Around the Bend (4 page)

A soft smile stole across her face, one that seemed to transform her entire face from the rigid woman I knew into someone as inviting as a hot cup of tea. Suddenly, I felt like part of the team again, not just the driver. “Thank you, Hilary,” my mother said, then before I realized what she was doing, she had leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

Okay, maybe miracles could happen. Or maybe my mother really was slipping into early dementia.

The cops saved us from all of the above. They found the car a couple hours later, abandoned on the side of the road, Reginald, my father and luggage intact. The ignition had been jimmied with a screwdriver, which meant a few hours’ delay in a shop to get it rekeyed, but other than that, the Mustang appeared undamaged.

I wanted to kiss it, but figured that would look weird, so I settled for patting the hood instead.

My mother’s relief, however, was no-holds-barred. She nearly ran to the car, embracing Reginald with the kind of fervor most people reserved for missing children. A weird little surge of jealousy rose in my chest. I couldn’t remember her ever grabbing me like that after preschool or kindergarten.

But then again, I’d never been stolen out of a travel plaza by a guy with a bandana and a screwdriver, either.

“You’re lucky,” the repair guy said to me. “Most of the time people never see stolen vehicles again, or if they do, they’re torched and abandoned. Your thief must have felt guilty about the pig.”

“Yeah, leave it to Reginald to save the day.” I hated having to owe the pig, of all things, for rescuing the car I’d scrimped for years to buy.

My mother was so happy, she was humming. As much as I hated to admit it, I’d made the right choice in deciding to stay instead of insisting we go back home. If I’d forced her to go back to Massachusetts, instead of remaining behind to find the pig, I’d have caused an irreparable rift between us.

We had enough cracks in our relationship already.

A little while later, we were back on the road, though we didn’t get far before night fell and we started looking for a pet-friendly motel. I had to call Nick, who used Google to find a place for us, and made a quick reservation. I wasn’t in the mood to argue with some desk clerk about whether a potbellied pig qualified as a pet or not, and was glad to leave that in Nick’s hands. “You owe me,” he said when he called me back with the confirmation number.

My heart softened when I heard his voice, and the extra mile he’d gone to, for a pig he didn’t like, and a woman who’d just turned down his marriage proposal. I missed him already, and again found myself wishing I could crawl through the phone line and be back in his bed, his arms, my face against the end-of-day stubble on his cheek, inhaling the scent of wood on his skin. Instead I joked, because it was easier than saying all the things that bubbled in my heart. “I’d say this makes us even. I took you out for Chinese last week, remember?”

“I want more than take-out.” Unanswered questions from the morning hung in the air between us. Nick had a way of doing that, of layering heavy meanings into simple statements. Hemingway would have loved him.

I sighed. “Like what?”

“Home-cooked meals. Maybe a kid at the table. Things to come home to, Hil, instead of everything being disposable.”

“Then buy some dishes, Nick, instead of Dixie plates.” I knew what he was talking about, but I couldn’t go down that conversational path. Me, with a child? I could barely care for myself. How could he even envision us with kids?

And where was this coming from? Was he hormonal?

Could men even get hormonal?

“I’m tired of everything being disposable, Hil. Aren’t you?” Then he clicked off.

My mother flicked off the penlight she’d been using to read the map. “What was that about?”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t want to tell me?”

I tossed the cell into my purse, then turned on my directional for the upcoming exit instead of answering the question. If I wasn’t going to give Nick an answer about the future—and kids, Lord help me, kids?—I certainly wasn’t going to give one to my mother.

Nick had thankfully booked us two rooms in the motel, at my request, to avoid any other deep conversations. I couldn’t really afford the extra expense from here to California and probably should have taken my mother’s offer to stay for free with her, but was prepared to take out an equity loan to pay for it if need be.

Okay, assuming I had some equity. Which I didn’t. I had credit cards, though, so what was a little more debt to add onto the pile?

“Why won’t you talk to me?” Ma asked, closing the atlas.

I glanced at her. “Since when do you take an interest in my life?”

“I always have.”

“No, Ma, you haven’t. You’ve told me what to do, but you’ve never paused long enough to listen.”

“I’m listening now.”

“I’m thirty-six. Don’t you think it’s a little late?”

As soon as I said the words, I felt bad and wanted to take them back. We’d barely spent one day on the road and already I’d screwed it up, par for the Hilary course. “I’m sorry, Ma, I—”

“It’s all right.” But the words came fast, like applying a Band-Aid over a gaping wound. It couldn’t stop the bleeding.

