female presidential nominee from a major party,” the news anchor said.
“Can you believe it?” Bethie asked. “Did you ever think we’d see the day?”
“Now she just has to win,” said Shelley, knocking on wood, and Jo waved her hand, knowing that Hillary was practically a lock, feeling sad only that she wouldn’t be alive to see it.
Bethie was holding a pot of lotion, Blue Hill Farm’s latest product line, a rich cream scented with lavender grown a few hundred yards away. “How about a hand massage?” Gratefully, Jo let her sister put a dollop of lotion into the center of her palms and spread it up her wrists and over her fingers, rubbing gently. She let her eyes drift shut, thinking that during these last few weeks she had been more moisturized than she’d been in all her life. Someone was always offering to rub her hands, her calves, her feet. She could feel the pain, down deep, but it was muffled and distant, far away, for now.
“Mom.”
Kim was first, of course. Kim was always early; Kim hated people who were late. It’s disrespectful, she’d say. Jo opened her eyes and smiled.
“Hi, honey.” She hoped that she didn’t look awful. She’d lost weight, and her hair again, of course, but she was wearing a light-blue linen tunic and, under her blankets, a pair of loose pale-gray pants. She’d insisted on real clothes, not a hospital gown, and had even allowed Shelley to smooth foundation on her face and brush some color on her cheeks and lips, and she’d hoped she looked all right, but she could see the truth in Kim’s startled expression, the way her eyes had briefly widened with shock. There was a couch on one side of the hospital bed, a daybed on the other. Jo had imagined the girls and Bethie sitting there, reading to Jo, sometimes talking or telling her stories, the way she’d told them stories when they were girls.
Kim came over and stood by the side of the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Not bad, considering. How are you?” Jo looked at her daughter’s face, searching for signs of tension or sadness, the way Kim would press her lips together tightly, like there were words she didn’t want to let out. Kim’s daughters were behind her, Flora, tall and lanky, with her spill of honey-blond hair and the lips that she kept closed over her braces, and solid, dark-eyed, curly-haired Leonie. Soon, Flora would have her bat mitzvah, and Jo wouldn’t be there. Jo inhaled slowly, trying to think of all the time she’d had with her granddaughters, and not everything that she’d miss.
Kim and Matt had gotten divorced when the girls were six and three years old. “I can’t be the kind of wife he wants,” Kim had said when she’d showed up on Jo’s doorstep with her suitcase and her girls. Jo got the story in pieces, learning that Kim had planned on going back to work full-time after Leonie started full-day nursery school. Matt had wanted her to stay home. “He wanted to take care of me. And I feel awful, because that was what I wanted when we got married. A man who’d take care of me. A man who’d never leave. And a life where I’d never have to worry about money.” Jo had nodded, keeping quiet, thinking about how Kim must have chosen in reaction to her own parents’ divorce. Matt, unlike Dave, would never leave her, and he certainly wouldn’t leave her scrambling for money, living in a condo with flimsy walls and fraying carpet, paying for her kids’ education with loans while he whooped it up with her neighbor. “But I don’t want that anymore,” Kim said. Kim had cried, and Jo had comforted her, had told her that she was a wonderful mother to her daughters, that people changed, and sometimes, marriages did not survive those changes, in spite of everyone’s best intentions. “You’re allowed to want to use your education,” Jo said. “You’re allowed to want to be more than a mother.”
So Kim had gone back to work, first at the U.S. attorney’s office and then as a public defender for young women, frequently young mothers, who’d gotten lengthy sentences selling or even just possessing quantities of pot that wouldn’t have gotten a white kid anything more than a warning. Kim had needed Jo, and Jo was happy to be needed. For years, she would spend a few nights each week in New York