Mending the Moon (19 page)

“Sorry. I'm sorry, Mom. It was nice of you to try. It's one of Honu's better panels, really.”

He liked the chocolate she gave him, and he really enjoyed their meal at Fourth Street Bistro, an extravagance she allowed herself because it was his last birthday before he left for school. He savored the food, exclaimed over the seasoning, asked smart questions when the owner stopped by the table to see how they were enjoying their meal. He's never liked Melinda's cooking—with the notable exception of her lasagna, which she cooks for him but won't eat herself, since it contains meat—but it turns out that he loves nouvelle cuisine.

Today at Sundance Books she saw a cookbook from Tra Vigne, a swanky Northern Italian restaurant in Napa she and Rosemary and Walter went to once during a winery tour. She bought it for Jeremy and wrote on the inside cover,
Their food's a little like Fourth Street's; maybe you can learn to cook your own! Happy eating! Love, Mom.

Jeremy's never been an academic superstar. He's certainly bright enough, but he's a classic underachiever, and she worries about him in college. He barely even got into UNR, which is a decent state school but no Harvard, and as desperate as he's been to get out of the house, he had no interest in applying anywhere else. The way Veronique slides around any discussion of how he's doing in her class is sufficient indication that Melinda's worry is well-founded. He enjoys cooking, though—he's always been happy to make breakfast or whip up batches of cookies for church coffee hour, even after he stopped going to church—and she hopes the cookbook may nudge him to think about being a chef, or at least pursuing the hobby more seriously.

She hopes it isn't too much of a nudge. She knows she has to be careful. He's so prickly these days, so resentful of any suggestion that she has an agenda for him. She doesn't know how much of this is normal growing pains and how much is his continuing issues with the adoption.

She reminds herself that he's an adolescent. If he didn't have issues with the adoption, he'd have issues with something else, and thank God his physical health has always been good. If there are any lingering developmental delays from the orphanage, Melinda can't detect them. He's an indifferent student, but so are lots of kids who didn't spend their first few years institutionalized in war-torn countries.

Sighing, she smooths the Christmas paper around the book and tapes it. Then she clambers to her feet and walks into her study. There's too much stuff on the floor right now for her to sit and wrap in here. She really needs to straighten up.

She always needs to straighten up.

Laughing at herself, she opens the cabinet under the shelves of geology books—this unit was one of her better yard-sale finds—and pulls out the shopping bag of Jeremy's gifts. She's wrapped them already, but she recognizes them by shape and size. More chocolate, a gourmet assortment of fair-trade dark ranging from 65% to 90% cacao. A red woolen pullover, since red has always been Jeremy's favorite color. The soundtrack of the Charlie Brown Christmas special. That one's a bit of a risk, since any day now she expects him to disdain their old tradition as childish, but the CD was on huge sale at Borders last January.

She puts the wrapped book in the bag and replaces it in the cabinet. Since he's not living at home, she probably doesn't have to be so careful about hiding stuff in here, but this way he can't stumble across anything on his rare visits, and she doesn't have to worry about reminding herself to hide the bag before he comes home on Christmas break.

She closes the cabinet, stands, and rocks back on her heels, stretching her lower back. There are still a few things she wants to get him, small stuff. Stocking stuffers, really: things she knows he'll use. Some of his favorite razors, socks, a pencil case since he's been keeping pens and pencils in a Ziploc bag in his backpack. And of course she'll bring something back from Mexico for him, probably a souvenir for right away and something a bit nicer for Christmas.

The holidays always go so fast. She's glad she's planned this Mexico trip, though. Part of her current sadness, she knows, is the annual advent of shorter days, whatever the moon's doing. By October, sun and warm water will be just what she needs, a final taste of summer before winter kicks in.

*   *   *

Still in her bathrobe, hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, Veronique sits at her tiny kitchen table and stares balefully at her calendar. January 1. That means that the holidays are over. Tomorrow, she'll have to start prepping her spring classes. It's not like this will be a tremendous amount of work—she's teaching a Women & Lit class she's done a million times and a nineteenth-century British survey, one of her bread-and-butter courses—but just thinking about it makes her chest ache. In a little over two weeks, she'll be back in the classroom, dealing with a new crop of blunted brains.

Melinda always took her out to dinner on the first day of class. It happened by accident the first time; they'd been trying to find a time to have dinner, and that night just happened to work. Halfway through the meal, Veronique made some offhand comment about how nice this was, a little reward for making it through the first day of classes, and Melinda promptly said, “Well then, we'll have to make it a tradition.”

And so they had, for what, seven or eight years now? The first day of classes, both spring and fall semester—and the one year Veronique was foolish enough to teach summer school, which left her feeling like she'd been flattened by an army tank—they invariably went out for Thai food. The tradition had become more important each year, as Veronique's boredom with teaching morphed into active hatred of it.

Classes start in two weeks. What's she going to do?

She's weeping now, furious at herself but still flummoxed by the question, which feels like a real and pressing problem. She could take herself out to dinner, but that would feel like an exercise in misery. The real problem is that she dreads returning to the classroom. Her courses this semester are essentially prepped, but that's because she's taught them so often that they bore her into somnolence.

She could get in her car tomorrow, drive to Canada, and vanish. Go AWOL. Who cares how cold it is this time of year? Maybe the weather would deter people from looking for her. She pictures herself leaping across ice floes to reach freedom, like Eliza in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
.

She seriously entertains this fantasy for a moment, picturing what she'd pack—which of her shoes would work best on ice floes?—and then discards it. She has to take care of the cats, who would not consider a road trip to Canada, with or without ice floes, a good time. Her knee's hardly up to leaping. And God knows that if she could afford to just pick up and leave her job, she would have done it years ago. No, that won't work.

