grapevine.
We didn’t talk about what he had told me that day in my guest bathroom, and I understood then that we never would again. I still wasn’t sure exactly what I felt about the whole thing. But it didn’t matter. My dad was still my dad.
I told him what I’d done in the house since he’d been over, and what I still needed to do, and I asked for his help, and for the rest of the week my dad spent his days at my house, working. I came home in every spare second between Breakup Doctor appointments to do whatever I could. Together we laid down the wood flooring I’d bought at ICAN, one plank at a time. We built a simple doorframe at the entrance to the back hallway and hung a door, shutting off the office space from my living space. I moved in the furniture I’d bought secondhand, and within a week and a half we were finished and I realized we had done it—I had my practice.
That night I called Sasha and asked her to come over. We stood in the back hallway, where we could see into both guest rooms and the bathroom, glasses of wine in our hands and the door to the rest of my house shut. She’d sat and dreamed with me of what my house could one day look like, and even though only a small part of it was finished, I wanted to share with her the beginnings of that vision.
“It’s perfect,” she said, looking at my waiting room with its cranberry walls and plush beige love seat and two sturdy chairs and secondhand end table with a fresh bunch of hibiscus flowers in a bowl on top of it.
We turned together to take in my office: a serviceable wood desk I’d found at a used-office-supply store, a plain rolling chair from Office Depot behind it, and a simple, clean leather sofa I’d found at a consignment store, its deep brown almost elegant against the Elysian Fields-green walls.
When I opened the door to the bathroom with all the fanfare of a circus barker, she gasped. Dad and I had realized we’d had enough leftover tile to do the counter as well, and I’d edged it in the same glass tiles that bordered the tub. With plush new towels—my one splurge—and some scented soaps and lotions, the bathroom looked almost like a magazine picture.
Sasha shook her head, amazed. “Brookie, you did it.”
“Oh, there’s still a ton to be done. Most of the house, actually. But at least I’m ready to start my practice back up. Finally.”
Sasha took a sip of her wine, running her hand along the smooth glass tiles along the counter’s overhang. “What do you mean? You already have a practice.”
She walked back out of the bathroom and toward the waiting room to look closer at the rest of the renovations, while I stood rooted to the spot as if pole-axed.
She was right. I’d started up my practice weeks ago, the first day I’d met with Lisa Albrecht to talk about her breakup with her husband. I’d been running it ever since, right up to as recently as an hour ago, when I’d hung up with a giddy Duncan O’Neill, who’d taken my questions and had a long talk with his husband, and found out Wagner was horrified at the idea that Duncan thought he’d sleep with women.
“He only likes to flirt with them!” he’d crowed into the phone. “I think it makes him feel universally attractive—you know, not just to men. He’d never admit that, of course. But he was appalled at the idea of having sex with a woman. Appalled!” He sounded so happy I didn’t trouble myself figuring out how their unusual dynamic worked for them as a couple, or why. It was enough that it did. And it felt great to help Duncan figure things out.
I leaned back against my freshly tiled counter, staring at the bathroom without seeing it. I’d been so caught up in defining my career a certain way, I’d completely overlooked that I was already doing what I was best at—helping people get through the hard parts of life.
Sasha wandered back in from her tour with a sigh. “I love it. Now I have to buy a house, too, you bitch.”
I laughed and pushed myself away from the counter, picking up my wine from where I’d set it down. “I know where there’s a nice one coming on the market, cheap,” I said, thinking of Frank Farqu as I took her arm and we walked into the rest of my house together.
thirty-four
One week later on a Saturday night, I found myself standing exactly where I never thought I would be: in the lobby of the Neapolitan Theater, a bouquet of fresh purple irises in my arms, as I waited with Sasha and Stu—who were holding hands in a way that I hoped would eventually look less incongruous to me—for my mother to come out from backstage after her show.
Sasha’s article about her had run this morning, timed to coincide with opening night, and I’d read it not knowing what to expect.
It was excellent—Sasha’s writing always was. But she had done a particularly insightful job with my mom. It wasn’t the sycophantic love-fest I’d half feared it might be, but a thoughtful, realistic portrait of a complex woman—practical and creative, an artist and a wife and mother. My mom had talked about our family a little—not much; she was private by nature, but with a gentle, proprietary pride. Even about my dad.
I looked over to where he stood by a pilaster, his plastic stem glass of wine forgotten on a table at his elbow and a spray of white lilies in his hand. They were her favorites.
