would give me away, I thought. And then I felt a rush of gratitude for myself, for the me who’d backed away at the beach, for the me who’d made the right choice.
Bette returned and handed me a glass. “You know what I’ve always liked about you and Dennis?”
“We bring dessert,” I said.
“You stay up late. All these couples we know, they’re in bed by nine.”
It was after midnight. A car alarm was going off nearby. Bette and Suzanne’s dog had come outside and was standing in the water on the top step of the swimming pool, looking around warily like a self-conscious woman in a bathing suit.
Before we left, Bette handed me a poinsettia in a copper pot. “Someone gave it to me,” she said. “I thought of you.”
It was compact, its flowers immature but bright. “I’m not sure I have a place for it.”
“You’ll find one. Be strong, woman.”
In the car, Dennis said, “What was that about? Being strong?”
“Your sister is strange,” I said. “Drive carefully. You’ve been drinking.”
I balanced the plant between my knees. I didn’t want it, and I knew I would eventually let it die. Bette knew it, too—I realized this in a rush—and that’s why she’d given it to me. She’d seen the flow of plants through my household over the past two decades. It was easier for her to give it to me, which she knew meant certain death, than to keep it and watch it die on her own. If she’d kept it, she would have rescued it from near-death out of guilt, then let it subside, then rescued it again. This could go on for years. “Stop the car for a second,” I said to Dennis.
He pulled over. We were at the corner of LeJeune and Barbarossa, in front of Merrie Christmas park, which I knew had once been a rock quarry. It now was a grassy basin filled with craggy banyans and a jungle gym. As a little girl Margo had swung from the vines. I took the plant, walked into the dark park, and placed it in the middle of a picnic table. I wanted to write a note—TAKE ME—but I didn’t have a pen or paper.
“That seems ungracious,” said Dennis when I got back into the car.
“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s exactly what she would do if she were me.”
Margo came home for a week before the start of the fall semester. She was settled into her apartment by this time—she’d been assigned a roommate, Janelle, whose boyfriend more or less lived with them, which concerned me—and we’d planned to spend some time shopping for kitchen necessities. As soon as she got off the bus, she said she needed to find a pay phone. She’d left the oven on, she told me, or thought she might have. Janelle’s boyfriend answered and she asked him to check. We waited. It was a muggy night, starry and bright with moonlight. She’d gained some weight since July Fourth weekend; her face was rounder, her jeans tight against her stomach. She caught me staring. “Stop looking at me, Mom,” she said. “So I put on a few pounds, so what?”
“So what, indeed?” I tried to sound breezy.
Margo spoke into the phone. “God, I thought so. Why do I always do that?”
“You really left it on?” I said. My breath caught. Would my daughter burn down her building?
She hung up. “I made toast this morning,” she said to me. “I left the broiler on.”
I hadn’t known Margo to use the word broiler. “Sweetheart, you have to be careful,” I said.
She threw up her hands and walked off toward the car. We’d been together ten minutes and already we were bouncing off each other like we did sometimes. “Are you hungry?” I said, and she said, “Starving.”
We went to a Mexican restaurant in downtown Coconut Grove, an area that at this hour was busy and frenetic. I paid to park and took her arm as we walked down Grand Avenue, past a pair of unwashed teenagers playing guitars on the sidewalk, then past a man wearing a JESUS SAVES sandwich board. At the restaurant, we slid into a corner booth and Margo dove into the tortilla chips and salsa. I ordered a margarita on the rocks and Margo said, “The same” and the waitress wrote it down without even looking at her.
“Well!” I said when we were alone.
“It’s OK, right?” she said. “I mean, I can drink.”
“I guess I don’t see why not.”
I avoided