Circle of Three

by Patricia Gaffney

  “Oh, he finished it all right. He finished it months ago, if you ask me, and all this so-called editing is just dicking around.”

  Dicking around? Ruth did look up at that, doll-eyed.

  “But don’t you already have tickets and reservations and everything?” This was bad. I hadn’t been paying close attention to the minutiae of my mother’s life for the last month or so—too many other things on my mind—but I knew this trip meant more to her than a casual getaway. She’d been seeing it as a transition between past and future, her old and her new life—maybe. The beginning of something different, or at least the possibility of it, between her and Pop. “Oh, Mama, why can’t he go?”

  “A symposium in Toronto. He gets to read a paper. Very prestigious, he says. They asked him at the last minute,” she said with sour triumph. Rolling sideways, she got up using her hands, slapping vigorously at the back of her skirt. “I’m so mad I could spit.”

  She walked away, keeping her back to us. She was getting old lady feet; one navy blue flat was worn down on the outside, the other on the inside, as if her feet were slowly collapsing on each other. She wore long-sleeved blouses no matter the weather—“My arms are ugly,” she claimed, “my elbows look like turkey wattles.” I hectored her about taking her calcium, but she was still losing height; after forty-two years, I was finally taller.

  Ruth looked up, blank-faced, from the absorbing task of rubbing dirt from her fingernails. These days her loyalties were divided. I loved it when she came home from her sinecure of a summer job and reported snippets of conversations with her grandfather, Grampa said this, Grampa thinks this about that. She was finally getting to know him, even growing close to him, and I envied her for it. But the experience was naturally muddying what had always been clear and uncomplicated, the family line: Gram was fun, lively, and interesting, Grampa was pretty much not there. Grampa was a rumor.

  My mother’s bowed head worried me. Surely she wasn’t crying. I strolled over to where she was running her hands over the pointed stakes of an old iron fence. “Mama?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m just mad. I wanted to go. Damn it to hell, I wanted to go on that dumb trip.”

  “I know you did.”

  “I feel like going anyway. Not to have fun, just to spite him.” She smiled, grim humor returning. “I could ask Calvin Mintz to go with me. Bet he’s lonely without Helen to boss around anymore. What a pair we’d make, huh?”

  The hard fence spike made a dent in the fleshy pad of the thumb I was pressing into it. For me the summer was passing in a haze, a kind of golden liquid balm, nothing remotely like it had ever happened to me before. I hadn’t lost myself in love or lust, I was still me, I could see Jess’s flaws—moodiness, self-containment bordering on aloofness—and he could see mine—too numerous to mention. But we fit, we always had, and our time together was filling up places in me that had been empty for so long, years and years. We were still in the chemical dependency stage, addicted to each other. That wouldn’t last, but I even looked forward, with curiosity, not dread, to what came next. To leave him now would be like…a drought that begins again after one long, healing rain.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “What? Oh, no.” Mama laughed self-consciously, dabbing at the perspiration under her nose with the edge of a tissue. In the slant of her downcast eyes, I could see the idea taking root.

  “Why not? I haven’t been anywhere in ages. Ruth could stay with Pop part of the time, part of the time at Modean’s.”

  “I can stay by myself,” Ruth called over. “Jeez.”

  “You don’t need a trip right now,” Mama scoffed, striding away a few paces, pivoting, coming back. “You’re in the middle of all that business with Chris, you’ve got”—she flung her hand out—“things going on.” Jess, that meant. She’d all but reconciled herself to him. He was like arthritis in a new location, a psoriasis flare-up, one more old age-related affliction she had to accept with grace and dignity.

  “Well, nothing’s going to collapse in a week. Come on, we’ll have fun.”

  “Oh, shoo.” Still playing hard to get. “You don’t want to go on a vacation with your old mother.”