I’d expected my father to look awkward in his suit, uncomfortable, fidgeting with the tie around his neck as though it were a too-tight leash. But he wore it like Cary Grant, the suit jacket filling out his chest and shoulders in a way that made him seem bigger, more solid. “Tall, slender men wear clothes better than anyone else,” my mom had always said, and looking at my dad in his dapper charcoal gray suit I had to agree. He was lit up with pride for her, no hint in his expression that he was anything other than thrilled to be there, supporting his wife.
My heart was pounding strangely. I hadn’t laid eyes on my mother in almost two months—since the day she’d dropped the Mom Bomb and I’d stormed away from the house. I’d spoken to her only once—the day I cut my foot. When she’d walked out tonight for her first entrance I felt as if I were in a vacuum, not so much distant from my own body as apart from it, lost from almost her first line in the story unraveling on the stage. I expected to feel disoriented watching my mother perform, but it didn’t feel like I was seeing her at all. The regal, brilliantly scheming, emotionally aching woman on the stage was someone else entirely—a stranger to me. My dad was right—she was a star up there.
When a door at the back of the lobby opened and my mother stepped out of it, I felt tears rush inexplicably to my eyes. Queen Eleanor was gone now, and it was her again—just my mom.
She looked out over the crowd of friends and family milling around talking to their own loved ones in the cast and crew or waiting for someone to come out from backstage. Her gaze landed on my dad, and they just looked at each other for a long moment that felt slowed-down. I saw the uncertainty in her eyes, the hesitation, and then I saw the instant she got what she was looking for. I didn’t know what it was—reassurance, validation?—because I couldn’t see his face, only her reaction. But I didn’t need to see it. She’d looked for him first—looked to him—and whatever happened, I knew that in some way everything would be okay.
Dad hung back while Stu and Sasha and I met Mom halfway down the expanse of the lobby. Sasha plunged into a hug; when she pulled back she touched Stu on the elbow in a gentle, familiar way, and he stepped forward and gave Mom his usual one-armed hug and said something I couldn’t hear from where I was standing, but it made my mother smile.
And then I was in front of her with my irises. “Mom,” I said, and I held them out. She took them and smelled them, even though she was the one who taught me irises had no scent and that was why they were always the perfect flower to bring to a hostess whose preferences and sensitivities you might not know.
“How did you like the show?” she asked me, her face half-hidden amid the purple-and-yellow blooms.
I told her the truth: “You were great, Mom. You are amazing.”
She lifted her head up and she was smiling at me with the Mom smile, her camera smile, the one that didn’t let her gums show.
“Thank you, Brook Lyn.”
I stepped closer to her and wrapped my arms low around her waist, the way I had when I was a little girl, before I had outgrown her and started curling an arm around her shoulders instead.
As I felt her arms come around me, heard the crinkle of the plastic around the flowers brushing my back, smelled her Sung perfume, I hoped she’d heard everything I meant, and that I wasn’t just talking about the play.
We had all ridden separately—Sasha and Stu because they were staying at a hotel down in Naples tonight and spending tomorrow at the beach, and my father because, to my surprise, my mother had asked him to come to the cast party with her, as her date.
I drove back home alone, and on the darkened, quiet late-night stretch of Tamiami Trail that led back to Fort Myers I thought about Kendall. About what had gone wrong between us, and how much of it was inevitable because of how raw we’d both been when we started the relationship, and how much I would never understand. I wondered how much of the way I handled our breakup might not have been about Kendall at all, but about the wounded places I’d sectioned off after Michael.
And then, as if evoking his name pried open the compartment I’d shoved him into and slammed shut so tightly, all the memories of our two years together flooded over me like storm surge crashing over a seawall. Finally, I let myself think about Michael. About the way his green eyes had crinkled up at the corners when he smiled. About his laugh—a loud bark of a thing that made me laugh, too, every time I heard it, even if I didn’t know what was funny. About his unbottled enthusiasm about everything he ever took on, whether it was working on a new song or learning to ride a motorcycle...or me.
I remembered the day I met him—we were in adjacent stalls at a self-serve car wash on Gladiolus, and he popped his head around the concrete-block corner to ask—not if I could loan him some quarters, or had change for a bill—but whether I could trade him a dollar for a hundred pennies.
I had smiled as I gave him the dollar and waved off the coins. “Why do you have a hundred pennies?” I asked.
And he shrugged and said, “My dad’s a coin collector. He’s been trying to find a 1943 copper penny—only forty were ever struck—so I sometimes buy a few rolls just to help him look.”
