worry in the TV room.
Will teased her that she spent twenty-three hours a day worrying about the kids. But what did he expect? Of course she worried about them. That was what mothers did, wasn’t it? Will had the luxury of knowing that she was taking care of the worrying and so he didn’t have to. He could rest his head on the pillow at night and sleep well.
When the kids were little, she’d worried about their getting hit by a car. She was a firm believer in hand-holding. Max and Martha had been like obedient little suction cups when they reached the street, holding their hands up to her, clinging to her with trust. Claire was the first one to pull away, to hold her arm stiffly by her side, glaring up at Weezy, wanting her independence.
When they were in high school, Weezy worried that they’d get in a car with someone who’d been drinking. When they were in college, she worried that the girls would be raped, that Max would be mugged, that they’d fall down the stairs at a wild party and break their necks, that they’d try drugs, drink too much, or vanish. The list went on and on. She kept most of her worries to herself, knowing that if she shared them with Will, he’d just think she was overreacting.
And then she worried that all of her worrying had made Martha the way she was. Maybe as a child Martha sensed Weezy’s fear of the world, absorbed it as a little person, and let it overtake her. Or maybe it had been passed down in her genes, a worrying gene that mutated and grew in Martha.
She wondered if having the girls so close together hadn’t given her enough time with either of them. They were less than a year apart and so different in every way. Had she made them the way they were? She would never know.
And so she continued to go through her clothes and worry. She worried that Claire was unhappy, that Max would get hurt by Cleo, that Martha wasn’t going to be able to get back to nursing. There was always something. That’s what Will never got. You could worry from morning until night, and even then, there’d be something more, something else that you needed to add to the list.
CHAPTER 4
Right from the start, Cleo knew she wanted to go to a college with a campus. She wanted green lawns and trees. She wanted a quad with brick buildings and college kids reading books on the grass. Basically, she wanted to go to college in a picture.
“Why?” her mom kept asking. “Why narrow it down before you even start looking?”
“Because,” Cleo said. She left it at that. Cleo had grown up in New York, lived on the Upper West Side her entire life surrounded by buildings and people, and she was ready for something different. There was no explaining to Elizabeth why she wanted—no, needed—a campus. She couldn’t say that she was craving greenery, that she imagined herself walking across grass, wearing a backpack, while leaves fell in front of her. She couldn’t say that she wanted to go to a school that had a campus because that was how she’d dreamt it would be. Elizabeth was not a dreaming woman, and would never understand.
Cleo also couldn’t say that she wanted to go somewhere different, somewhere no one else from her high school had even considered going. She’d listened as the guidance counselor had listed all the usual colleges, and she’d pressed the woman for more options until she’d come up with some.
When she stepped onto Bucknell’s campus, she knew it was the place for her. Their tour guide was a cute girl named Marnie, with a brown ponytail and a raspy voice. She was the kind of girl that looked like she always had a party to go to. Marnie laughed as she pointed to all the brick buildings, told them that she was a philosophy major (which made Elizabeth snort), that she was from Quakertown, Pennsylvania, and that her boyfriend was on the baseball team. “He’s the pitcher,” she said proudly, like they should all be jealous. Cleo found that she was.
After the tour, she and Elizabeth went to have lunch in Lewisburg, at a little place called Maya’s Café. Cleo tried to contain herself as they walked down Market Street, even though she wanted to point at the old-fashioned movie theater and squeal. Elizabeth didn’t like