Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,58

Funny to waste what you had? End up in a place like this?’

Iris wasn’t really on his side, with its gold-leaf sconces and French doors and mahogany sideboards.

‘Rob,’ Ann says again, signaling something more overtly now. But my father is breathing heavily and shoveling chunks of burger into his mouth.

She sighs and takes my hand. ‘Pretty ring.’

I look down. My mother’s hand. My mother’s ring. She strokes the sapphire on my finger. This is what they’ve come for.

The professor is signaling for the check. I pull my hand out of Ann’s.

‘They want the ring,’ I tell Harry as I run the professor’s card through.

‘Your mother’s ring? That’s cheeky.’ He’s nabbed a duck confit and I get a fork and take a few bites. The tender meat dissolves in my mouth.

I tell Harry about my father and the storage closet and how the athletic director had not wanted to believe me when I told him about the peepholes.

‘Oh Casey.’ He looked around the corner. ‘That slumpy man out there?’

‘Ann has no idea. It was all hushed up. They even threw him a little retirement party with cake.’

I bring my father the check. No coffee refill or dessert menus or squares of chocolate.

‘Let Ann try it on,’ he says.

I shake my head.

‘Let your stepmother try on my mother’s ring.’

‘I haven’t taken it off since she died.’ I didn’t know that was true before I said it. I’m standing just far enough away so neither of them can reach me without a wild lunge.

‘How did you get it?’

‘She left it to me.’

‘Probably all she had in the world to give you, the way she lived. Casey,’ he says, trying to sound tender. ‘She left us.’

‘I know, Dad.’

‘Ann came and saved us. She took us in. And when I lost my job—’ His voice cracks. ‘I’ve never had much to offer her.’

Ann lifts her purse up on her lap. I look at her hands, big stones on nearly every finger from her ex. She pulls out her checkbook. ‘How much?’ Her first husband was a Du Pont.

‘No.’

‘C’mon,’ my father says. ‘Just tell us your price.’

I tap their bill on the tray. ‘Twenty-nine seventy-five. Have a good drive home.’

Instead of just leaving cash on the table they give it to Fabiana on their way out. There’s a brief exchange, I can’t tell about what, and they’re gone.

Fabiana brings me the tip on a tray. Less than 10 percent. She stabs a piece of the duck with my fork. ‘How do you know those people anyway?’

I thought once the book was out of my hands the bees would fly off and I could relax. But they are worse. All night I lie in the dark on my futon while they writhe beneath my skin. I try to soothe myself with thoughts of agents reading my manuscript, but my feelings about the novel start to shift. Soon any thought of it scalds me with shame. Six years and this is what I have to show for myself? I try to hold the whole thing in my head again and I can’t. I think about the first few pages and panic blooms in my chest and spreads like fire to my extremities. I watch the clock run through its numbers until it is light.

During the day I miss working on it. I’ve lost access to a world where my mother is a little girl reading in a window or twirling in fast circles on the street, her braids raised high off her back. Outside of those pages she is dead. There seems no end to the procession of things that make my mother feel more dead.

The gynecologist has ordered a mammogram. He said my breasts were difficult to examine manually because they were fibrous. It makes me feel like a cereal.

The technician is rough. She shoves and tugs my right boob into place on the glass plate and brings the other plate down with the touch of a button and just when it is as tight and squished as I can bear, she lowers it more. Sometimes she has to lift it back up a bit and cram my flesh in deeper. She should be a potter or a chef. Her hands are strong and certain. She reminds me of the line cooks stuffing potatoes.

When she’s doing the final position, she asks me to draw my shoulder back, and when I can’t seem to do it to her liking she draws it back herself. ‘Good,’ she says but