She takes a long swallow of coffee, sweet and creamy. Her doctor's been on her for years now to cut down on sugar and cholesterol, but she's never planned to live forever and she needs her pleasures. Savoring her French roast, she forces herself to think about work. The 19c Brit syllabus is pretty much dictated by the department; not much leeway there. But Women & Lit's an open topic. She can teach it however she wants.

Since the middle of last semester, it's been advertised as Women & Work, a topic that allows her to teach everything from Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
with its oppressed slave women toiling away under the lash, to Ehrenreich's
Nickel and Dimed,
with its oppressed Wal-Mart employees sorting endless piles of Jordache jeans. The topic resonates with the students, most of whom are working their way through school. For a long time, it was one of Veronique's more popular courses, which is why she keeps teaching it. But she's tired of it, as of so much else, and as she's grown more bored, so have the students. Time for a change.

All right, so what would be more interesting?

Women & Tourism.

Women & Murder.

Women & Abandonment.

Veronique feels encased in lead. What's she thinking? She can't prep a new course, with an entirely new set of books to be ordered, in two weeks. That's insane.

Women & Violence.

She blinks. Trendy. Relevant. Related, God knows, to Melinda, which means Veronique will have some emotional energy invested in the work. She can still use the Stowe, the first book on the syllabus, which will leave a month for the other books to come in, if she orders them in the next few days.

The students won't have signed up for this topic. On the other hand, Women & Lit satisfies both college and departmental requirements and always fills: she'll have students no matter what she teaches.

She pushes herself away from the breakfast table, already making lists as she heads upstairs to search her shelves, and the library database, for good fits. Stowe. Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers.”
Beloved. Bastard Out of Carolina,
or
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Something by Kingsolver, who's always a hit with students.

That's a thin list, but it's a start, and she'll find others. Maybe she can do this. Maybe she can force herself through another semester.

*   *   *

Gone, finally. Anna waves the detested rental car out of the driveway and goes inside to collapse onto the couch. William's parents have been in Seattle for a month and a half, from before Thanksgiving to now, New Year's Day. Even if she felt close to them, even if the visit hadn't come at such a hideous time, having them here for so long would have been a strain.

The one blessing is that they stayed in a hotel, not at the house. William spent a lot of time with them, which meant that Anna didn't have to, although it also meant she didn't see much of William. But that was true even before his parents descended on Seattle.

She suspects she'll see even less of him now.

She knows they have to talk. She's afraid to talk to him, afraid of guilt and accusations and recriminations, most afraid of having to witness his pain, since her own is vast and unsupportable and inescapable, the air she breathes and the lungs she breathes it with. She can't face what happened yet. She can't face talking to William about any of it, having to witness his own grief. His only son, his boy. Percy.

She hasn't been able to face anyone else, either. Her New Year's resolution is to get back into the world again: to help William with Kip's postponed opening, to go back to her knitting group, to turn her energies back to the Blake board, which will be meeting in a few weeks.

Before Marjorie and David came, all of that would have seemed unbearable. Now it will be a relief.

Marjorie and David, of course, arrived with an agenda. Communication. Openness. Transparency. They wanted everyone to share feelings, to use the incomprehensible horror of what Percy did and how he died as an opportunity for personal growth. They wanted to help William and Anna through the holidays, which they knew could be meaningful even in grief, and they wanted to help plan Percy's funeral as a community celebration of life. They hadn't been especially close to their only grandson, mostly because they lived in Massachusetts, but in this case, that was a blessing, because it gave them clearer heads with which to supervise their son and his wife.

Anna didn't want to be supervised.

She found their ideas about growth and transparency and celebration obscene.

She knows they meant well. They always mean well. But they always mean well in such a high-handed, officious, controlling way that it makes her want to scream. The funeral is none of their business. They kept telling her and William that it was important to have a service for closure, but Anna isn't sure she wants closure, even if she should. How can you have closure on the death of your only child? How is that possible under any circumstances, let alone these? She's simply not up to the ordeal of a memorial service, especially one that includes any form of the word “celebration.” She suspects William feels the same way, although they haven't discussed it directly. They've only discussed it through his parents.

In any case, the date's now fixed. Percy's memorial service will be on July 24, which would have been his twenty-third birthday. That's going to be a brutal day anyway: they might as well have the memorial then, and pack all the misery into as short a span as possible. At least it's a Saturday, the most convenient day for such an event.

Marjorie and David wouldn't leave Seattle until the date was set. They'll come back in July, for the service. Anna fervently hopes they won't stay another six weeks.

She's closed her eyes in sheer weariness, but she feels a wet nose nudging her hand, which rests on one knee. “Hello, Bart,” she says without opening her eyes; a warm tongue licks her palm in response. She hears soft thumping now, the dog's tail beating a tattoo against the carpet.

“Don't get your hopes up. The days of nonstop walks are over.” While Marjorie and David were here, she took Bart on three, four, five walks a day: to get away from them when they were in the house, and to relieve her stress through exercise when they and William were off somewhere without her. As much as she longed to be alone, she couldn't stand being in the house by herself; she kept finding herself listening for Percy's footsteps. So she'd fidget and pace and wind up taking the dog out, again. A few times, Bart even refused the leash, flopping down with his long head on his lanky paws. If you want to go out again, human, do it by yourself.

But David and Marjorie are gone, finally, and the weather's at its most wretched, and the dog will just have to cope with the old, two-walk-a-day regimen while Anna tries to resume her old life. She's pretty sure that no one in her knitting group or on the Blake board will want her to share her feelings about Percy. That's the upside of the isolation she's felt: the common decency of privacy.