farm in Wales. The trust will pay as long as the program is accredited. Or there’s another one where you study with the monks in Tibet. If you’re not ready—”
“Can we talk about this later?”
“There is nothing to talk about. You will come home tonight and you will be with me when the bank opens tomorrow morning.”
“Uh, yeah, okay, I’ll see.”
Was it me? Did I teach her to say that? To say, “I’ll see”?
“Aubrey, there is nothing to see. You have to come to the bank with me. You know this. They won’t release the trust funds if you’re not there to sign off. I have your letter of acceptance from Peninsula and the invoice from the bursar’s office, so they can just transfer as much as you need for the first year.”
“Sorry, tomorrow morning is impossible. Two new crews of framers start tomorrow, so Tyler and I are going to be slammed.”
Zen Mama cracks and morphs into Prison Matron Mama. “Oh, you will be slammed, Aubrey Lightsey. If you do not get your behind home this instant, you will be most definitively slammed.”
“Okay, I gotta go.”
“Aubrey, baby, don’t do this. Not for some guy who’s working in a roach coach.” I am apologizing before the last two words are out of my mouth. “Sorry, sorry, I meant catering van. Erase. Erase. Not ‘roach coach’—catering van. Lunch wagon. Food truck.” But it is already too late; I have spoken the forbidden words.
“I cannot keep having this conversation with you. If you insist upon belittling me and demeaning what Tyler and I are trying to do, the business that he and I are trying to build, our discussions are at an end. Your disrespect totally invalidates all the initiative and discipline and hard work and everything else you supposedly want me to show that I am, in fact, already showing.”
It stuns me how anger can transform my daughter from a monosyllabic mope into Rumpole of the Bailey. If Rumpole had a degree in counseling.
“Aubrey, please. I’m sorry. I slipped.” I grovel to no avail. She hangs up. I call back and it’s straight to voice mail.
I consider driving to the dump of a shack that Tyler rents with a rotating crew of dead-enders and miscreants, and dragging my daughter home by her hair. But ever since Black Ice Night I’ve known exactly what that would accomplish: She’d move into that shack with Tyler.
A Jerry Springer montage plays in my mind, featuring some blob of a skanky trailer-trash mom sitting next to her blob of an even skankier trailer-trash daughter—both of them wearing Daisy Dukes and radiating hatred toward each other—while someone in the audience stands up and, neck veins bulging, index finger stabbing toward the sullen daughter, who is rolling her eyes onstage, yells with self-righteous, Old Testament wrath, “If she were my kid, I’d lock her sorry ass up!” Or, “I’d call the police on her sorry ass!” Or, “I’d toss her mother-bleeping duh bleepitty-bleep-bleep sorry ass out on the motherbleeping street! S’what I’d do!”
I try to recall who I was when I watched these hillbilly jamborees. I have vague memories of being a puzzled, superior, teen-free mother who knew sure as gravity that she and her daughter would never go down that path. We would read The Secret Garden together and pick blueberries in Maine. We would never even come anywhere near that path.
And, I remind myself, we aren’t anywhere near it. Not really. Aubrey’s not doing drugs. She’s not giving blow jobs in the boys’ locker room. She’s just changed beyond recognition in the past year.
Forget anthrax. The greatest chemical threat facing our country today is the hormones delivered to our daughters at puberty. Hormones that, in Aubrey’s case, were not fully ignited until Tyler appeared.
If only I can get her shipped off to college.
I think of Aubrey twenty-four hundred miles away in the state of Washington, rushing to class across the Peninsula State College quad beneath towering evergreens that shelter the campus. It’s drizzling. It’s always drizzling there. But that was part of the appeal when we chose Peninsula at the start of her senior year, back before Tyler Moldenhauer scrambled her brain. Back then she wanted something as different from the sunbaked grids of Parkhaven as possible. She couldn’t wait to leave the world of megachurches and malls. Besides, Peninsula, her dream school, was close to Forks, Washington, where all her vampire books were set.
In the shower, warm water pulses against the top of my head