Until the Day I Die

by Carpenter, Emily

  I told you so vibrates through every cell of my body. Gigi’s stupid bike from 1990-something is not a substitute for a car. But Shorie didn’t want a car; she wanted her grandmother’s bike. And insisted we haul it to her room until she can get the right kind of lock for it. I know I can handle getting a rusty, grease-coated bike up a set of college dorm stairs, but there’s no rule book for leaving a daughter at college who distinctly, desperately, angrily does not want to be left. Or maybe there is a guide, and I just haven’t paused long enough from working to google it.

  This was always Perry’s area—the delicate handling of our prickly daughter. If he were here, he’d whisper some inside joke in Shorie’s ear, cajole and comfort and coax until she was laughing and charging up these stairs. I can’t help but think the least he could’ve done was impart his secrets. But there was no time for a letter from my husband. And now there is just a big blank negative space where he used to be.

  I still haven’t gotten used to this new jagged anger that emanates from my daughter. It started when Perry died. Every once in a while, it shoots out in violent electrified bolts toward me, always taking me off guard, paralyzing me, making me hurt in ways I never expect. It stays constant, a low hum droning on and on underneath any other sound.

  I have lost my husband. I am losing my daughter.

  The urge to cry is sudden, sharp, and overwhelming, so I turn back and aim a huge grin at my daughter. “Come on,” I say cheerfully. “Let’s make a dent in the universe.” I yank up my end of the bike, charging up the steps. I can feel her behind me, tripping to keep up.

  We’re almost to the fourth floor when Ben catches up to us. “Y’all should’ve waited for me.” He’s his usual happy, open-faced self, loaded down with a couple of plastic trunks full of clothes from the truck. He continues past us, then is back in less than a minute. He hoists the bike over one shoulder and takes the stairs two at a time, Shorie and I falling into line behind him. A crowd of girls presses up behind us, and I find myself jostled closer to him, so close I can smell sweat and soap and whatever detergent he washed his T-shirt with. His back is a really nice one—long and lean and muscled—and it tapers down into loose-fitting jeans.

  I focus elsewhere: the dorm doors decorated with whiteboards and name tags and Auburn posters. I’ve known Ben (and Sabine—there was never Ben without Sabine) for thirty years. In those years there have, admittedly, been a handful of times when I considered what it would be like to be with him. There would be this flash between us, a moment that only lasted half a second, and a thought would flit through my head—There’s something . . .

  But those flashes were like the impulses you got when you stood at the edge of a cliff and felt that illogical urge to step over the edge. Easy enough to ignore. Especially when Perry was alive. Now that he’s gone, they fill me with shame. I may feel lonely, but I’m appalled at the idea of even touching another man, much less my best friend’s husband.

  In Shorie’s room, Ben swings the bike against the wall, claps his hands, and rubs them together gleefully like he’s never had so much fun. “That’s your grandmother’s old bike?” he asks Shorie. “Damn thing’s a millstone.”

  “It’s a beach cruiser,” she says.

  I resist the urge to compare the bike to Perry’s mother, Gigi, millstonewise. I’m the adult here, after all. It’s up to me to keep things positive, even if it kills me.

  “Bathroom’s through that door,” I say to Ben. “Knock before you go in.”

  Shorie, Ben, and I take turns washing up, edging politely around each other. When Ben says he’s heading back to the truck for another load, Shorie turns to her bookshelves. She should be tossing confetti and dancing in circles around Ben. He canceled whatever weekend plans he had—work, hanging out with Sabine—and volunteered his truck. His reward? Being treated to a teenage girl’s icy silence in the back seat of the cab the two hours down to Auburn.

  “Do you want me to make up your bed?” I ask.

  “Okay.” She flips open the top of the bin with all her books.

  I lay the foam pad over the thin mattress and wrestle the purple Pottery Barn comforter out of its plastic bag.

  “Hey, where are the sheets?” I ask.

  “The what?”

  I breathe deeply. “The sheets. For the bed.”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t you pack them?”

  I rummage through a couple of boxes. The sheets are stuffed into an actual suitcase, crammed beneath Shorie’s collection of Converse sneakers, clearly stuff she packed. I decide not to think about the germs.