I thought about how little kindnesses like that, those small thoughtful gestures, were so much a part of who he was: taking my car to a gas station every month to check the oil and the wiper fluid and the air in my tires; warming my side of the bed on nights when it got below sixty, because he knew I hated cold sheets; bringing me small gifts for no reason—my favorite candy bar, a CD from an artist I’d mentioned liking, a spray of gladiolus because he noticed them while he was standing in line at the grocery store and knew they were my favorites.
I was happy with Michael—happier than I had ever been in a relationship. But more than that, I was proud. I’d spent my whole adult life helping other people make smart choices, helping them learn not to be self-destructive, how to be rational, to hold high standards for themselves and stick to them. I had never let myself lose my head over a man; never let myself get too deep into a relationship once I realized someone wasn’t worth it—never pulled a Sasha. I practiced what I preached to my patients and my friends, I stayed true to my beliefs, and I waited for a man who was everything I said a partner should be. When Michael and I got engaged, I felt like a walking banner for a life well lived, as if I were the perfect embodiment of everything I professed in my practice and among my friends and family, a shining example of how to do it right.
I loved Michael. I really did—it was hard not to, with his relish of everyday life, and his energy and sincerity, and his unalterable optimism. But for whatever reason, we hadn’t worked out—he had gotten spooked, or changed his mind, or panicked, or who knew what. As with Kendall, I would probably never know all of the reasons it wasn’t enough. Why I wasn’t enough for him.
But his abrupt departure from my life left me with more than just a broken heart and a head full of confusion. It took away the thing I was most proud of—my judgment—and left me feeling no smarter than anyone else where relationships were concerned. I could see now how much that had hurt me, beyond the pain of losing him. I wasn’t just rejected—I’d been invalidated.
Maybe Kendall had simply been a reaction to all of that. He was the exact opposite of Michael—buttoned-up, careful, traditional. Maybe, more than anything, he was an overcorrection.
I thought I’d loved Kendall too...but had I just been proving something to myself? Trying to undo what had happened with Michael, to show myself—and Sasha...and my mother—that I hadn’t made a mistake. That I knew what I was doing. That I was still doing it right.
Maybe I’d been so busy judging Kendall as a broken person when I met him, someone to stay far away from where a relationship was concerned, I hadn’t seen that I was broken too. Broken and not ready to pursue something new with anyone else.
The same way I had been the night I called poor Ben Garrett and used him to palliate my own wounded feelings after Kendall walked out on me.
My mind shifted to Ben. To the way he’d shown up for our date with an open smile on his face; how he drove me home because I wasn’t in any shape to drive, and let me take over his car stereo, never complaining even when I was maniacally changing stations like a deejay with ADD; and the way he threw back his head and laughed when I’d turned his ICAN joke around on him.
I’d made every mistake in the book with him—asking him out at the last minute, using him to get back at Kendall, never returning his call after what was actually, for me, a really good date. And he was a good guy. Not perfect. Not the exact “right” type of man. But nice.
Nice was a start. For now, nice was enough.
But I’d never returned his call after our date, and that had been three weeks ago.
I flicked my eyes to the numbers glowing on the dashboard clock. Nearly eleven o’clock on a Saturday night.
Sasha’s good advice played through my head as I took a deep breath—into my diaphragm—and let it slowly out. In. Out. All of Sasha’s good advice played in my head—that I was only human, like everyone else. That mistakes were only stumbles, and you picked up and moved through them, and you did the best you could, and you hoped for the best, and if it didn’t happen...you just reached for the people you loved, the ones you could count on, and then you tried again.
I picked up the phone and scrolled through my call history. When I found Ben’s name I pressed it; the call connected, and the line rang. Rang. Rang again. Of course—it was Saturday night. What did I expect? Suddenly the ringing stopped and a voice I was surprised seemed so familiar said, “Brook...hi!”
One last breath, because with my suddenly racing heart, I needed it. And then:
“Hi, Ben. I hope it’s not too late to call.” I meant it in every way possible.
He laughed—the open, warm laugh I remembered from our lone date more than a week ago, and said, “It’s a li
ttle late. But not too late.”
An unexpected smile crawled over my face and I felt something loosen around my chest as I opened my mouth to talk, not sure whether something stupid was going to come out of it, but willing to take the chance.
About the Author
Phoebe Fox has been a contributor and regular columnist for a number of national, regional, and local publications; a movie, theater, and book reviewer; a screenwriter; and has even been known to help with homework revisions for nieces and nephews. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and two excellent dogs.
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