“Mama,” Alma whined. “Your phone is ringing.”
Hazel strained against Mattie’s hollering, listening for the vibration. When she finally found her phone, facedown next to the stove in a puddle of water, it was still buzzing. jenny, it blinked.
“Hey.” Hazel clamped the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she lifted Mattie by the armpits out of his high chair. Content on the floor, Mattie picked up Alma’s discarded shoe and lifted the dirty sole to his slobbering mouth.
“The job,” Jenny was saying.
“What? I can’t hear—”
“I got the job,” Jenny said. “I did it, Hazel. I left him. But it was bad, really bad. I didn’t have time to do any of the things we talked about. Ansel read my email, he woke me up late last night. I left, I checked into the hotel, but I don’t have any of my things. Can you come?”
Jenny was crying, choked through the speaker, a siren wailing vaguely in the background. Hazel looked down at Alma, always far too perceptive for her age, an expression of concern painted across her little fox face. Hazel wrapped her fingers in Alma’s silky hair and gazed out at the flat expanse of the neighborhood. It was placid as ever, the sky a blank autumn blue. The calm seemed unfair, nearly taunting.
She remembered only after she made the plan, hung up the phone. Late last night. The squeeze in her chest, that phantom fist. At thirty-nine years old, Hazel had experienced her first Summoning.
*
No one could tell Hazel, now, that she had nothing.
She had Barbie dolls and board books. Baby formula, playdates, macaroni art. She had rice pudding smeared into the carpet and sticky hands early in the morning. A tantrum in the shampoo aisle at Target, a tantrum at the Italian restaurant downtown, a tantrum at her parents’ anniversary party. In the rare moment she found time to reflect, Hazel tried to revel in the chaos and motion, the fierce existence of the world she had so deliberately created.
So when Jenny called with the news, Hazel hunched over the kitchen table, shaking with the calibration. A younger self came flooding in, an annihilating rush: she was eighteen years old again, and Jenny was the whitest sun, the sharpest sound. The refrain from those withering teenage years echoed suddenly back. Be happy for her. In the cave of Hazel’s head, the phrase took on an old wounded tone, the words limp and defeated.
Alma reached out, her face like a worried little psychiatrist—she stroked Hazel’s hair, tender, her palm covered in half-peeled Winnie the Pooh stickers.
*
The change had happened slowly, almost imperceptibly. Hazel could trace the start of it back to Jenny’s wedding day.
Their parents had rented a tent on a golf course, with a partially obscured view of Lake Champlain. There were only thirty guests, mostly aunts, cousins, and Jenny’s high school friends. Hazel had only been dating Luis a few months by then, and it was the sort of new and giggling love that could be fractured by the politics of an event like this. She had not invited him. Standing behind Jenny as she pinned up loose tendrils of hair, Hazel ached for Luis’s presence—Luis was the kind of man who could not handle sad movies, or scary ones either. He cooked his mother’s tamale recipe on Sunday nights, kneading the dough with his knuckles.
Luis was the only person Hazel had told about Jenny’s secret.
Ansel hadn’t graduated from college. He didn’t show up for any of his finals, that last semester—Jenny mentioned a fellowship he didn’t get, a professor who had written a bad recommendation. He’s too smart for them, she told Hazel, Ansel’s voice layered beneath the words. Jenny lied at the graduation ceremony, told their parents the philosophy program did something separate, while Ansel sulked in his dorm room. Ansel had worked at a furniture store ever since, where he polished handmade chairs and artisan tables and delivered them to wealthy families across Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. He was writing a book, Jenny said proudly. That part was true. Hazel had seen the pages, stacked on a makeshift desk in the garage when she’d gone to visit. She found it difficult to picture him sitting there, committing his thoughts to paper—it seemed more like a show than a genuine endeavor, a way for Ansel to remind himself of his own middling intellectualism. And there were other things she’d noticed, in that small rental house. The recycling bin, filled with empty wine bottles, a cheap chardonnay Ansel would never touch.
In the bridal tent before the wedding, Hazel tried to talk to Jenny. But she had waited too long. Jenny’s breath was sour with champagne, her eyes glassy as Hazel handed over a tube of lipstick.