  “When’s Adelia getting here?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “She didn’t say?”

  “I never called her.”

  I straighten. “Shorie. She’s your roommate.”

  “I was busy. You get that, Mom, right? It’s hard to do all the stuff you should do when you’re busy, busy, busy.”

  She slams a couple of books onto a shelf. I snap the top sheet over the bed. So many unspoken words simmer between us, but if I speak up now, it’s going to turn into a battle. This is one topic we’ve covered thoroughly.

  In March, after Perry died, his share of Jax’s stock reverted to me, along with the new weight of major shareholder, and shifted everything into high gear. Granted, for a startup, we were doing well—making enough money to cover salaries and also roll some cash back into the company. But we were nowhere near millionaires, not yet. We always needed to be raising more capital to safeguard our income—and it was technically still my job to attend these startup pitch events and scout potential investors. But, honestly, a lot of what I was doing was unnecessary.

  Ben brought up the subject, once, of my taking a break. But after I pointedly changed the subject, he never mentioned it again. At Jax, as I mapped out some wild monetization or scaling model for the next five years or reported on the latest habit loop design or A/B split testing at another meeting I’d called, I’d notice my partners’ faces soften with pity. It was obvious they were placating me, showing up and sitting with polite smiles on their faces while I made up new reasons not to hand over the reins.

  And then, early this summer, it occurred to me what I was doing. The goal I had been unconsciously moving toward ever since Perry’s death. I was getting the company ready to sell. Preparing to let Jax go.

  This is why Shorie’s extra mad at me, as is Ben, even though he’s doing a pretty good job pretending he’s not. And I understand. None of us had planned on selling this soon, but none of us had planned on Perry’s dying either. And we made a pact. We agreed that when we sold, we’d all move on.

  I want Shorie to start fresh too. She’s already on her way, with a full ride from National Women in STEM, along with career and mentorship opportunities that the organization will provide. She’s got a chance to really make something of herself and her talents—if she’ll just trust me and fly on her own.

  But if she won’t fly, I’m going to give her a push. As I see it, that’s my job as her mother. And once I’ve done that—once I’ve gotten everything at Jax squared away and the company sold and my daughter launched into the world—then maybe, at last, I can focus on other things.

  Like how I am going to survive the rest of my life without my husband.

  5

  SHORIE

  Ben Fleming wants to sleep with my mother.

  Sorry, no—I should just say it right out: Ben Fleming wants to fuck my mother. And OH MY GOD, just thinking those words makes me feel like I need to take a thousand scalding showers and then lock myself in a sensory deprivation chamber.

  At first, I thought I was imagining it because of all Mom’s other strange behaviors. The blank way she looks at me, her forgetfulness, the constant working—and when she’s not doing that, the constant sleeping. But now that I think about it, these past couple of months, it does seem like Ben and Mom have gotten . . . tighter. I watched them the whole ride down from Birmingham from the back seat of Ben’s
truck. They chatted and laughed and periodically touched each other’s arms. Oh, my goodness, look! There’s a deer on the side of the highway eating grass! How amazing! I must touch your arm for the hundredth time! I wondered if Sabine would’ve minded if she’d been there.

  Anyway, just add it to the list of suck: my dad is dead, my mom is making me go to college instead of letting me stay home and work at Jax, and now there’s uncomfortable parental flirting. That last one, the flirting, doesn’t just suck; it actually fills me with Hulk-level rage. That the two of them can joke and laugh like one didn’t just lose a best friend and one a husband mere months ago infuriates me. And do they not care that I’m right there, watching them? It’s fucking disrespectful is what it is.

  Now, standing in my new dorm room, organizing my books, I am so knotted up with fury and fear and homesickness that I can’t open my mouth. And even though the thought does occur to me, briefly, that I may possibly be overreacting to this Ben-and-Mom thing because I’m actually angry at Mom about other stuff, I shut it off and slam books onto the shelf instead.