  I did, though. I wanted to give her what she wanted, freely and for nothing. From the heart. For so long Mama had squeezed love out of me like toothpaste from a tube, and see where that had gotten us—at a prickly distance from each other, the hunter and the hunted, her starving, me scared of being eaten. Jess was mixed up in there, too. Loving him, choosing and acknowledging him—that was when I’d finally gotten free, when I was the most bound and committed. Now I could make this not-so-little sacrifice for my mother, give her this gift, for the very reason that she didn’t expect it and hadn’t asked for it. Hadn’t squeezed it out of me.

  “I do, Mama. I want to go away for a week in the Bahamas with my old mother. We’ll lie on the beach and read all the books we’ve been saving up.”

  “Oh…”

  “We’ll eat fish every night, and we’ll go shopping, we’ll go to the movies, we’ll fat-ass. We won’t do a damn thing if we don’t feel like it. And if we meet two nice-looking guys in the bar, we’ll let ’em buy us mai-tais.”

  She gave a giddy, girlish laugh. “Well, that would serve him right, wouldn’t it? Oh, honey.” She took my arm and gave it a hard squeeze. “You know what, I’m gonna ask Birdie.”

  “Birdie? What—to go with you?”

  “She needs a trip, she’s been down in the dumps.”

  “I need a trip.” Now I felt hurt. “You can’t ask Birdie, she’ll drive you nuts.”

  “She will, Gram,” Ruth agreed, sidling over. “She’ll drive you nuts.”

  “She probably will.” She laughed again, a gay sound, and I thought, I love your face, I love you, Mama. “I think that’s what I’ll do, though. Carrie, you are a sweetheart, but you’ve got enough going on right now. I’ll call Bird this afternoon, perk her up. Now, who’s doing these flowers? Ruth honey, you know how the little holder in the plaque works? You pull it out of the ground and turn it over and it’s a vase. Oh now, aren’t those pretty. Carrie, are they from your garden or Modean’s?”

  So we arranged the flowers on Stephen’s grave, and I mused on the interesting fact that my mother could still surprise me, still had tricks up her sleeve. Say what you would, families never got boring. And mothering never got less complicated. All you could do was hope, like a doctor, to dono harm. But it was a futile hope, because harm was inevitable, and then you just hoped someone, someday (Ruth, soon) took into account your good intentions.

  My mother shoved up from her knees with a grunt and took a few stiff paces away, pressing both hands to the small of her back, stretching, jutting her chin out. I stayed where I was, barely brushing Ruth’s arm with mine. I stroked a finger over the raised letters, STEPHEN EDWARD VAN ALLEN, BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER, and tried to marshal my thoughts. Now was my chance to say something wise or true or conciliatory about Stephen. Squeezing Ruth’s tennis shoe, I said, “Your father—”

  “Mom, do you think he can see us? Or hear us? Do you think he’s, like, aware of us right now?”

  “Hmm. Well, I don’t know, but it’s possible, it’s entirely—”

  “Because sometimes I can really feel him near me, but other times…” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I can almost not even remember what he looked like. If I concentrate on that green corduroy shirt, I can still see him.” She drew in a deep breath and blew it out. “But for how much longer, you know? What if he becomes invisible?”

  “Well, then—”

  “Then I guess I’ll just carry him around like a feeling. I’ll always have that, right, the sense of my father.”

  “You look like him,” I said. “Here.” I traced my finger along the neat, decisive line of her jaw. “You’ll never lose him, because he’s in you.” She smiled. “That’s why I could never not love him. Why I never stopped.”

 
“Yeah, but…” A faint pink colored her cheek. Embarrassment? I’d take that over outrage any day. I started to speak, but she said, “Don’t talk about that here, Mom, okay? You know.” She ran her palm across the brittle grass on top of the grave. “Just in case.”

  Of course. Just in case. I felt embarrassed by my own in-delicacy.

