Getting Warmer (16 page)

“Would you mind if I massaged your abdomen?” he whispered.

“Not at all.”

“Then roll over.”

When we pulled up to my parents’ house and saw that the blinds were open—I was certain I had left them closed—my first thought was that the house had been robbed.

If only I had been so lucky.

My mother came hobbling out of the house on crutches just as I stepped out of Jonathan’s car, heat blasting up from the driveway. She was wearing turquoise track pants, one tennis shoe, an Ace bandage, and a white T-shirt emblazoned with brightly colored hibiscus. Her hair looked grayish.

I stood frozen to my spot on the driveway, my mind whirring but not coming up with any solutions to the crisis that lay ahead.

“Oh, I’m so relieved!” my mother said breathlessly when she reached us. She leaned on the crutches, her shoulders pointing up to her ears. “We got home yesterday afternoon, and when you weren’t here, I figured, well, she’s probably just out shopping. And when you didn’t come home for dinner, I thought, well, she probably has plans with her friends. But then it got to be eight o’clock, nine o’clock—midnight! And I really, really started to think something awful had happened.” She looked at Jonathan, standing there in his yellow T-shirt, and she brightened immediately. “Oh, hello!”

I couldn’t look Jonathan in the eye. My heart was racing. My mother did not sound disoriented. She sounded agitated, though. And the crutches were a nice touch.

“We went to Sedona,” I said. “It got late, and we stayed over.”

“Sedona’s a town north of here,” Jonathan said gently. “It’s known for its red rocks.”

“Oh, I know Sedona,” my mother said. “Natalie’s father and I visited last year. Beautiful place. Beautiful! We stayed at that place up by the airport. Oh, look—you bought T-shirts! Where did you stay?” Jonathan told her. Her eyes widened. “I’ve heard that’s magnificent.” She turned to me and mouthed, “
Expensive
.” Then she shot Jonathan one more enormous grin before saying to me, “Aren’t you going to ask what happened to my ankle?”

“What happened to your ankle?”

“I sprained it. Walking down the Gillespies’ ridiculous stone steps.” She turned to Jonathan and rolled her eyes. “The Gillespies had a log cabin built. Understand, these are people from Long Island.
Long Island
.”

She turned back to me. “You know what Barbara Gillespie’s reaction was? To my sprained ankle? What she said to me before I’d even taken an ibuprofen?
‘I hope this doesn’t mean you’ll have to miss shopping this afternoon.’
And when I said it would, that my ankle hurt like the devil and I couldn’t possibly leave the couch, she said, ‘Well, then, would you mind if I went on my own? I really need to get those soapstone coasters.’ Coasters!”

“You should probably sit down,” I said, trying to will my mother back into the house.

She shifted on the crutches. “I know, I know. I’m supposed to keep the foot iced and elevated. That’s what the doctor in Flagstaff told me. We had to wait four hours in the emergency room, and it wasn’t even covered on our health plan.” She perked up. “Jonathan? It’s Jonathan, right?”

He blinked. “Yes. It is.”

“Won’t you join us for lunch? We were just about to sit down.”

“You’ve probably got stuff to do,” I said to him.

“Uh . . .” He looked really confused. “I don’t really, but, um, if you want me to go . . .”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“We’re having soup,” my mother said as she hobbled back toward the house.

Jonathan stared at me. We were silent until my mother made it back into the house. “She gets like this sometimes,” I said, once the door had closed. “Coherent. For a day or two at a time. Once it lasted a week. It’s—it’s like a gift.”

It was almost chilly inside the house. “What do you have the air conditioner set to?” I asked my father.

“Seventy-five.” The ceiling fan whirred above the kitchen table, ruffling his thinning silver hair. He had a fresh sunburn on his nose.

“You’re supposed to keep it at eighty,” I said. “From an energy conservation standpoint.”

My father slurped his soup to cool it down. “It was eighty when we got back yesterday. Too hot. Your mother said it made her ankle swell.”

“Swell even more,” she interjected.

My father rolled his eyes.

“It might help to drink ice water,” I said, my innards glowing from the soup. “Maybe take a dip in the pool.”

