by Sara Zarr
“We have a little more setting up to do at the house,” she continues, “but if you’re tired, you can lay down in my room while Jill and I take care of that. And if there’s anything you need, you let one of us know. We want you to feel at home.” She slides out of the booth. “Be right back.”
“Thank you, Robin,” Mandy says as Mom heads off to the bathroom, where I’m pretty sure she’s going to cry some more.
The waitress comes back, setting tomato juice down in front of Mandy and orange juice in front of me. After switching the glasses, I shake hot sauce into my juice, and Mandy sips hers.
“That’s not good for your heart,” she says.
“What?” I stop mid-shake.
“Hot sauce.”
I laugh. “Where’d you hear that? It’s fine for my heart.” She watches as I stir in the hot sauce, squeeze my lemon wedge into the juice, and then drop the whole thing into the glass, stirring again.
“Are you hungover?” Mandy asks.
“No. I just like my tomato juice this way.”
What a weirdo. I wish Dylan could see this. Right now she’s fixed her stare on my eyebrow ring. To get her to stop gaping, I raise the eyebrow in question and think I might say, “Does it offend you or something?” Then I hear my dad’s voice in my head, the way I have for the last ten months. “Try a little tenderness, Jilly.” So saith Otis Redding, Dad’s favorite. Dad understood my natural inclination away from tenderness because it’s just like his was. Neither of us will go down in history as “nice,” even though he had the best heart, absolutely. “Try a little tenderness” was our polite way of saying to each other, “You’re being an asshole.”
So I try. Maybe girls from Nebraska or Iowa or wherever she’s from are more sheltered. Maybe she never learned how babies are made. Or what birth control is. Maybe none of this is her fault. Suddenly I’m dying to ask her all these questions: How did it happen? Who’s the father? Why did you decide to have it? But Mom comes back, looking a little splotchy, and I don’t think she’d view my curiosity as welcoming.
Mandy, however, has no such worries about inappropriate curiosity. As soon as Mom gets her napkin back in her lap, Mandy asks, “Is Jill adopted, too? She looks nothing like you.”
Before we can react, the waitress appears with our food, setting my sausage in front of Mom and Mom’s eggs in front of me. She gets Mandy’s order right. “Anything else?” I switch the plates. “Oh,” she says. “Oops.”
“Just keep the coffee coming,” Mom says.
When the waitress is gone, I tell Mandy, “I look like my dad.”
His dark eyes. His shorter, thicker build. Mom is willowy. Me and Dad: more oaklike.
“You’ve got my nose, though,” Mom says, “and it looks better on you.” She’s been saying that as long as I can remember. Her nose is fine on her. A little wider than she’d like is all.
Mandy isn’t even paying attention. She’s drowning her pancakes in butterscotch sauce, enough to cover the plate. I steal a look at Mom, expecting to see it killing her not to say anything while Mandy ingests so much sugar, but all that’s on her face is that same shy rapture I saw at the station. The nerves are gone and it’s lighting her up, I can see it, thawing out the places in her heart that Dad’s death left numb, warming her in a way I haven’t been able to.
Because although I have Dad’s build and hair and eyes, his bluntness and his impatience, his good common sense, I don’t have the piece that matters: his heart.
Mandy
Robin’s house is like a house you see on a TV show. Like a mansion. In her e-mails she called it an old Victorian that she and her husband had “fixed up a little.” It’s nicer than any house I’ve been in, with two fireplaces and a formal dining room and a polished wood staircase and darker wood floors. And I haven’t even seen the upstairs yet.
“We’ll set you up right here for now so you can rest a bit,” Robin says, patting the couch. “Jill and I will finish getting your room ready. If you decide going up and down the stairs is too much, we’ll figure out something else. At the moment there are no real beds down here….” She stops and stares, and starts rubbing a spot on her face. I stare back. I’m really here, is what we’re thinking. “I hope this is all okay, Mandy. You’ll tell me if it’s not?”
“It’s fine. Thank you.”
I’m still getting used to her voice and also her hair. During this whole thing, we never talked on the phone. I told her I couldn’t because of reasons beyond my control. Everything was through e-mail, and that was hard enough because I only did it from the library, even though we had a computer at home. Kent could be very nosy, especially when it came to me.
