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“You could keep them,” I tell her. “They don’t take that muchspace.”
“No. My living room looked like the waiting room at a dentist’s office for thirty years. Nomore.”
I ignore her and lift the box, starting toward the kitchen. My mom doesn’t move, and we stare each otherdown.
Technically, I’m the one looking down—because she’s a head shorter—but what she lacks in size she makes up for instubbornness.
At least she didn’t pass that down tome.
“Fine. I’ll take them.” I set the box by the door, though I’m not looking forward to navigating transit with it. I’m also not sure where it’ll go in the apartment I’m renting from an NYU professor onsabbatical.
“You have any idea how many of my friends’ sons never visit?” she says after I return to the kitchen. “You come once aweek.”
I play along. “I bet their moms don’t order sushi fordinner.”
It’s a skill you get good at, moving from blowup to civility. I used to think it was a weakness, but when my dad got sick, I learned it’s easy to pick fights. It’s harder to let go when each disagreement dredges up everything you did and didn’t do from the past, like a thousand cuts that neverheal.
She takes me in, smiling. “How was yourweek?”
“It’s not over yet,” I say under my breath, leaning a hip against thecounter.
No matter what went down in this house, I feel as if I can be me here. At school, I need to put on a front. Here, like when I’m working out with Jake, I don’t have to pretend I care when Idon’t.
I teach four biology classes aday.
The freshmen aren’t toobad.
The seniors have realized they need to at least make an effort to get intoschool.
The juniors are the worst. It’s like they knowbetter.
“They’re teenagers,” my mother advises. “They’ve got shiny new parts and are taking them for aspin.”
“The problem isn’t their… parts. It’s that they know the world’s at their fingertips. And they have no respect forit.”
I survived growing up lower middle class, working my way up as an academic, in an industry that prides itself on putting prospects through a medieval gauntlet of tests of mental strength and stamina, only to emerge on the other side and have to opt out before claiming my prize when my father’s cancerreturned.
When my dad got the stage four diagnosis, his longtime friend helped to arrange the teaching position so I could pay the bills and be close to home. I’ve only met Terry Crawford a couple of times, but he’s the foremost cardiologist on the East Coast. Plus, he’s published his share of academic papers. I respect him professionally in a way that’s different from respecting my father’s workethic.
If I want the chance to win back the tenure-track faculty position I turned down in Seattle in April on account of my dad’s illness, I’m going to need some strong people in my corner. People with influence, like TerryCrawford.
“I know how much Dad loved Baden,” I say, half to myself. “I just can’t for the life of me understandwhy.”
I walk past her into the living room. My chest contracts every time I’m here. As if I’m waiting for him to walkin.
“He loved you too.” She squeezes my arms frombehind.
And there’s a subject I want to get into as much as I want to drag my intestines out of my abdominal cavity inch byinch.
Subjectchange.
“How’s theclinic?”
“Lots of cats this week. We’re overrun with neuters and spays. Friskyfall.”
I think back to Jake’s words about getting a dog but dismiss them again. My mother needs support, not something to take up her time and shed all over thefurniture.
My phone rings with the lab’s number. I turn away for some semblance of privacy as I answer. “Hello?”
