"Did I not just say you have half your life left?"
"I thought you were being mean."
"I was being realistic. It’s your turn."
Her turn? She wasn’t the woman who’d spent the seventies bleaching her hair within an inch of its life and chasing down a herd of potential step-fathers. "I’m always realistic."
"You loved Barbie."
"I don’t even know Barbie."
"You liked the little shoes, the car, that one pink trench coat. It was quite stylish. But you loved the house most of all."
"Barbie’s dream house." Gwen closed her eyes and lay back down on the carpet. She’d moved the pink and white house and the Barbies to every apartment and rental Ellen had dragged them to. "It was perfect. Remember the tiny pink sink and the tiles set on the diagonal? Perfect."
"No one was in it."
Gwen opened her eyes. "Barbie was. And Ken. Ha, Barbie had Ken, and Ken stuck around, and there was Skipper. Was that her name? She was a young cousin or niece. Ungrateful daughter."
"Nope. No one was in the dream kitchen. Not even Barbie. It was always you with your hand in there setting the table, stacking the plates in the sink and making the water sounds. Remember the water sounds?"
"Shhhhh," it still sounded a little like water. Gwen felt the tears drip along her cheekbones and into her ears. "What am I going to do?"
Her mother smiled, brushed the tears off her right cheek, shrugged.
Gwen circled around the car, its backseat packed to just below the head rests. There was unobstructed vision from the rear view mirror. She’d checked, twice. Gwen had done it all, and now the day Missy was supposed to leave for college, she had to find a way to undo it. Standing in the driveway, the morning felt not so much new as foreign. Even the sun, salmon pink on the mountains, seemed a shade off of normal, the temperature a few degrees too hot even for August.
Readjusting her handbag on her shoulder, she considered that instead of transferring everything, she could drive the little red car straight to The Linen Source. She’d try to put back what she’d set in motion. Who knows, maybe she’d find a store called The Life Source and put back what the last couple of decades had set in motion. Would she return her past if she could? What if they gave her twenty-years of store credit to live over again? It would erase Steve. But some of those years had been good, or if not good, definitely pleasant.
But Missy would be erased too, or M would be. Gwen hated to think she didn’t even know what to call her daughter at eighteen. Once she’d known every cell of her and then her first word, hi. Her first step, the couch to the coffee table quickly followed by a fall and much crying and consoling. Gwen knew how to console an eleven-month-old baby, and she’d figured out when to encourage a cranky kindergartner to take a nap, even though Missy had insisted she was much too old for that at five. As a mom, she’d never failed to throw the right kind of birthday party that made ten special, eleven, twelve... She wouldn’t take a second of that back, just the present.
What was that expression she’d loved? The present is a gift? The present is the gift you give yourself? The present is a gift; that’s why they call it the present? Whatever the hell the saying was, she wanted to spray paint it on the house and drive the college car right through it.
She stopped, hand gripping the driver’s door handle. The house she had loved and cleaned and built a life in didn’t hold anything anymore. She had no life in it and no life outside it. She envied Missy, probably not for the first time, if she were honest with herself. Missy had an inviting path laid out, and then created another one that, while completely unappealing to pretty much anybody, Missy had a lot of enthusiasm for.
Gwen reached for her own car keys. She’d take the comforter out and put it in her car and start by returning something. Errands didn’t constitute a life, but they might help her forget she didn’t have one. Missy had two lives to choose from. She should take the one Missy wasn’t using.
The thought shot through her like something electric, and she stared again into the back seat at everything she’d picked out. She moved closer to the