by Emily Adrian
“So this is Amanda, the famous Amanda,” Maxine says, climbing into the back seat.
Nina takes the passenger side. I learned recently that modern-day kids are supposed to ride in the back until they’re thirteen. Nina is still twelve, but the rule strikes me as so far-fetched that I can’t bring myself to mention it. Instructing a seventh grader to ride in the back, with shotgun unclaimed, sounds about as effective as asking a golden retriever to take the wheel.
The girls are giggling. I must have grown up at some point; being the butt of an inside joke doesn’t bother me at all. It’s practically an honor.
“Yup, and next to you is baby Jack. He’s almost three months.”
Maxine peers into the car seat. “Hello, baby Jack. Would you like a brownie?”
I reach back. “He’s a little young, but I’ll take one.”
Maxine peels off the wrapper before placing the brownie in my palm. I eat the whole thing in three bites. It tastes like a chocolate gummy bear, and I immediately want another.
“Where to?” I ask the girls.
Nina turns toward Maxine. “Your house?”
Maxine groans. “My house is boring. Let’s have an adventure.”
Nervously, Nina fixes her gaze on me.
“Um . . .” Jack is going on forty-five straight minutes of contentment. A new record. I rack my brain for errands that could be construed as adventures. I desperately need a new nursing bra—the one I brought to Ohio has given up its fight against my ever-expanding and shrinking boobs—but Walmart won’t register on the girls’ adventure-meter. I could use a drink, but while the neon glow of Harvey’s Pub might delight them, the field trip would probably get me evicted from Carrie’s house.
“You guys want to visit my mom?” I ask.
My heart protests. It’s as if I’ve jumped onto someone else’s treadmill mid workout. I love my mother, but she and I have a relationship best maintained at a distance. When I visit, she interprets my every move—my offers to make spaghetti Bolognese instead of ordering from Pizza Hut, the Fitbit I gave her one Christmas, my habit of emptying all the ashtrays overflowing in her tiny kitchen—as slights against her, her home, my entire childhood. She doesn’t outright accuse me of antagonizing her, never gives me the chance to assert my gratitude, my humility. Instead she plays the victim. She hisses apologies and retreats to the yard for long periods of time, returning with her eyes swollen, the fingers of her right hand bloodless from the cold.
I’m dying to see Jack in her arms, but the longing is hard to reconcile with my guilt. I should have invited her to New York after he was born. So what if she didn’t have the money? So what if she’s daunted by air travel? I could have wired her the cash and talked her through the whole thing.
I call her between three and five times a week, demanding an explanation for the impossibility of motherhood, and I have never introduced Jaclyn to her own grandson.
There’s a chance she already knows I’m in town. Carrie may have told her own mother, and Rosalind may have encountered Jaclyn at the bank or the Amish-run farmers market. Even more likely is that Gabe has called, hoping to bypass my cell. Whenever I see his name on the screen, I invent a reason why I can’t pick up. Because I’m about to shower, or because Jack needs his diaper changed, or because it’s my turn to do the dishes. I text Gabe the reason.
It’s not that I don’t want to talk. I crave his voice—specifically, the casual tenor in which he tells me, almost daily, “I have a theory”—as much as ever. I can’t silence his calls without first taking a deep breath to forestall my own tears.
The problem is I’m mad at him, and I don’t know how to stop being mad at him. No more than I know how to love him less.
If Gabe has called my mom—assuming, as he must, that my mom’s place is where I am—I can imagine how Jaclyn navigated the situation. With her nose for deception and general sense of loyalty, she would have covered for me. There’s no doubt.
Nina is skeptical, even as Maxine shouts “Yes!” and pumps her fist in the air.
“You sure?” I ask. “I mean, she’s just an old lady in a trailer park.”
“Positive,” Maxine says. “Old people are hilarious.”
It’s tempting to correct myself. Jaclyn Flood is many things, but old is an exaggeration.
As we drive to the opposite end of town, Maxine hovers over Jack and narrates every development: “His eyes are closing. They’re half closed. Now they’re kind of twitching. Now he’s smiling? Like, smiling and then frowning? Oh my god! No offense, Amanda, but your infant here is a little bit creepy.”