And here I was, fresh out of tourniquets for our relationship. Jeez, I was ruining them all over the place. Nick back in Boston, my mother here.

The bright neon sign announcing the motel came into view. My mother elected to stay in the car while I checked us in, got the keys and parked by the rooms. She seemed tired as she headed into hers, Reginald trotting along by her feet, both of them going inside without a word of goodbye.

I should have been relieved. But I tossed and turned all night, overindulging in junk TV, feeling as guilty as a six-year-old caught eating the Christmas pies before the company arrived. I’d screwed things up with my mother—again—and watching too many reruns of
The Jerry Springer Show
didn’t give me any ideas on how to fix the mess. Nor did it help me sort things out with Nick. All it did was give me a nightmare preview of my future, should the improbable happen and Nick decided to have a food fight over the Thanksgiving
dinner with his cousins after his father got a sex change and married the live-in maid.

I finally nodded off just before dawn, only to be awakened an hour later by the sound of the phone. I grabbed blindly for it, knocking the white plastic to the floor, trying twice before I got the receiver in the proper place against my ear and mouth. “Hullo?”

“When are we leaving?” My mother, sounding as chipper as a squirrel on Acorn Dropping Day.

“Later. I’m sleeping.”

“We have a lot of miles to cover. We can’t stay in bed all day.”

“Ma, I’m the driver. If you don’t let me sleep, I will crash the car into one of those concrete barriers and we’ll both become highway pancakes.”

I could almost hear her disappointment in me. Apparently, she forgot I worked in a bar and “grille” and didn’t keep banker’s hours like the rest of the world. “There’s no reason to get smart with me, young lady. I was only asking a simple question. Are you ready to go?”

“No.”

“It’s already ten past seven. If we leave much later—”

“Ma, listen to me. I am going back to bed. I am going back to sleep.” I used small, precise syllables. No room for misunderstanding. “I am not getting up now.”

“Why? You sound awake to me.”

I gritted my teeth and gripped the phone tighter. “It’s an act. I slept with a ventriloquist last night.”

“Hilary, don’t be vulgar. Just tell me how you want your eggs and I’ll order for you. You can meet me in the restaurant attached to the motel in a few minutes.”

The thought of breakfast made my stomach roll. My eyes closed and the phone slipped a little in my grasp. “Ma, for the love of all that is holy, please let me sleep for another hour.”

Another pause of disappointment. “Fine. I’ll get takeout and bring it to you.”

“Whatever.” As long as she let me sleep, I didn’t care if she wheeled in an entire Swedish smorgasbord. I dropped the phone back into the cradle and buried my head in the foam pillow again.

Ten minutes later, she was at my door. “Hilary! Eggs, sunny side up with a side of wheat toast.”

I stumbled to the door and yanked it open, blearily focusing on her fully dressed and smiling self. “I thought you were going to let me sleep for an hour.”

“Then the eggs would have been cold. And you know how you hate cold eggs.”

“Ma, I hate eggs, period.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever.” I turned, leaving the door open and climbed back into my bed, pulling the covers over my head, knowing I was acting like a three-year-old. And so not caring.

“But you always liked eggs when I made them.”

“And when was that?” My voice was muffled by the scratchy floral polyester coverlet. “Because last I checked Dad was the one who fed me breakfast. Got me dressed for school. Made sure I got on the bus.”

I closed my eyes and squeezed my temples. What was with me this morning? Had I not just vowed a mere twenty-four hours ago that I would not get into a verbal match with my mother? That I would behave for this road trip?

Uh-huh. And look how well
that
was going.

She brought out the worst in me, like sandpaper on a callus. It was why I kept a mental egg timer on our visits, because I knew if I went over so many minutes, someone was bound to blow.

“Will you please come out from under there and eat your breakfast? You need to start the day right.”

I flung back the covers, annoyed and frustrated and not in the mood for anything sunny side up. I stalked over to the breakfast tableau she’d set up on the cheap laminate table in the corner, grabbed a piece of wheat toast, then perched on the corner of the armchair and nibbled.

“For God’s sake, Hilary, put on some clothes.”

I looked down at my tank top and panties. “These
are
clothes, Ma.”

She glared at me.

I had two choices. I could continue to stand there, just to tick her off, an art I had perfected during high school, or I could throw on a pair of jeans and buy some peace.

I had learned some lessons in three decades of life. And one of them was that some battles were not worth the fight—like what I wore to bed.

