her, she was suddenly aware of her bare arms. He had a friendly face. And he listened when she talked.
Really, this was all it took. Greg Liddiard could have said anything about poetry. He could have been an idiot, though he was not. She was that starved for interaction, for real eye contact, even. She was standing by the window at the end of the hall, the afternoon sun shining so hard that her skin felt hot and she had to move away from it. Later, after he moved past her, when she turned and looked up at the sky, she saw that it was a cloudy day.
It was just one indiscretion, and never even fully realized. But as Dan liked to say, she had made her bed, and she could lie in it. Or sit in a booth at a diner, with all her worldly possessions packed in her minivan.
She supposed she should regret that first moment in the hallway with Greg, that first time she let herself look back at him, right into his pale, attentive eyes. But really, even now, she didn’t. He was in Alaska now, married, a new father, and not the great love of her life. But if he hadn’t come along, she might have still been living with Dan, going to sleep with her eyes and ears covered so she wouldn’t hear the television after he finally came to bed. It was a more comfortable life than the one she had now, but she wouldn’t pretend it was preferable.
This is what she would tell her daughters, both of them, if they would let her. But Elise got angry when she talked about Greg. Veronica clapped her hands over her ears. She understood—they thought she meant to talk about sex; and yes, of course, that was private, and nothing they wanted to associate with their mother. But so much that was private could be helpful, instructional, and what she wished she could tell them was that what happened with Greg had little to do with sex and more to do with bravery. Even before she met him, she had grown tired of living cautiously. She wished she could tell them that as scared as she was now, she didn’t regret what she’d done. Passion wasn’t always rewarded. And yet that wasn’t the point.
Of course, neither of her daughters—the lawyer or the future doctor—was asking for any advice or wisdom from her at the moment. Just the night before, when she had come to Veronica’s door, when she’d had to tell her daughter she had nowhere else to go, Veronica had looked at her with a mix of sympathy and horror, and it had made Natalie want to run back out into the night, into the cold, to the van. She wanted her daughter to feel sorry for Marley; that was fine. She didn’t want her to feel sorry for her. She wanted to be someone her children could admire.
She thought she still could be. She felt sure of it for a while that morning, after she helped Veronica, after they’d gotten Jimmy out of the van; and she wanted to hang onto that idea that she could give each of her daughters something now, even after she had failed, even while she was falling. She did have something to give them. Because she knew she could get back up.
It was almost midnight when she closed the newspaper and stood to put on her coat. She’d only circled two ads, but she’d read the rest of the paper, cover to cover, except for Sports. She took just the Classified section and left the waitress five dollars. On her way out, the waitress waved and thanked her. Natalie, lifting her head, thanked her back.
14
I KNEW, EVEN AS I TOOK the test, that I was failing it. List below the hydroxybutanol structures that have R configurations. I’m not sure why I made myself stay the entire hour and a half. What spinning pattern in the H-nmr spectrum would you expect for H atoms colored green in the structures below? I probably could have walked out in the first fifteen minutes and gotten the same grade.
But I worked as well as I could through each question, calm and unhurried. Deep down, I had already accepted what was true. Two out of three wouldn’t make it to medical school, and I would be one of the two. But for that last hour and a half, I did my best,