The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,42

door.

I watched her slam out of the bar, and then I paid up, apologizing to Charlie, and followed after her. I found her on my front stoop, waiting for me.

“Lucy,” I said. “Come on.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. As I unlocked the door, pushing the warped wood open with my shoulder, I heard her stand and follow me inside.

I put the teakettle on and then came out to the living room, where she sat, brooding, in the dark. I took off my coat and smelled the cigarettes from the bar in my hair.

“Lucy,” I said. I sat down next to her. “I’m sorry.”

It was the first time I had realized it: I have always been looking ahead. I rarely saw my sister because she was always behind me.

I watched her remove her coat in the blue dark. The kettle whistled.

“Okay?” I stood and moved to turn on a lamp.

I saw my sister nodding, shyly, as the room filled with delicate light.

And now, if I were to call Lucy to tell her what had happened with Anita, how I had done this strange and horrible thing in that same town, all I could imagine hearing between us was the sound of the surf or the caw of a foreign bird.

_______

When I arrived home, Ramon was playing his hedgehog/mouse game, several beer bottles on the table.

“Have you even moved?” I asked, dropping my bags.

“Barely,” he said.

“Living it up, I see.” I bent down to kiss him on the cheek. I should mention Anita. Say something and make it go away, I thought.

“I don’t know.” Ramon stared straight ahead at his computer. He didn’t even greet Harriet. “Sometimes I just think I’m living it all down.”

I looked over at my husband. It was not worth repeating, I thought, nodding at the five bottles of beer on the table, lined up in a perfect row. I took off my parka. He was far away. “Sorry,” I said.

Ramon looked up at me. He smiled. “Oh, by the way,” he said. “Lucy called.”

13

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In the two months that had stretched out between Raleigh and the information session in White Plains, there was Anita upstate and then, as always, there were pregnancies. Three of my friends informed me—some gingerly, as sensitively as they could, some in mass e-mails to avoid telling me directly—that they were pregnant. One friend gave birth to an eight-pound boy, and another had to have a surgical abortion at six months due to a rare genetic disease. She already had a child, but I don’t think this made it easier for her when, in the supermarket, old ladies put their hands on her stomach, not knowing that inside was only a ghost.

That was when Michelle let me know Zoe would have a sibling.

“You’re pregnant?” I said when she called with the news.

“Yes! Yes. I’m so relieved, you know? Thank God,” she said. “You just never know if it’s going to work out. Of course, you know what I mean.”

“Congratulations, Michelle!” I was in my office/closet trying to get organized. I looked out onto the street, where two women walked together, both about to burst, one’s stomach taut and rounded, a fanged snake who’d eaten a bowling ball, the other’s belly torpedoed, as if she’d inhaled a missile.

“Maybe we’ll get to do this together again. Like we almost did before. Ugh, you know what I mean. You just never know; you just have to believe,” Michelle said. “Stranger things have happened.”

I was silent and I continued sorting through my piles of paper.

“Okay, I’m just going to say this,” Michelle stated. “And if you’re mad, you’re mad.”

There was a Mother’s Day card in one of these stacks. It was given to me. By Ramon. We’d been dating almost a year, and on Mother’s Day he had made me a card he’d created on the computer. “Maybe you shouldn’t say it then,” I told her as I fingered the card. “Because I’m not in a great mood.”

“What else is new!” Michelle said, falsely cheery.

“I realize I’ve been in a bad mood for like four years now,” I said. “I know.”

“I know. That’s the thing, Jesse. Being a mother, it’s not like it’s all good. It doesn’t solve everything. You can’t do everything. As a woman, I mean. We have all these roles, still. Nothing’s changed since our mothers, really. As you know, I have a fairly liberated husband, and he still tells me, ‘Just bring Zoe to your meeting. We can’t afford a sitter