and couch it as a question, Aubrey still bristles. It’s never the words. Not between a mother and a daughter. It’s what lies beneath the words. It’s every asthma attack Aubrey has ever had. It’s her having to quit the soccer team when she was eight because Dr. Queng thought that exercise triggered the attacks. It’s the fact that she had her first serious attack in a long time on the day of graduation three months ago and they’ve continued through the summer and, judging from the one empty and one nearly empty inhaler, have skyrocketed in the past two weeks. It’s that we both know that anxiety is a much worse trigger than soccer ever was. It’s that we can both turn our heads and see that the great room is filled with supplies for a four-year journey she won’t even talk about making. It’s that I’m starting to suspect that something far more ominous than simple grumpiness and reflex resistance is at the heart of her reluctance to claim her college money.
She gives me a look that encodes an encyclopedia’s worth of information and I translate every buried meaning: Stop hovering. Stop knowing enough about me to monitor, to judge, every single, solitary breath I take.
I go into Zen Mama state, refuse to mirror back her mood, and say with as much perk and pep as I can manage, “So, today has to be the day we collect your tuition. For the first year.” No reaction. Though it’s a strategic weakness, I am so desperate for signs of life from her that I ask, “Are you excited?”
Aubrey glances at me as if I’d inquired brightly, “Triple root canal today! Are you excited!?” Since Aubrey shut me out after Black Ice Night, almost nine months ago, I have been reduced to gathering clues about her in nonverbal ways. So I step close enough that I can smell her breath. It is metallic from the inhaler. Before her expression curdles and she backs away, I inhale more of her smell and analyze it as if I were a perfume maker. I detect the odor of burned coffee and Fritos that clings to her no matter how many times she showers. I can also smell the enemy: Tyler Moldenhauer. Besides those familiar odors, though, there is a new one that I’ve been catching hints of for the past few weeks. Amazingly, it is the aroma of actual cooking, the last thing that might occur in the lunch wagon. I try to identify the novel odor’s components—garlic, cumin, lemon, parsley, and an earthy aroma that for some inexplicable reason causes me to recall the moment I met her father on that train lumbering through Morocco.
Aubrey reaches out and flicks the clips I used to pin my sheepdog bangs out of my face. “What’s this? What’s going on here?”
Delighted just to be interacting, I run my fingers along the bristly hedgehog array poking out behind the clips and explain, “Oh, you know, my bangs are in that awful stage when they’re too short to pull back behind my ears and just hang in my eyes.”
“You look like a Chinese gymnast. I don’t see why you cut bangs in the first place.”
“You’re serious?” I ask her, flabbergasted. “I cut them because of what you said.”
“I never told you to cut bangs.”
“Not in so many words.”
She pretends not to remember what I’m talking about. Not to remember that moment right before we set out for her high school graduation in the middle of May when she studied me with the laser intensity that only a teenage daughter can bring to bear upon her forty-four-year-old mother, then asked, “You know who you remind me of?”
“Who?” Grateful that Aubrey had tossed me a rare conversational bone and thrilled by the unusual experience of eye contact with my daughter, I wondered who she’d name. It had been a while, but people used to tell me I reminded them of Joan Cusack. It might be because I too have a barely perceptible lisp, since both of us seem to have tongues a tiny bit too big for our mouths. Would Aubrey even know who Joan Cusack was?
“Who do I remind you of?” I prompted. I’d also heard Maggie Gyllenhaal. I knew she knew who Jake Gyllenhaal was.
“Benjamin Franklin.”
“Benjamin Franklin!” I’d laughed and swatted at Aubrey, pretending the Benjamin Franklin comment was a joke. “You bitch!” Back before Tyler, when I used to know who her friends were—the sweet, gawky