you go. That’s the story. Do with it what you will.
“I don’t know anything about the past, Ms. Santé,” Zelda said. “But as for today, it really wasn’t Parker’s fault.”
“I don’t want to hear it. I really don’t. This”—she pointed at me, then all around her—“has been my life for years now, ever since Marco passed away. It’s been unending. Parker acts as if he’s the only one who lost something. He gets to screw up over and over again and I’m supposed to hold everything together.” Her eyes were filling with tears, the way they always did when she so much as mentioned my dad. “You have no idea how many excuses I’ve heard.”
Zelda looked at me, as if asking my permission for something, though I didn’t know what. (And if I had known, I probably wouldn’t have given it.)
“And what’s your excuse?” she said.
My mom was so sunk into her own emotional meltdown, she didn’t fully register the question. “What?”
“I asked you what your excuse was.”
“My excuse? For what?”
“For this show you’re putting on. For the perpetual pity party you appear to be throwing yourself. Can’t you see what a terrible example you’re providing?”
“Young lady, you’re in my house right now—”
“Exactly!” Zelda said. “And let’s take a look at this house of yours, shall we?” She marched through the kitchen and on into the living room, to the photograph mounted over the television. It had been taken in Mexico, I think, or somewhere with a beach, anyway—my mom and my dad, looking a lot younger than I’d ever known them to be, a little younger than it seemed they ever could have been. Kids, basically. They were too close to the camera, which my dad was holding (a selfie before the age of the selfie), and smiling like the world was a deck full of aces. Perfect happiness.
“Look at that, Ms. Santé. Right in the middle of the room. And you wonder why your son is utterly arrested?”
“Because I have photographs of my late husband? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Parker could get better, but he doesn’t want to. And that’s because you could get better and you don’t want to. You surround yourself with these so you won’t ever let go, and that’s what you’ve taught your son is normal. It’s shameful, Ms. Santé. I’m sorry, but it’s absolutely shameful.”
“I will not stand here and be lectured about grief by a girl.”
“But you expect your son to stand here and be lectured about self-control by an alcoholic?”
For the first time in the conversation, my mom was stunned into silence. In an instant, my mind flashed through a hundred different micro-memories: bottles piled up in the recycling bin, cranky mornings and sleepy evenings, the smell on her breath. They had a rule at Delta that you couldn’t have anything to drink for twelve hours before a flight, and I knew my mom had never broken it. But I also knew that she made a big deal about not breaking it, and sometimes she’d pour herself a big Bloody Mary early in the morning, if she had an all-nighter coming up. Did that mean what Zelda said was true? And why hadn’t I ever noticed?
Finally my mom found her voice again. “Get out,” she said.
“With pleasure.”
Zelda slammed the door behind her. In thirty seconds she’d stripped my mom of all parental authority. Now we were just two fucked-up people standing in a dirty kitchen with no idea what to say to each other. My mom lowered her wineglass to the counter with a shaky hand. I headed for the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Wherever she’s going, I signed.
IN THE SHAKESPEARE GARDEN
I RAN TO CATCH UP with Zelda, and together we walked north, back into Golden Gate Park. It was after eight, and the park was mostly empty, though there were still a few health nuts running the trails in their Lycra shirts and shorts, iPod shuffles stuck to their arms like multicolored Nicorette patches. Streetlights glowed orange on the major roads, but there was no light on the trail Zelda was taking, toward a locked gate and a metal sign that read shakespeare garden.
“Come on,” she said, and climbed over the gate.
I’d been in the Shakespeare Garden before, but it felt totally different in the dark, almost like a cemetery. A path ran between two rows of stone benches to a kind of altar, on which was posed a bust of the big man himself, with