“No,” Jules says. “She has a new life.”
“Come on, years have passed since you were with that woman. And frankly, she isn’t aging well.”
There is a long pause. “I wanted us to have kids,” Jules says. “But she had them with someone else.”
“So? You can have them with someone else, too.”
“Are you mocking me?”
“Listen to me, Jules,” Mom says. “I have important things to say to you.”
She moves closer and he eyes her mistrustfully, sweat beading on his pale forehead. Suspended between sounds of pounding feet above and laughter below, the room feels strangely still.
“I have three children,” Mom says. “This is Hannah, my oldest. She’ll be gone in a year, and the others will go soon enough. They’re the best and only thing I’ve managed to do in this world. I’m friendless, and God knows how long Bruce will stick around after Hannah goes. I’m not the woman he married, as he often reminds me.”
“Mom, stop it,” I say. But I see that she means it, and feel a torque of dread.
“If I can do this, anyone can,” Mom tells Jules. “Certainly you can. You have skills, a trade, a place in the world.”
Jules seems to register my presence in the room for the first time. Then he looks back at Mom. I watch him see her: a thin, anxious woman with bleached-blond hair, in a polka-dotted dress.
“You moved the fence,” he says. “That’s what this is about.”
“Let’s go,” Mom says.
Jules seizes his tape measure and they leave the room side by side, with me close behind. “Are you… writing an article?” I ask, to ease the silence. “I saw a lot of papers on your desk.”
“A book,” Jules says bleakly. “About the Conduits’ lead singer, Bosco Baines. He’s on a concert tour that’s supposed to kill him, but he keeps not dying.”
“You could kill him,” Mom suggests, and Jules gapes at her. “Kidding,” she says.
On the second floor, I stop and let them go on without me. They seem not to notice. Like Stephanie, I’ve done all that I can do. Now I turn away, like she did.
The Salazars’ entertainment room has a huge-screen TV with surround sound where Bennie Salazar used to play concerts of artists he’d worked with. He invited Dad a few times to watch old Conduits shows, and Dad came back grinning and smelling of bourbon. Now Chris Salazar and Brian and the other boys are doing Wii on that screen, and Molly and the girls are playing board games. My friends are sprawled on an L-shaped couch, a mix of girls and boys drinking cans of soda laced with gin and vodka they’ve swiped from the bar. Someone hands me a can, and we talk about college visits and summer internships. Soon we’ll be seniors.
I keep going to the window to check on Mom, but the garden is so far down that I have to stand on a footstool to see her. “What’s Hannah looking at?” someone asks.
“My mother,” I say, and they all laugh.
The first time I check, Mom and Jules are squatting in the dirt with the tape measure extended.
The second time, they’re both standing up, holding glasses of seltzer.
The third time, they’re leaning against the fence side by side, looking up at the sky. It’s electric with twilight.
The secret to a happy ending, Mom used to tell us, is knowing when to walk away.
Once I’ve seen Mom leaning against the fence with Jules, I force myself not to look again.
See Below
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Joseph Kisarian→Henry Pomeranz