I’m about to murmur in agreement, but Nina chastises her friend. “Don’t say that. He’s an innocent baby.”
I watch carefully for breaks in the roadside brush so I don’t miss the turnoff for Green Acres Mobile Home Park. After my brother left for Ohio State, my mom sold our house and paid for her trailer in cash. “It’s not like the parks down by the train tracks,” she assured me over the phone. “The lots are plenty big, and there are rules about not using sheets for curtains, keeping your grass nice and short . . . that kind of thing.”
Where does your mother live? I asked myself after we’d hung up, so I could practice answering: In the nicest trailer park in Deerling County.
I feel something like shame as I signal for the next left. Green Acres is crowded with assets worth more than the mobile homes themselves—boats and Fords and Harley Davidsons. Wide satellite dishes hint at thousands of channels. The wind smacks against starched American flags. Two lots down from my mom’s place, nestled in the overgrown grass, is a make america great again sign.
I’m relieved by the lack of signage in Jaclyn’s own yard.
Freeing Jack from the car seat, I hug him close. As Nina and Maxine survey the scene, I try to gauge their reaction. The patriotic clutter must look more or less ordinary to them. Green Acres is shabby, sure, but in rural Ohio even the daughter of Powerball winners has caught drive-by glimpses of real poverty. This isn’t it.
Their gazes have landed on my mother’s plywood porch. To the right of the front door sits a stone statue of a Siamese cat. Strung around the cat’s neck, a notecard says, hi brian!
My embarrassment blooms. My mom is not one for hijinks or cheekiness, but the kind of men who periodically attract her attention are prone to both.
We knock. My fervent wish is that she’s alone.
“Is this where you used to live?” Maxine asks.
“No.” My mom raised us in a two-bedroom house that the original owner ordered from a Sears catalog circa 1945. My brother and I slept in bunk beds until I hit puberty, at which point my mom gave me her room and finished the attic for herself. The roof was always mossy. The screen doors never latched, storms sending them slapping against the vinyl siding of the house. Shag carpets, fraught plumbing, never enough air. My friends in New York would barely be able to perceive the difference between my childhood home and Jaclyn’s current setup, but to me, the difference is everything.
I haven’t driven past the property since she sold it.
When my mother throws open the door, she takes a step backward and gasps. Her voice, when she finds it, comes out hushed and reverent. She reminds me of someone spotting a deer in the woods.
“Look at him.”
She reaches to touch the baby’s head, but her fingers flutter south. She strokes his hand.
“Amanda,” she says, without taking her eyes off the baby. My name is an admonishment or a blessing. I don’t know which. “Well,” she says, composing herself a little, enough to acknowledge both Nina and Maxine. “Who are . . . what are . . . ?” She laughs and wipes her hands on her jeans. She’s wearing her hair in a low ponytail, a white tank top with lace edging the straps. She’s skinny. She wasn’t always.
I once googled Ohio mom, hoping, I guess, for a screen full of comforting faces. Hund
reds of mugshots stared back at me. Horrified, I showed Gabe, who theorized that plugging any state into the formula would yield similar results. We googled California mom. “Ha!” I exclaimed, before realizing the rows of yellow-haired women clutching their yellow-haired sons were actually the same woman and that she had been kidnapped.
My mom says my name again.
“This is Nina and her friend, Maxine,” I tell her.
Mom’s eyebrows jump. “Nina Hart?” As if she’s never seen Carrie’s daughter around town.
“That’s right.” I place a protective hand on Nina’s back. No longer secure, the baby squirms.
“Hi,” squeaks Nina. Maxine looks stunned. Maybe I should have mentioned that we would be introducing Jack to my mom for the first time.
Jaclyn leads us inside. “I wasn’t expecting you until the twenty-ninth,” she says. “Where’s Gabe?”
The baby has begun to fuss. His staccato shrieks will turn to wails if I don’t feed him within seven minutes.