  On the hill above us, the service was breaking up. We were ready to go home, but out of respect, we waited for the mourning family to drift down the path to their cars and mill around for a few minutes, getting organized—you go with him and we’ll go with them, see you at the house— the necessary social business of grief. Then we three strolled down to Mama’s car. We’ve had our funeral, I caught myself thinking, we’re safe for a while. As if loss were apportioned fairly, predictably, at convenient intervals. But hope was a deft deceiver, and I was nothing if not full of hope on this savory, soft, sweet-smelling midsummer day in the Hill Haven Cemetery. The future had vistas, potential, it looked like a pastel sky. The only cloud was that everybody I loved wasn’t as full of sappy, sanguine expectation as me. There was something to be said for starting over, for filling your boat with fresh progenitors and sailing off into the downpour. Your new day wouldn’t last long, but that was the nature of new days. Grudges resurfaced, bad habits recurred, slights and hurts and meannesses were bound to muddy the flood-waters before they could even start to recede. But then you started over again. As long as you could love and as long as you could forgive, it never had to end. Good thing, because you’d never get it right for long.

  “Mama, let me go with you,” I said again from the backseat of the car, leaning forward, careful to stay out of Ruth’s rearview mirror. “We could have such a good time. Come on. I’d really like to go.”

  But she wouldn’t budge. She was going with Birdie, period, and I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t for the pleasure of martyrdom—I knew exactly how that role played out, and today Mama wasn’t playing it. Generosity of spirit? A belated demonstration, better late than never, of the art of letting go? I enjoyed not knowing. I liked giving her the benefit of the doubt.

  “I’ve got this great idea,” Ruth said, flicking on the turn signal and slowing down smoothly, conscientiously, for the stoplight. She was going to be an excellent driver. Either that or she had her entire family fooled and she was going to be a holy terror. Absently, I reached around for my purse; we were coming into town, and Ruth’s great ideas in this vicinity usually had to do with the Dairy Queen or McDonald’s. But she said, “Let’s all get tattoos.”

  I snorted. Mama rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah, no, I mean, wouldn’t that be incredible? When I get mine fixed, we could all three get new tattoos. Just a little one for you, Gram, a little bit of flash. It doesn’t really hurt, not that much, and if we do it together it would be, like, a distraction. What do you think?” Her eyes danced in the mirror, daring me. “Mom, you could get a sexy one, you could get a butterfly on your ass.”

  Mama hooted with laughter. “What would I get?” She pushed up her sleeve, holding out her spotty, mottled forearm. “A big bleeding heart with an arrow through it? And underneath, ‘George, Forever and Ever.’”

  Ruth guffawed, bouncing in her seat. “Cool, or a skull and crossbones, Gram, right on your collarbone or something. Or your boob! Wouldn’t that blow them away at the garden club?”

  They cackled and snickered, thinking up wilder tattoos and more vulgar places to put them. The idea that my daughter was contemplating, had actually suggested, apparently not in jest, getting group-tattooed with her mother and her grandmother—that hadn’t quite sunk in yet. Something to think about later.

  Meanwhile, I thought about the tattoo I would get if I ever really did it. Not a butterfly on my ass. What was it called, that symbol of the serpent eating its own tail? It probably signified infinity, endlessness, timelessness. But for me it would mean the effort to love well going on and on, round and round, always imperfect and always forgivable. The best we could ever do for each other.

  In the front seat, they’d made decisions. A perfect ankh for Ruth, some kind of flower for Mama—not a rose, though: too common. “Are you in, Mom?” Ruth took her right hand off the steering wheel and lifted it in a fist. Poor hand, still pink and sore from the last laser treatment. Mama clasped it, chuckling. I surrounded it gently with my hand, and the three of us stuck our joined fists through the sunroof and shook them in the air.

  I sat back, wistful, feeling a little heavy from all my fond, precarious hopes. Pastel sky or not, the future came too fast sometimes. It flew by in a blur—not unlike the Dairy Queen. But what could you do? Nothing. Hope for the best. Relax, enjoy, and let your daughter, the expert, drive you home.