I put down the toast, picked up the Lees I’d dropped on the floor the night before and wriggled into them, ignoring the way my mother’s nose wrinkled in distaste, then went back to my breakfast.

“You’re getting crumbs on the—” She cut herself off, apparently deciding I was a lost cause, and rose. “Reginald and I will meet you in the car. Be sure to make the bed before you leave.”

“Ma, that’s what the maids do.”

“We don’t want them thinking we’re total slobs.” She glanced around my room, at the shirt draped over the armchair, the open duffel bag, its contents strewn in a circle, the blankets puddled on the floor. “Even if some of us are.”

Then she left the room without shutting the door. I crossed the room and closed it myself, muttering unflattering things about passive-aggressive relationships under my breath.

Then I threw the eggs into the trash and stood over them, watching the little tendrils of steam rise off their happy yellow faces. If I’d thought it would make me feel better, I’d been wrong.

My mother, I discovered, only liked to read books, not listen to them. I tried each of the books on tape—
New York Times
bestsellers and Oprah picks—and she rejected them all. One reader was too slow. One was too hard to understand. The third had a drawl. “Grates on my nerves.” The fourth was a male. “Men shouldn’t read books written by women.”

“Ma, he’s playing a character. He’s an actor. That’s his job.”

“If I want an actor, I’ll watch a movie.” She settled her purse in her lap again and stared straight ahead. Reginald snarfled in agreement and laid his head on the console between us. I had to work really hard to not be grossed out by the thought of a pig lying on the leather of my car, his wet nose against my elbow, and Lord only knew what was coming out of said nose every time he made a noise. “It’s not natural to
listen
to a book anyway. That’s why they have pages, Hilary. So you can read them.”

“Fine.” My teeth hurt. “Let’s try some music. I brought several CDs of—”

“I don’t like music in the car. It’s too distracting.”

“Distracting for what? You’re not doing anything.”

“For you. You could get all wrapped up in—” she reached into the plastic dish that held the CDs, yanked one of them out “—Barry Manilow Sings the Fifties and next thing I know, you’re plowing into a North American Van Lines truck.”

I laughed. “Ma, I seriously doubt I’ll get distracted by Barry Manilow. I don’t even like Barry Manilow.”

“Then why did you bring that CD?”

“I thought you’d like it.”

“Oh.” She turned the plastic case over, read the list of songs on the back, then placed it back in the dish. “That was very thoughtful, Hilary.”

She said it like I’d bought her a gift certificate for hangnail removal. “I thought you liked Barry Manilow. You went to his concert.”

“Your father liked him. I went along for the ride.”

“You went to a concert just because Dad liked the singer? Why would you sit through something like that if you didn’t even like it?”

She turned to face me then, her face clear and surprised. “I loved your father, Hilary. Why wouldn’t I do that?”

“Because you’re allowed to have your own likes, Ma. You didn’t have to pretend to like things just because Dad did.” Would Nick and I end up like that five years down the road, ten? Me pretending to like things just to make him happy?

“He knew how I felt. We didn’t have any secrets, your father and I.”

And yet…the way she said that—too fast, too pat—I wondered how many secrets they’d had that she wouldn’t
admit. What marriage
didn’t
have a few secrets? I thought of Karen and Jerry, who had been my next door neighbors and relationship-advice gurus for ten years. Karen had told me about the shopping she kept from Jerry, the receipts she kept in her wallet, and the blind eye she turned to his occasional after-work beer with his buddies.

What if the buddies he shared a Coors Light with had breasts and wore high heels? What if her trips to the mall involved more than a few sweaters and a new raincoat? They told lies, kept secrets, and each seemed to know, but ignored them, like messes behind closet doors. “A little space,” Karen said, “is a necessity. If he knew everything, I’d be suffocated.”

That’s what I was most afraid of with Nick. Being suffocated. Moving in with him for good, having him know everything, from my bra size to how often I washed my laundry, to whether I ate breakfast. I liked my space, and I didn’t want to answer to anyone for where I had been last Saturday or what I’d spent last week’s paycheck on.

And I didn’t want to spend my Saturday evenings wondering if he’d really been knocking back a Bud with Lou or LouAnn.

Space. I needed lots of it.

Karen and Jerry had gotten more or less lucky, my parents, I suspected, not so much. To me, that meant I had a fifty-fifty chance with Nick. Those odds simply weren’t good enough to be betting the rest of my life.

“So who do you like, Ma?” I asked.

“Who do I like for what?”

“Singers, music.”

She lifted one shoulder, dropped it, stared out the window. “I never really thought about it.”