“Back home. He’s flying out at the end of next week. You’ll see him then.”
“You drove here by yourself?”
“Me and Jack.”
From the fridge, Mom selects three sweating cans of store-brand pop. She delivers them to the table and urges us to sit. Compared to the dust and decay of our apartment in Queens, her trailer feels clean, almost modern, if not exactly spacious.
A few scratches mar the kitchen table’s layer of white paint. Upon closer inspection I realize it’s the same table that served as a makeshift desk in my childhood bedroom. I used to doodle on its surface, carve sullen song lyrics into the wood. I remember etching, in deranged capital letters, a line from a Tori Amos song about bleeding. I had thought the singer was threatening her lover with suicide. Only now does it dawn on me that Tori was singing about uterine lining. She was threatening a boy with a baby.
Did my mother ever lean over my desk to read my carvings? Not once was I tempted to search Jaclyn’s sock drawer or peer beneath her bed; back then, I would have assumed she was equally uninterested in my own secrets.
Obviously, she read my desk. And probably my diary, and probably the notes folded into paper footballs and piled on my nightstand. Was she mortified for me? Concerned? Sickened with dread?
And as she slapped paint over my adolescent angst, did she celebrate?
I’m waiting for her to ask where I’m staying and how long I’ve been in town without stopping by, but she cuts straight to the chase.
“Why would you come without Gabe?”
I jiggle the baby, who’s rooting against my shirt. I look into Jaclyn’s eyes. She must know. She had me when she was twenty-one, my brother when she was twenty-three. On Saturdays she worked overtime at the DMV. My dad sat on the couch and periodically hollered at us to come change the channel. We called this babysitting.
Jack’s hunger has become urgent. More than ever, I wish for an alternative to lifting up my shirt. I’m embarrassed by the map of blue veins beneath my white skin, my doughy stomach ravaged by stretch marks. My mother won’t scrutinize me; I know that. Still, I feel as if I’m about to present her with an injury or a self-inflicted scar—damage done to the perfect body she gave me.
Jack is thrashing, giving me no choice. I hunch my shoulders and shift toward the wall while he latches on. “We were bored,” I say. “Gabe has so much grading to do this time of year. Jack and I were ready for a vacation.”
Nina snorts. “Some vacation,” she says.
A Siamese cat jumps onto the table, tail taut, motor running. It’s a beautiful specimen of a cat, with lush fur and long whiskers.
I’ve never seen this animal before in my life.
Maxine, who has been trying hard not to look at my boob, is delighted by the distraction. “Who’s this?”
“This is Van,” my mother answers. Without asking, I know the cat’s last name is Morrison.
“What’s his story?” I ask.
Jaclyn blinks at me.
“For example, why did you have Van’s likeness carved in stone?”
“Also, who’s Brian?” Nina asks.
Wearily, my mother strokes the cat’s back. Van arches his spine and purrs. “Brian lives next door with a handful of other young men. Brothers, I think.”
Nina and Maxine exchange a look pertaining to some inside joke or secret code. They do this often, like cops or girls in a bar.
“M-A-G-A?” I ask.
Mom feigns ignorance. “What’s that?”
I shake my head. She continues, “Brian has a nephew who visits on weekends. He keeps a sandbox behind his trailer.”
My laughter shakes my chest, compelling Jack to nurse with renewed force.
Nina says, “What’s so funny?”
“Well, to a cat, a sandbox looks a lot like a litter box,” Mom explains.
“Ohhh,” the girls chorus.
“Did you leave some surprises for Brian?” I ask the cat, who is head-butting the baby, who is too milk-drunk to care.
“He did indeed.” The pride my mother takes in this cat, this neighborhood rivalry, disorients me. The version of Jaclyn with which I’m familiar is nonconfrontational, forgiving to a fault. “Brian pounded on the door and asked me, ‘Did someone tell you you could have a cat here?’ And I said, ‘Well, Brian, no one told me I couldn’t.’ Brian goes, ‘Funny, I was under the impression this was a no-pets park,’ and I say, ‘The beagle on the corner didn’t mention anything.’ And Brian goes, ‘I don’t know nothing about a beagle, but I know cat poo carries all kinds of nasty diseases, and I know what I’ll do if I catch your cat in my nephew’s sandbox again.’”