In the pictures Robin sent, her hair was long, and I imagined her voice softer and higher than it is. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just not how I imagined, and I spent a lot of time imagining everything about her. Maybe she spent a lot of time imagining me, too. I wonder if I’m like she hoped.
“Put your feet up,” she tells me. “I’ll get you a glass of water.”
The couch is leather, with a matching chair and the thing you put your feet on—I forget what it’s called. Real leather. My mother showed me in the furniture store one time the difference between real and fake. Once you touch and smell and even hear them both, you never forget, and afterward what’s fake stands out, even if you never noticed it before. The living-room furniture in Kent’s apartment was vinyl. If you sat on it very long, especially in warm weather, your rear would be damp when you got up. A lot of things about Kent were fake.
In front of the couch here at Robin’s is a low coffee table with a vase of real flowers and some magazines I’ve never heard of, with names that all start with the, like The Economist and The New Yorker and The Atlantic. There’s no TV.
When Robin comes back with my water and finds me holding The Economist, she says, “I know you told me you’re not much of a reader, but we’ve got lots of books all over the house if you change your mind. Jill’s dad had a little bit of an addiction.”
Then I notice the built-in shelves on both sides of the fireplace, the books behind glass doors. I set the magazine down. “Is there a TV upstairs?”
“No, this is it.”
I look around the room again, nervous.
“Oh!” She laughs and goes over—quick steps, everything she does is quick—to a dark red wooden cabinet against the wall and opens its doors. “Here you go. We hide it when we’re not watching.”
At Kent’s apartment we were never not watching it. If the TV is off and there’s no radio, the silence is so heavy. It makes you scared.
Robin hands me the remote and looks ready to cry again. I don’t know what to say. Whatever I would think of is the wrong thing, probably, the way I kept saying the wrong thing to Jill at breakfast and it was just like my mother told me: I make people uncomfortable. Actually what she said was “You give them the creeps. Just act right.”
I close my eyes to think.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and I open my eyes. She’s pressing her hands to her cheeks. Every move she makes is part of the puzzle I’m putting together: her voice, her hair, her quick steps, the way her hands move, plus all of our e-mails and the way she started writing “Mandy, Dear,” instead of “Dear Mandy” in the last few weeks. It’s adding up to something, finally. “You’re exhausted. I’ll try to contain my excitement and leave you alone for a while. I’ll run up and get the sheets on the bed. I should have had it all done, but I decided at the last minute to get you new bedding, and I wanted to wash everything first…. Okay. You rest.” She’s lowered her voice to a whisper. “I can’t get over how tiny you are.”
She goes upstairs. It’s the first time I’ve been alone since the cab dropped me off at the train station in Omaha.
I’m here. I did this. When I sent my first e-mail to Robin, I only had a small hope she would reply; and after she replied, I had only a small hope she would agree to everything the way I wanted it; and when she agreed
, I only had a small hope she wouldn’t change her mind. And here I am, all of those small hopes getting me from one day to the next, the way they have my whole life.
In the pocket of my dress is another small hope—the white sticker from Alex’s magazine that has his address on it. I peeled it off while he was in the bathroom.
When will you be coming through Denver again? I’ll write. We can meet for coffee.
I have to keep thinking of my future.
The only little worry mixed in with my hopes is Jill. Robin never said very much about her in the e-mails. At breakfast, after Jill said she looked like her father, I asked her about him, and she wouldn’t say anything. Robin had already told me some and in a way I felt like I knew him, but I wanted to make conversation with Jill. She changed the subject. Then I offered her some of my pancakes. She made a face and said she didn’t like pancakes. What kind of a person doesn’t like pancakes? Not a good kind.
It could be that she’s jealous. The way she stared at Alex when he got back on the train made me think of what my mother says: When it comes to men, never trust another woman. “Especially if you’re pretty,” she told me, jealousy will always get in the way. “And you are a woman, Mandy,” she said when I got my period. “You stopped being a girl today and that’s something, but don’t expect the world to throw you a parade.” I didn’t. Friendships were the first thing to change, she said. When I got to school, I told my best friend, Suzette, I’d started, and she said, “Gross,” and told everyone. My mother turned out to be right that time.