“Oh, come on, everyone has a favorite singer. A favorite song or two.”

“Do you?”

I didn’t say anything for a second, watching the signs carefully as we made the switch on 90 north to Albany. The signs were tricky, a little confusing, and I was quiet until I was sure we were going the right way. “Yeah, but I’m kind of fickle. I think that comes from working at Ernie’s. I hear so much music that I have a new favorite every year. I used to be strictly a Bruce girl then—”

“Bruce?”

“Bruce Springsteen. You know, ‘Glory Days,’ ‘Born to Run.’”

“Oh.” She thought a minute. “Is that the song you used to play all the time in your room? The one about cars and getting out of town?”

My gaze settled on my mother, absorbing her lean frame with surprise. She’d passed by the closed door of my room hundreds of times over the years, and I’d never thought that she’d paused, maybe put her ear against the six-panel oak to listen, to take an aural peek into her daughter’s world. “Yeah, that’s the one.”

She nodded. “It’s a nice song. Kind of…wild.”

“Like me.”

A smile crossed her lips, the kind that was soft, almost private, caught up with memories and shared connections, and in that moment, I felt like maybe there was hope for my mother and I, that a bridge really did exist somewhere out there, and all we had to do was find the right path to get to it. “Yes, like you,” she said.

The angry blare of a horn sounded behind us and I jerked
my attention back to the road, pulling the wheel straight again. My heart leapt in my throat, pulse jumped, breath caught, then all settled again when I realized all I’d done was stray a few inches too far to the left.

“See?” my mother said, her voice back in full-on parental mode. “This is exactly why I don’t like to listen to music while we’re driving.”

And just like that, the bridge disappeared into the mist.

“If we keep stopping like this, we’ll never get to Uncle Morty’s.” We’d stopped at the Shaker Heritage Society in Albany, the Corning Museum of Glass in Syracuse, made a quick one-day detour to Niagara Falls, and were now trying to fit in one more stop before the sun went down. I was exhausted, irritated and felt like I’d done an entire week of both
The Amazing Race
and
Survivor
, all in a two-day period.

And all the while, I wondered what was going on back home. In Nick’s head. He’d issued me, more or less, an ultimatum. I was putting distance between us, literally and figuratively. The more I did that, the more I worried that he wouldn’t be there when I got back. That there’d be no returning to the easy, comfortable relationship we’d had.

Considering I was not going to take that next step with him—already I’d had that nice little Barry Manilow preview of my future and it scared the pants off me—I fretted about what steps he was making.

“Your father needs to see the country, and so do I.” My mother was standing on the rough beach shores of Lake Erie, holding up the cardboard figure of my father. A howling wind curled around the lake, turning the edges of the waves
to froth, then pushed at my father, as if trying to knock him over, testing my mother’s strength. “Take the picture, Hilary.”

Reginald had opted to stay in the car. Smart pig.

“Ma, this is crazy.” Nevertheless, I raised the digital camera and snapped the picture, capturing my father’s windswept head, just before the real, present-day wind bent it back.

Red filled my mother’s cheeks, her hair lifted in the fierce breeze and her navy pumps sank in the damp sand. Yet she stood there, even after I shouted that I had taken the picture, clutching the cutout of her husband.

“Ma? You coming? We have to get back on the road.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” But the wind battled against her, pushing her toward the lake, using my father as leverage, sinking her kitten heels farther into the earth. She bowed her head and pressed forward, but seemed frozen there. I slung the camera over my shoulder and hurried down the beach, sand gritting between the foam of my flip-flops. Lake Erie clearly wasn’t as friendly as the tourist brochure made it out to be, at least not on this late-May day.

“Let me get that,” I said, taking my father from her. She gave him up without argument, then gripped my arm, her breath coming labored and short as we made our way up the beach to a bench that sat at the edge of the parking lot. “You okay?”

“I’m perfectly fine.” That no-nonsense, lawyer tone. The dare-you-to-disagree one. I could almost believe her.

“You don’t sound okay.”

“Well, I am.” She took a seat on the bench. When she did, I noticed her left leg seemed swollen, larger than the other, and the skin of her foot pressed over and above her shoe, like a marshmallow.

“Then why are you sitting down? And why is your leg puffy?”

“I want to enjoy the scenery. And you know I have poor circulation. That car of yours is no help. Stop trying to read something into my every move.” Again, that arguing-for-the-defense voice that left no room for quarreling. I shrugged, loaded Dad in the car, then came back and sat beside her. After a few minutes of silence, she rose and climbed into the Mustang, purse in supermarket position again.