  Coincidentally the one I’m putting up now is my copy of The Emotional Dictionary. It was a graduation gift from Daisy’s mom. Clearly she was trying to tell me something. Like that I’m maybe emotionally constipated or something. Which I’m not at all. Just because our culture expects girls to emote all over the place, that doesn’t mean we should if we don’t feel like it. I have emotions, plenty of them, and I can show them anytime I want. I cried when I learned about Euler’s Identity, as a matter of fact. Right there in the third row of Ms. Blaylock’s trigonometry class.

  Just to prove to myself that I’m perfectly comfortable with my emotions, I list out the ones I happen to be feeling right now. For each one, I slam another book on the shelf. Melancholy, BAM! Despondency, BAM! Misery, BAM!

  Don’t get me wrong. I love my mother. And I know what I’m thinking about my own maternal flesh and blood is disgusting and offensive, but it’s the truth. It’s not that hard to tell when a man wants a woman. Well, correction: as long as I’m not the woman in question. That, I’m not so good at.

  And there’s this: My mom is more attractive than your average suburban mom. She has long Disney-princess dark-brown hair and the bone structure of a runway model. Unfortunately she happens to dress herself like a color-blind toddler. And puts her hair in one of those midlevel, mom-style ponytails, scraped back and twisted with a scrunchie. She may be old (forty-eight?), a mad workaholic, and annoying as crap, but she would be a catch for any man her age. I guess. But it’s way too soon for her to even think about moving on. Way too soon for flirting. Especially with Ben Fleming.

  And I don’t even know where she finds scrunchies anymore.

  I load more books onto the shelf. BAM! BAM! BAM! I shouldn’t be here, moving into this dorm, wasting my time going to dumb-ass English comp classes that I could literally sail through even if I were in a coma. I should be in Birmingham, working at Jax, doing what my dad did, taking care of everything he used to take care of. Isn’t that the point of college anyway? To figure out your future? My dad already gave me my future.

  My senior year, instead of playing lacrosse after school, I went to Jax every day and shadowed him. He showed me everything: the back and front end stuff, the database of all Jax’s users, and the way the servers keep the whole show running smoothly. He explained Scrum, the work-managing system they followed to build Jax. And Slack, the software they used for assignments.

  Dad also had his own quirky organizational system. He didn’t use the calendar on his phone, or any other kind of personal-assistant app. He carried around a journal, slim and bound in coffee-colored leather, where he kept a record of everything—every problem he encountered, every to-do list, even ideas he had for new features. He jotted little poems to me and my mother in it, sometimes those dumb motivational quotes. He got a new one every month, and at the end of the month he put the old one on the shelf in his office at home.

  He had me sit down for at least one afternoon with every single Jax employee for a Q&A session. I got to endlessly test every new feature of the app, even the long shots the more motivated interns were working on. He even set up the email server to automatically forward his daily event report to me so I could understand how he spotted problems.

  I still check the report religiously at six fifteen every morning, right after I wake up, just like he used to do, even though I haven’t told Mom. She wouldn’t like it, guaranteed.

  I haul another armful of books out of a box. BAM! BAM! BAM!

  But here’s what makes me nervous. My mom is not in the right headspace for making good decisions. I mean, if Ben is dumb enough to make a move on her, I worry she may go for it. I’ve never really been able to predict how my mother will react to things. But since Dad died, it’s gotten worse. She’ll work for, like, two days straight, then sleep for the next two. I never see her eat anything more than a cracker or half a banana. And she just kind of floats around the house like she’s stoned. And then randomly snaps over something stupid like Foxy Cat shedding on her laptop case.

  Once, when I was trying to convince Dad to let me enter this international hacking competition called the Global Cybergames, he commented that I didn’t need it. He said social engineering was the biggest issue in cybersecurity. In other words, humans become the weakest link in any system by sharing their passwords or using their computers’ automatic log-in function for email and unsecured websites. I probably shouldn’t think this—it sounds cold—but sometimes I think my mom is the weak link of Jax.

