“I only came because I didn’t think CJ would be here,” I said without anger or blame. My mother had lied to me to get me to come. This was who she was and would likely always be. It was my responsibility to accept that. In a dizzying flash, I saw Tina in Frances’s kitchen the first night we met, her fingernails in Nixon’s black fur. You think you’re going to come here and you’re going to get advice, and then if you just follow that advice, it will get better. Instead, what you learn is how to take responsibility for it. It was a sensational moment of lucidity, one that begged to be shared with the person who prophesied it.
“I didn’t think he would be!” My mother was flailing, desperate to reclaim her hold on me. “I guess he finally took a stand against her.” She smiled and rolled her eyes—that ole battle-ax Martha. But this act had finally worn thin, and my expression was bored and disengaged. It must have been terrifying for my mother to realize she had so completely lost me, and for that I did feel compassion. “Please don’t make a fuss, Ruth,” she added, her voice verging on panicked. “You’re here. And you look…” She flopped her arms in my direction, at a loss for words. Not because I looked beautiful beyond description but because my mother never paid me compliments, and it must have been like sifting through a drawer of sharp knives for a blanket. Her mind wasn’t where you looked to find something soft and warm. “So put together,” she ended up saying. “It would be a shame for it to go to waste.”
But it wouldn’t go to waste—Tina would see me. Tina, who wouldn’t struggle to tell me I looked beautiful, whose mind was not barbed but curved in the way of a prescription lens, focusing the light and rendering things clearly. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, taking a small step away from her, “but this doesn’t feel good to me.”
My mother appeared genuinely dumbfounded. “Good for you? It’s not meant to feel good for you. Your father is dead.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean pretending. That I’m still married. That we are one big happy family when we aren’t.”
My mother wore her comfortable victimized sneer, as broken in as a favorite pair of jeans. It had always frightened me that she could find anything amusing about her disappointment. As if she spent her days waiting for life to let her down like she expected it would, then shared a dark laugh with herself. She had been smart to prepare for the worst.
It was the same sneer I’d seen the morning my father died in a car crash on the way to the place where we stood now, after suffering a minor heart attack on the heels of the argument the three of us had around the breakfast table. I’d stayed the night after CJ and I had our final, explosive fight about a bobby pin he didn’t even realize he had stuck to his collar when he came home too late again, and in the morning I’d informed them that CJ and I were not going to work things out this time, that I was going to ask for a divorce because I was a homosexual, and they both knew I was because my father was one too.
“I knew you would do this,” my mother declared with a sick sort of triumph. Her face was ruddy, pin-cushioned with beads of sweat. “I said to myself—maybe it’s better Ruth doesn’t come. Because I knew you would only make it about yourself. But I extended an olive branch, and now here I am, doing exactly what I knew I would spend the day doing. Comforting you, when I’m the one who needs comforting.”
I was grateful to her for giving me such a hammy display of her cruelty, which up until that point she had doled out discerningly, at a rate meant to keep me coming back for more. She had made it so easy—not just easy, but pleasurable—to walk away from her. I got on my bike, and I rode to the water, where the breeze was, and Tina too.
PAMELA
Miami, 1979
Day 540
In the hotel room, the phone rang at the same time the door opened.
“I have to answer,” I found myself saying, impossibly, to Ruth’s mother and to Tina. Neither acknowledged me. The two of them were staring each other down like longtime rivals in the ring.
“Pamela?” Mr. Pearl said. “Do you think it’s possible you can move your flight?”
I felt like I could breathe again. I was still going to testify. “Of course,” I said through my long exhale. “What day should I leave?”
There was an awkward pause. “Good question,” Mr. Pearl said with a laugh that made me queasy. It was the laugh of someone who had battled an irrational toddler all day and had lost the will to live. “Judge Lambert wants to meet with you in his chambers tomorrow morning. And then he will decide whether or not you can remain on the witness list.”