Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,67
messy house in Columbus, filled with the cousins she saw once a year on Christmas, who exchanged a ton of tacky plastic as-seen-on-TV gadgets and talked about Jesus in a way that made her mom and Matt visibly uncomfortable. Then she realized that wasn’t the grandmother Tom was talking about.
“Oh, my bio dad’s mother. I don’t even know who that is. I guess that’s weird.”
“That is weird! Does she know you exist?”
“I think so. But my mom and I have talked about this stuff for, like, a cumulative forty-five minutes over the course of my entire life, you know? You definitely know more about my dad’s family than I do.”
“So you’ve never met her?”
“No, I’ve never met anyone in his family. It doesn’t seem important. Look, can we talk about something else? Or, like, do something else?” She tried to look at him the way she had seen people do in movies and TV shows—flirtatiously, suggestively. She half closed her eyes and inclined her head in a direction that would have made it easy for him to lean down and start kissing her again. He ignored it.
“So this is kind of crazy, but what if you went to visit her and you asked if you could have the tapes? Like, as a kind of inheritance?”
Marie opened her eyes fully. “That’s not kind of crazy, that’s completely crazy. Where does she even live?”
“The internet thinks she lives in Massachusetts. We could drive there in, like, five hours.”
“Let’s just go right now, right? Road trip!”
Tom didn’t catch her sarcasm, or refused to. “Well, no, but you could probably figure out how to call or email her. And then we could go visit. We could plan it together. It would be an adventure for us.”
“Where would we sleep?” There was no way she would actually do this, but she liked thinking about it. She imagined a room in some kind of gross roadside motel, peeling back the rough comforter and climbing into a bed with Tom, and felt terrified and thrilled. It was like remembering a scene from a movie, not like imagining a possible thing that might happen in her life.
Tom shrugged. “I hadn’t thought it through that far—in the car, I guess? Or at your grandmother’s house, if she’s nice.”
Marie shook her head. During one of their many recent hushed, tense conversations about money, Matt had mentioned something about inheritance, and Laura had said that no amount of money was worth having to deal with “that awful woman.” Marie was just now realizing that they had to have been talking about her grandmother.
“I don’t know. Basically the only thing I know about her is that my mom doesn’t like her.” Marie pulled her hand away from Tom’s grasp. “This whole idea is just too scary and weird, Tom.”
He grabbed her hand back and started to rub the inside of her wrist with his pointer finger, lightly.
“A road trip is romantic, right?” He leaned in for a kiss.
They kissed for a long time. A goat bleated in the distance, but Marie barely heard it. When they stopped kissing, she was ready to agree to almost anything.
* * *
Laura woke up and knew, without checking, that Marie was home, safe in her bed. She must have barely breached the surface of consciousness at whatever point in the night that Marie had crept in the door, then dived back down into a deeper sleep. It must have been very late, but at least she had come home. Anyway, it wasn’t worth picking another fight about, and she always wanted to keep Marie from feeling bad if at all possible.
She got out of bed and looked in the mirror over her dresser to see whether the damage from the thrown phone was still visible. Luckily it wasn’t, though if you were looking for it you could see that the undereye circle on that side was slightly darker. Laura still looked incongruously young compared to most of her kids’ friends’ parents, but compared to all the versions of herself that had existed previously, she looked old. Not old old, but not young anymore. It wasn’t about gray hair or wrinkles or anything that obvious, but more in the set of her jaw and the reflexive downward tilt of her mouth. Her default mode was skepticism and worry. When she’d been younger her default mode had been openness and inquisitiveness, and the light in her eyes had flashed at everyone indiscriminately. Now she wished she had saved