I was babbling. In truth, I didn’t care how hot or how cold my parents kept the house. In fact, coming home to seventy-five degrees would be like heaven if only it didn’t mean introducing Jonathan to my lucid (if whiny) mother. My goal was to get through lunch without blowing my cover, which meant steering the conversation away from my job and my mother’s mental health.

“I can’t swim with my ankle like this,” my mother said, as I’d known she would. “I can’t even take a shower, for God’s sake. This morning your father had to help me in the bath.” I shuddered. It doesn’t matter how old you are: the thought of your parents naked—especially together—is just icky.

Jonathan kept as quiet as he could, even as my mother grilled him.

“Did you and Natalie meet at work?”

“No, um—at a restaurant, actually.”

“It was a bar,” I interjected. “He picked me up at a bar.”

“So, you’re not a teacher?” I stiffened, but it was okay. As I’d explained to Jonathan, my mother would be upset to hear that I worked at a prison (a true statement), so I’d just told her that I was a teacher (another true statement).

“No,” Jonathan said. “Nothing so worthwhile.” He shot me a warm smile. “Just to make it clear, I was working the night I met Natalie.”

“You’re a bartender?” my father asked, his soup spoon clanging against his bowl.

“No, I own my own business. Restaurant supplies.”

The phone rang—to my great relief—but as my father started to stand, my mother barked, “The machine can get it! We’re enjoying our lunch.” She smiled at my father, but the gesture was clearly for Jonathan’s benefit. Of course, we stopped enjoying our lunch as we sat through the rings. On the fifth, the machine picked up.

It was Shelly. “Mom? Dad? I’ve been calling for days, and I keep getting the machine, but I haven’t—you didn’t return my messages.” Her voice cracked. The answering machine was turned up so loud, it hurt my ears.

“Shelly called?” my mother said.

“Oh, yeah,” I muttered. “I meant to tell you, but—”

“Shhh!” my mother hushed.

“Frederick left me,” Shelly continued, letting out a sob. “I really need to talk to you, and—”

Without thinking, my mother sprang out of her chair in the direction of the phone, collapsing the instant her full weight hit her ankle.

“Shit!” She sprawled on the ground. My father pushed out of his chair, making a loud squeak on the ceramic floor. “Get the phone!” my mother shrieked as he reached down to her. “Get the goddamned phone!”

My father grabbed the receiver just as Shelly was whimpering her good-byes.

“Shelly? It’s your father,” he said, as if she wouldn’t know. The answering machine continued to broadcast at an ear-wounding volume.

“Oh, Dad!” Then Shelly really let loose with her crying. I glanced at Jonathan. He looked alarmed, like: she told me her mother was nuts, but her sister, too? Is it genetic?

Finally, Shelly composed herself long enough to wail, “Why didn’t you answer the phone?”

“We were eating soup,” my father said.

“For the past four days?”

“Do you want to talk to your mother?” my father asked.

“Frederick left me!” Shelly burst into sobs anew.

“I’m sorry to hear that, honey. I’m really sorry.” He glanced nervously at my mother, who was making her way across the floor on all fours. Jonathan leaped out of his chair to help her up. She held out her hand for the phone as my father scurried across the room to pass it over. Jonathan continued to hold her up. “Maybe it’s for the best,” my father said as a way of closing the conversation. “Your mother never thought Frederick was right for you.”

“We both thought it!” my mother yelled, taking the portable phone and holding it out between them. “You said he was irresponsible and selfish! You said it!”

Blinking nervously, Jonathan helped ease her back over and into her chair.

My mother put the phone to her ear. “Tell me what happened, sweetheart. Just tell me.”

“Frederick left me,” Shelly said for the third time. And then, the kicker: “Because I’m going to have a buh-buh . . .
baby
!”

“Ohmigod!” My mother’s voice grew high and breathy. “A baby! You’re going to have a baby!” She dropped an octave. “And he left you? When you needed him most? Just left you?” Back up an octave. “But—a baby! I’m going to be a
grandmother
!” At that, she broke down, her sobs mixing with Shelly’s. Together, they sounded like a pack of coyotes that had just caught a bunny.