The girls look upset by my mother’s story. Maybe by the word poo, specifically, or by my mother’s exaggeration of Brian’s north Ohio accent, which turns catch into kee-atch. Jack has pulled off my breast and is staring at the ceiling light. I scratch Van behind the ear. “Think you can dodge a few bullets, buddy?”
“We’re not worried,” Jaclyn says. She pulls the cat into her lap and focuses on Nina. “You look just like Carrie.”
“Mom,” I warn.
“Well, she does.”
Nina is unfazed. “I get that a lot.”
“What about you?” Mom shifts toward Maxine. “Do people say you look like your mom or your dad?”
She shrugs. “No one ever really says, either way.”
“Trust me, there was a time in your life when it was all anyone talked about,” I say.
“Well, let’s see.” My mom, emboldened by the subject of Brian et al., ejects Van Morrison from her lap and takes the baby from me. He gazes up at her with astonishment. Frequently, Jack resembles an alien stumbling from the wreckage of his spaceship, eyes roving, asking, What planet is this?
“He looks like Gabe,” my mother admits.
“That’s the consensus.” They have the same full lips, broad forehead, and pointy ears. I didn’t think it would bother me, my son sharing none of my features, but it does.
The baby grows restless. My mother takes him on a tour of her trailer, struggling to interest him in the gold-framed photos of me as a child, the water pouring from the bathroom faucet, the buttons of the remote control. He allows himself to be briefly distracted by a team picture of the 2001 girls bowling team and by Jaclyn’s dramatically whispered tale of the time I bowled a 240, leading Deerling to victory against a rival school.
Jack loses it when asked to admire the Ronald Reagan calendar hanging above the kitchen trashcan. My mother—who was fifteen when the man took office—replaces the calendar with a current version each year. Ronald is number one on her list of celebrity guests, dead or alive, whom she would invite to a dinner party. Fantasy dinner party is one of my mother’s favorite games—though, to my knowledge, she has never thrown a dinner party.
“We should probably go,” I say
.
Nina and Maxine are quick to jump to their feet. Reluctantly, my mother hands over my miserable baby and walks us to the door.
The girls are halfway to the car, shuffling over the gravel and singing a Taylor Swift song in a restless, soulless way. My mother palms the top of Jack’s head and stoops to kiss the tears from his flushed cheeks. “He’s beautiful,” she says. “Good job.”
She’s not going to mention the pain I’ve caused her, delaying this moment for ten long weeks.
“How many times has Gabe called you?” I ask.
“Zero times. Why would he call me?”
“He thinks I’m staying here.”
“Now, why would your daddy think a thing like that?” Mom tickles the baby’s bare feet.
“We’re kind of fighting.”
Her eyes darken. “You walked out on him, didn’t you?”
“I guess.”
She exhales my name.
Bouncing my knees to keep Jack happy, I stare at her, unapologetic.
“You walked away? You took his baby from him?”
“His baby? Mom, we’ll be apart for two weeks. We talk every day.”
Technically, we text, and only about the baby. I send him pictures of our son, and Gabe replies, “He’s huge!” I send footage of Jack lying on Carrie’s living room rug, kicking his legs and hooting like a barn owl, and Gabe replies with a row of heart-eye emojis.
I listen to the videos carefully before I send them, turning up the volume, checking for Carrie or Nina’s voice in the background.
“You have to make things right with him,” Mom says.
“Aren’t you the one who told me to love him less?”
“He’s not supposed to notice you loving him less.”
I laugh. “How could he not notice?”
My mother stares past me toward the overgrown grass of Brian’s lot. Her forehead is creased, and she’s squeezing the fingers of her right hand repeatedly. If I were to lift her hand to my lips and kiss her knuckles—a dramatically tender gesture I performed often as a child—I know her skin would smell like tobacco. She won’t light a cigarette in Jack’s presence. The deprivation must hurt.