feel now that there is something she wants to tell me. For a fraction of a second her eyes widen with panic and I am certain that she is about to reveal everything.
I lean forward, reach out, and she whirls away. “I cannot be having this conversation now. Tyler will be here any second and I have to—”
I grab her arm before she can rush off. “What do you mean, Tyler will be here any second? You don’t seriously think that you’re going to work today. I have canceled all my appointments except for the class I have to teach later this morning to get this done. Why are we even discussing this? You’re coming to the bank with me right now. We’re going to transfer the money to pay for your first year’s tuition. Then we’re going to pack all of this up.” I wave at the college supplies. “Then we’re going to put you on a plane. Tomorrow. End of discussion.”
“Okay! All right! I’ll go. I just can’t do it right now. Tyler and I are running a business and he needs me.”
“You’re working at a frigging lunch wagon, and if we don’t go today, right now, that is exactly what you are going to be doing for the rest of your life! Is that what you want?”
“I am not ‘working at.’ We rent it. We’re partners. We’re building something, but just because it doesn’t exactly fit your perfect-daughter image, you don’t want to know anything about it.”
“About what? What is there to know? Seriously, tell me.”
“Why? So without you knowing anything, I can listen to you tell me what a loser I am?”
“Tell you you’re a loser? Aubrey, when have I ever told you you’re a loser? I have bathed you in toxic levels of self-esteem your entire life. I adored every drawing you ever held up for my approval and cheered every spelling test you ever passed. Your entire childhood was nothing but a Milky Way of gold stars awarded every time you brushed your teeth or pottied. Come on. We have been waiting for this day for sixteen years. We can finally claim your get-out-of-town money. Please, sweetie. For me. Let’s just keep all the options open.”
She jerks her arm away. “I said I’d do it! I can go this afternoon. I’ll meet you back here after the lunch rush.”
“I can’t believe you don’t want to be at the bank as soon as the doors open. What is so hard about this?”
“Uh, honoring your commitments. Ever heard of it?”
“How about your commitment to your future?”
“Whatever.”
“ ‘Whatever’? Did you just say ‘whatever’ to me?”
I stare at this surly stranger planted in the middle of my kitchen radiating disgust at me in her inevitable pair of Nike shorts and one of her redneck boyfriend’s old T-shirts and wonder if she is my penance for once believing that I was a parenting genius and that puberty was a tale invented by old wives who didn’t know how to accept and love their children and let them follow their own unique path to become the unique human they were intended to be. The way I, in all my enlightenment, had.
At just the moment when I want to scream, “You bitch!” and not in the chummy BFF way, I see tears, staunchly unshed, glaze her eyes. Mossy green with thick lashes, her eyes are exactly like Martin’s. Exactly like the one other person I loved most in the world who also became a complete and total stranger to me.
“Aubrey, sweetie. What is it? What’s going on? You can talk to me. You know you can tell me anything.”
Her chin quivers. The past year of hardness and distance falls from her and she is the little girl who collected dinosaur stamps and begged me for a pink bedroom with a canopy bed. There is a second of clarity, a truce. An umbilical connection joins us and I feel her anguish as surely as if she were kicking inside me beneath my heart.
“Aubrey, what’s wrong, baby? Please. Tell me. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out together.”
SEPTEMBER 9, 2009
Every day I edge six inches closer to the football field. Today I reach the midway point between the football and band fields. It’s not even about Tyler. The android predator with the number seven on his jersey directing the other androids on the football field is really beside the point. Seven has become just one of 360 degrees on a compass. I could