My hand hesitated over the ignition. I could easily let this go, avoid an argument, get on the road, put some more miles behind us. “What was that about back there?”

“Your car sits too low. I needed to stretch my legs.”

I still didn’t believe her, but all my medical knowledge came from watching television, and shows like
Grey’s Anatomy
. Didn’t exactly make me a medical expert.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” Ma turned to the window, averting her too-red cheeks from my continued suspicious analysis. “Can we get going? Uncle Morty could drop dead of heart failure by the time we get to his house.”

“
Now
you’re in a rush?”

In answer, she flipped the road atlas onto her lap and began tracing our future route with her index finger. Plain, short nails. The tips accented with a white pencil that she ran beneath them every morning, part of a daily ritual she’d been doing for as long as I could remember, the nail beds polished with clear, no-nonsense Sally Hanson.

That pretty much summed up my mother, I realized. Neat, clear and no-nonsense. Whereas I—I looked at my own hands for further clarification of how different I was—had raggedy
nails. Hilary Delaney—low-maintenance, not always sensible. A mess, my mother would, and had, said.

Up until now, Nick had liked the mess that was me. But lately, he’d wanted me to straighten, fly in the V that was the rest of middle America. Become part of the two-point-five kids suburbia flock. At some point, I’d have to choose whether to be in that group or without him, and that made my head hurt.

It made everything hurt.

I started pulling out of the parking lot, heading back toward Peninsula Drive. The shiny Tom Ridge Environmental Center winked back at us from a little farther down the road. I glanced at my mother, sure she’d want to see this tourist attraction, too, but she was slumped in her seat, clearly tired.

As I drove, my cell phone rang. I reached for it, in the dish of the car’s console, but my mother was faster. “You are not going to answer that while you’re driving, Hilary. You could cause a wreck.”

Not a single other car shared the road with us, just a bunch of crazy people on bikes who clearly didn’t notice the wind or what felt like sub-zero temperatures. The sun above was bright, I was barely driving twenty-five miles an hour. To my mother, though, that didn’t constitute a preponderance of evidence on my side, so I didn’t even bother to bring up those facts.

I appealed to her Reginald emotions. “It’s Nick, Ma. Calling to find out where we’re stopping for the night so he can find us another porcine-friendly motel.”

The phone rang again. My mother’s grip tightened. “I can talk to him. You drive.”

“No, no, no. You
can
not talk to Nick. If you do, you’ll—”

“I’ll what?” She held it up, against her window, the third ring making the slim Motorola dance against the glass.

“Give me the phone, Ma.” I needed to talk to him, make sure all was as it had been before I’d left. This wasn’t just about motel rooms. It was about checking the status quo.

She flipped it open, as defiant as I had been in preschool. Now I saw where I got a few of my more undesirable traits. “Hello, Nick. This is Mrs. Delaney. When are you going to make an honest woman out of my daughter?”

“Ma!” I hissed. Why did she have to add fuel to that fire?

She ignored me. “Really? And she said no?” My mother turned a sharp glance on me. I had racked up one more disappointment in her eyes. “Oh, you are such a dear. Yes, yes, I believe we are just a few miles from that area now. Oh, they do? Wonderful. Yes, we’ll look for that exit. Oh, thank you, Nick.” Another pause. “You too, dear. Have a wonderful evening. And don’t worry, I’ll be sure to talk to Hilary. I’ll put in a good word for you. You are such a sweet boy. Good night now.”

Sweet boy? Nick was nearly forty, for Pete’s sake.

She closed the phone and placed the Motorola in the empty ashtray, giving it a little pat, as if all had been settled with my future.

I glanced at the dish with longing that bordered on pain. I would have given my right arm for a Marlboro Light right now.

“Hilary, Nick said—”

“Don’t say one word about my love life. I don’t ask about yours, you don’t ask about mine.” And don’t interfere in that particular discussion. Could she have made it any worse?

“I don’t have a love life to ask about.”

“You don’t? What about Mr. Messinger across the street?”

My mother’s face reddened, crimson coloring from her cheeks to her chest. Reginald poked his head up, looked from one of us to the other, then went back to sleep. “He’s a neighbor, nothing more. We talk about tulips and…gardenias.”

“That’s not what I heard.” I grinned. Mrs. Whittaker was a fountain of more than just medical gossip. “Ma, it’s okay for you to have a little romance. You may be older, but you’re not dead.”