alone as I had, so I determined to give her a different kind of life, a different, better kind of love.
I had no idea how the past and present, comfort and disappointment, security and sadness would entwine into such an elegant knot.
chapter two
When Azalea was seven, she and I sat on the deck with my mom, who was visiting us from Michigan. The occasion for the trip was Azalea’s Grandparents and Special Friends Day. My mom had been driving me crazy. She made innocent “suggestions” about how I could do everything better, from setting the table to cooking the burgers to being nicer to Thayer, who rolled his eyes when she wasn’t looking but probably loved it. I still felt like she didn’t see me at all. And I still felt like she was cold, unattuned. She never meant to be bossy or intrusive or rude, of course, but she couldn’t help it. One day she snidely told me she thought my skirt was ugly, which really threw me. For the rest of the day, I silently fumed as we cooked and then ate, and then at night, as Thayer put Azalea to bed, my mom and I sat out on the deck, sipping our drinks—me a glass of wine, her a VO and water—and just watched the bats swoop across our yard, listening to the birds sing into silent darkness. As we sat there, I told her that I thought she was out of line in insulting me like that, especially in front of my family, and she took it in, then apologized.
A couple of days later, we sat chatting over guacamole and chips. Azalea had been telling us about how her teacher counted “blurts” on the board, and then withheld recess from the kids who talked out of turn the most.
“It’s not fair!” she said.
My mom and I agreed, saying that those were the kids who probably needed recess the most.
All of a sudden, my mom said, “Oh my gosh, Azalea, have I ever told you about Miss Patterson?”
Azalea shook her head and looked at me. I had never heard the story, either.
“Well,” my mom began, reaching for her sparkly cigarette pouch, “when I was in fifth grade, Miss Patterson—who ran an old-fashioned classroom—hit kids with a strap for talking.”
“Really?” Azalea asked, looking at me, her soft blue eyes open wide. She grabbed a chip. “Kids got hit?”
“One day,” my mom said, nodding, “I must have whispered something to a friend, and Miss Patterson told me to go put an X next to my name.”
My mom’s voice got stern, and she dropped her chin. “?‘That’s almost your third, isn’t it, Libby?’ said Miss Patterson, and then Bobby Connor piped up, ‘That was her third, Miss Patterson.’?”
Azalea laughed, maybe thinking of the know-it-all brown-nosers in her class.
“How the hell did he know?” my mom snorted, putting her cigarette to her lips, then inhaling, her long fingers hovering near her mouth.
“And of course,” she added, exhaling, “he was always in trouble.”
Watching my mom’s silver smoke disperse in waves, then bits, wondering where it goes, I listened as she told Azalea about how the worst part was that her parents’ policy was that if she or her sisters got the strap in school, they would get it again at home, and she knew that her sisters would hardly be able to wait to snitch on her. They were older than she was and in a different class, but it was a small school in the tiny Ontario town where she grew up, and news traveled fast.
“Oh my gosh!” Azalea said.
“The next day,” my mom continued, “Miss Patterson said, ‘We have some unfinished business to attend to, Libby.’
“My poor little heart was pounding as she took me to the hall outside the class,” my mom said, taking another drag.
But when she got to the hall, Miss Patterson gave her a package to take down the hall to the third grade teacher, Mrs. McIntosh, which she did, dutifully, if a little confused.
And then as my mom, wearing a perfectly pleated wool skirt from Scotland and