I couldn’t believe my luck. I didn’t have to convince Jonathan that my mother was losing her mind; she did all the work for me. He left shortly after my mother got off the phone, thanking my parents for their hospitality and tactfully saying that we probably needed some time alone as a family right now.

That night I went online to check out the Arizona Department of Corrections. They were hiring, though not English teachers, specifically. Well, not any teachers. But if I could get a job there—just something part-time, temporary and not overtly life-threatening—I could honestly tell Jonathan that I worked at the prison. And then I could quit the prison job, claiming burnout, and begin work at Agave High School.

And we could begin anew. And I would never, ever lie to him again. I mean, after my mother had a miraculous recovery from Alzheimer’s—which, as it would turn out, wasn’t Alzheimer’s at all but merely an allergic reaction to black mold encountered in a cut-rate motel room at the Grand Canyon.

I was feeling high on life’s possibilities when I walked into my Adventures class on Monday and saw Robert’s seat empty. That wasn’t necessarily significant; until Katerina came along, Robert rarely made it to class on time, and never on Monday. I dove into my marketing lesson and tried not to glance at the clock.

Over the weekend, I had assigned the kids, once again, to watch television commercials and identify the target market. The first time I’d tried, it had been hopeless.

“What was the commercial for?” I’d asked Marisol.

“A Volkswagen.”

“Which model?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, is it a Passat? Or a Beetle? What kind?”

A pause. “I didn’t know we were supposed to write that down.”

“That’s okay—no big deal. It was a Volkswagen. Good enough. And what was the television show you were watching?”

Another pause. “I forget.”

“Did you . . . write it down?”

She hunched over her desk, her hair falling in her face. “I didn’t know we were supposed to.”

This time, I’d created a worksheet: program name, program time, network, product advertised, and, the grand finale, the target market. (Or, as I’d put on the sheet, “Who do they think/hope is watching the show?”)

First, I called on Cherie. “I couldn’t do the homework,” she shrugged. “We have TiVo, so I always just, like, skip the commercials.”

“Couldn’t you have
not
skipped the commercials?”

She looked genuinely surprised. “I didn’t think of that.”

Next, I tried Racquel, who had actually completed the assignment. She had watched
The Real World
on MTV at one o’clock in the morning.

“What were you doing watching television at one A.M.?” I asked.

She shrugged. “My brother wouldn’t let me use the Xbox.”

The product advertised? Red Bull (presumably to help kids stay up until three o’clock).

“Okay,” I said, ready to drive home the point. “MTV is showing
The Real World
at one o’clock in the morning. Red Bull pays for air time. Who do they think is watching, Racquel? Who is their target market?”

She looked at me with rare confidence. “People who watch TV,” she said.

Next, after giving Racquel a self-esteem boost—“Yes, very good, because if no one was watching, no one would see the ad, right?”—I asked, “But to take it even further, who do they think is watching? Do they think your parents are watching?” The kids snickered. “Do they think I’m watching?” They snickered again, which made me feel really, really old. “No, they think
you’re
watching. And you, and you, and you. And how old are you? Are you sixty?” And so on.

I glanced at the clock (ten minutes in, and still no Robert), and moved on to the other students. The last one I called on, when the class was almost over (and still no Robert), was Steven, who, dear boy, had watched the news with his grandmother: six o’clock on NBC. Between stories about a convenience store robbery in Gilbert (family-owned business, family didn’t speak much English, came from a country that started with a “V”) and an arson incident in Carefree (really big, expensive house under construction, neighbor next door smelled smoke, called 911 but it was too late, the house had already burned beyond repair, neighbor said it was really sad when you couldn’t feel safe in your neighborhood anymore), Steven had watched a commercial for Viagra.

I should have seen this one coming. I expected laughter. There was none. Shock? None. I took a deep breath. “And what’s the target market for . . . this product? Who did they hope was watching?”

Steven wrinkled his nose. “People who like to take baths outside?”

That was as good a time as any to wrap things up and assign the next day’s homework. Which left us with four more minutes to spare. Every great teacher knows that class time is precious and you shouldn’t waste an instant.