  I happen to know that Ben, Sabine, Layton, Arch, and Gigi have met secretly a couple of times to discuss what to do about her. I stumbled onto one of those secret meetings one Sunday night, when I dropped by Arch and Gigi’s house to see if I’d left a magazine there, one of Dad’s old copies of Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, that had an article I wanted to finish reading. I’d let myself in the kitchen door, and I could hear someone, on the other side of the swinging door to the dining room, talking. It was Sabine.

  “. . . could be just the rest she needs. A gentle push to encourage self-care. It’s an incredible place.”

  I’d found the magazine and crept back out to my bike without anybody seeing me, then rode away as quickly and quietly as I could. What was strange was how not upset I felt. Yeah, I was shocked that the rest of the adults were talking about my mom like she was a problem. What outweighed it was the relief that somebody was going to take care of the situation.

  But now that feeling of relief is disintegrating. If something happens between Ben and my mom, especially if Sabine finds out about it, surely that will be the end of Jax. And what’s left of our family.

  I chuck a final armful of books onto the shelf and head to the desk to arrange Arch’s old cigar boxes and beer stein from Germany that I decided to use for decoration. I arrange the items methodically, positioning each exactly three inches from the next. I like things just so. Dad was the same way.

  “You’re lucky you STEM kids get to move in on Wednesday,” Mom says. “I heard the other freshmen don’t get in until Friday. They only get the weekend before they have to start school.”

  I grunt noncommittally and pull out my phone.

  “Did everything allocate properly?” Mom asks, and it takes me a minute to realize she’s talking about Jax.

  “Mm-hmm,” I say.

  “The automatic deposit went through?” She cranes her neck, trying to get a glimpse. But the fact that she’s asking the question proves that she’s restrained herself from logging on to my account and stalking, which is a little surprising.

  I know I should play nice and let her see, but I twist away instead. “It’s all good, Mom.”

  “Just checking,” she says lightly, and it occurs to me for the first time that maybe I’m taking the wrong approach to this whole school vs. Jax thing. Maybe my best strategy is to play along with what she wants and find another way to get what I want.

&nbs
p; 6

  ERIN

  What the hell is keeping Ben?

  Shorie’s moved on to hanging her shirts and jeans in the closet, and I’m draping a string of twinkle lights across the window frame. Right now would be an excellent time for him to show up and inject a little levity into this putrid mother-daughter tension stew. But he’s nowhere to be seen.

  And then, a tall girl with bright-red hair appears in the doorway. She’s struggling with a minifridge but, after a beat, lets it crash to the floor.

  “Shorie?” Her voice sounds professional, like it’s coming out of a TV, and she’s wearing a ton of gorgeous, complicated-looking eye makeup. She’s so big and beautiful that I’m rendered speechless. She fills the room with a delicious vanilla smell too.

  Shorie fixes her smile. “Adelia.”

  “Dele.” The tall redhead thrusts out her hand. “Like Let’s Make a . . . , you know? I mean, you probably don’t. Nobody our age does. It’s just a thing my mom always used to say to her friends. I don’t even know why I said that. I’m nervous. Anyway. Unbelievably excited to meet you.”

  Shorie nods. Smiles. You can do it, I think.

  Dele continues. “You didn’t bring monogrammed pillows, did you? My mom was like, you’re gonna get the girl with monogrammed pillows, and she’s going to fucking hate you because all you’re bringing is the fucking Harry Potter sheets and a Hermione shower curtain.” Dele turns to me and claps a hand over her mouth. “Oh my God. Sorry. My mom didn’t actually say it that way. Cleanup on aisle Dele.”

  I wave her off. “You’re good. All pro-Hermione here. I’m Shorie’s mom. Erin.”

  “Sorry I haven’t been more in touch,” Shorie says. “I wasn’t sure I was actually coming to school.”

  “Oh, no. I get it. No worries,” Dele says. “Glad you decided to come.”

  Our eyes drag and catch. Dele and I have been surreptitiously emailing for the past couple of months. I feel guilty for not telling Shorie—and for being such a capital-H Helicopter Mom—but I know from experience how important your freshman-year roommate is. I was the only kid from my small Tennessee town who attended Auburn. Alone and nervous, I was lucky enough to have a roommate who insisted on dragging me everywhere she went.