  Afterward

  “A Woman is Her Mother”

  EXCEPT FOR MY MARRIAGE, the bond between my mother and me is the strongest I’ve ever known, stronger in a few primitive, hard-fixed ways than the one I share with my husband. No one will ever love me the way Mom does. Not that her love is perfect—far from it—but it is steely and constant: smothering, judgmental, stern, tenderhearted, uncritical, and nourishing. There’s nothing I could do that my mother wouldn’t forgive. She drives me crazy. I grow more like her every day.

  After publishing The Saving Graces, a book about friends, I wanted to tell a story about mothers and daughters—about women in the “sandwich generation” who have both mother and daughter and are both mother and daughter, and who spend their middle years being pulled in different directions by almost-adult children and aging parents. It’s a unique time of singular challenges, and it doesn’t last long—although it can seem like a lifetime.

  In Circle of Three, Carrie, her mother Dana, and her daughter Ruth, make up the middle and two ends of their own sandwich generation. Each knows how it feels to want to strangle your mother—or your daughter—and how heartbreaking it is to realize that you will, one day, lose them both. In the midst of the push-pull of growing up, growing old, growing apart, and growing together, they learn that the best we can do, however imperfectly, is to love each other. And to forgive.

  Luckily, forgiving our mothers becomes easier the older we get. A line in an Anne Sexton poem tells us why: “A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing.”

  It really is a circle. When we forgive our mothers for not loving us perfectly, we forgive ourselves.

  —Patricia Gaffney

  Books by Patricia Gaffney

  Available from HarperCollins e-books

  The Saving Graces

  Meet the Saving Graces—four of the best friends a woman can ever have.

  For ten years, Emma, Rudy, Lee, and Isabel have shared a deep affection that has helped them deal with the ebb and flow of expectations and disappointments common to us all. Calling themselves the Saving Graces, the quartet is united by understanding, honesty, and acceptance—a connection that has grown stronger as the years go by…

  Though these sisters of the heart and soul have seen—and talked about—it all, the four will not be prepared for a crisis of astounding proportions that will put their love and courage to the ultimate test.

  Nora Roberts: “A jewel of a book and every facet sparkles.”

  Booklist: “This ode to the friendships between women could easily become the Northern version of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.”

  Washington Post Book World: “Breathtaking• unique.”

  Circle of Three

  Newly widowed, Carrie is overwhelmed by the guilt of knowing her marriage died long before her husband’s fatal heart attack. Struggling to go on for the sake of her teenaged daughter, Ruth, and her overly possessive mother, Dana, Carrie slowly emerges from the sorrow that has embraced her and begins to pull her life together, with help from an unexpected source—Jess, Carrie’s first love. He re-enters her world and quickly becomes her lifeline.

  Inspired by a passion she thought she’d never have again, Carrie must find a way to weave her new life—and love—into a family struggl
ing with its own pain and disappointment, a family threatened by her happiness.

  Wise, moving, and heartbreakingly real, Circle of Three offers women a deeper understanding of one another, of themselves, and of the perplexing and invigorating magic that is life itself.

  Nora Roberts: “Circle of Three reminds us what it’s like to be a woman.”

  Harrisburg Patriot News: “Gaffney’s…[a] gifted writer…[and] a great storyteller with insight into the lives of women.”

  Flight Lessons

  Anna has studiously avoided her aunt Rose—the woman she once loved more than anyone else in the world—since the night Rose betrayed Anna and her mother, Rose’s own fatally-ill sister. In the sixteen years that have passed, Anna has built another life for herself far from her hometown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but she can’t forgive or forget.

  Now another betrayal, by a faithless lover, has brought Anna back to her family’s restaurant, where, as it turns out, Rose needs her estranged niece’s help—and trust—more than ever before. Determined to leave as soon as Rose’s struggling business is back on its feet and her own heart is healed, Anna joins Rose in the kitchen of the Bella Sorella, where values clash, generations collide, and personal lives become intricately entangled. Anna has vowed not to follow her Aunt back into the past—even though such resistance could keep her from true love.