Anyway, Jill is not Alex’s type, with an electric-blue streak in her brown-black hair, and that eyebrow ring, and dark, chipped nail polish. She’s doesn’t take care of herself or understand the importance of first impressions. My mother says you should always take a moment to look in the mirror before you leave the house and try to see yourself through the eyes of strangers.
The baby moves and I touch it back. When I first started to feel it, it was sometimes like a heartbeat and sometimes like tiny waves from a miniature ocean, as if the baby was swimming inside me, already graceful. Now it’s a kick. Every time it moves, I imagine how it will look. How I hope it will look. Just because I’m giving my baby to Robin doesn’t mean I don’t think about it the way anyone in my state would, imagine holding it or the way it might look at me. It’s been a part of me since July. Now it’s February. That’s a long time to think about someone every day.
Robin made a doctor’s appointment for me, and it’s tomorrow, and we’ll find out the sex. I told Robin I already knew. In our e-mails, I told her I’ve been going to all my prenatal appointments. I told her I’m due in three weeks. I told her it’s a boy. She already has a girl, and I thought that she would want one of each and that if I told her it was a boy, the chances of her saying yes would be better.
Heavy footsteps clomp down the stairs, and Jill says from behind me, “How many pillows do you want?”
“What?” I ask, turning to her. She’s got her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt. Slouching and frowning.
“On your bed. How many? Mom says some pregnant people like to sleep with one between their knees.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what? One for your knees and one for your head? Or more?”
How many pillows do they have? “Either way.”
She sighs. “Can you just give me a number?”
“Three.”
“Great.”
Jill clomps back up. I lean into the soft, real leather of the sofa and close my eyes, wondering what my mother would say if she could see me now.
Jill
The excitement of watching Mandy take over our lives has to be temporarily abandoned so that I can come to work. Work is good. I urgently need distraction from the situation, which until this morning was all dread and imagination. Like the SAT or a dentist’s appointment. For weeks and weeks you imagine how horrible and impossible it’s going to be, and then you’re doing it and it’s hard to tell in the moment: Is this as horrible and impossible as I thought it would be? Worse? Not so bad? I don’t know.
I’ve tried convincing myself it has nothing to do with me. It’s Mom’s right to do this. Yet I can’t help thinking, Am I not enough? Mom and I have had our issues. I know she didn’t want me having a serious boyfriend in high school. I know she would have preferred me to have friends with better GPAs. I know she wants me to go to college, and I’m not, at least not right away. She knows I know all these things, though we never talk about them. You’re familiar with the elephant in the living room? We’ve got a whole herd. The biggest one is this: Dad was the parent I was closer to.
And I think, for my sake, Mom feels guilty about being the one who lived.
It has occurred to me that she sees the baby as a do-over. A chance to correct my failings and to finally have a child that’s all hers.
These are not pleasant thoughts. Work gives me a little bit of a break from it all.
Margins is a bookstore—part of a big national chain, which Mom isn’t super thrilled about, given that she’s on the Buy Local board and had me marching around Washington Park with a sign reading SAVE MOM ’N’ POP! when I was eight. But my parents wanted me to have a job, and Margins was hiring. At least it’s books, Mom said, something we can believe in and not deep-fried sandwiches or mortgage banking. Plus, Dad quickly realized I could put the employee discount to good use keeping him up to his neck in World War II memoirs and quantum physics theory and crime novels. And, to our collective surprise, it turned out that for a person who doesn’t like people, I’m pretty good at this customer service stuff.
It’s a slow night. We’ve got a Presidents’ Day special going on—twenty-five percent off any title at all related to a president. The problem is, Corporate didn’t define “at all related” or “president,” and right now there’s an old guy trying to get a discount on Happy Birthday, Ms. President. The cover photo is of a hot woman in skimpy lingerie holding a briefcase. I look at the back for a description while the customer rests his knobbly hands on the counter.
“So, this is actually about the president of a company,” I say.
“Still a president.”
“Yeah, but. Of an underwear company.”
He corrects me. “Fine lingerie.”
My manager, Annalee, is on break, meaning this case is mine to judge. The guy looks like someone’s nice grandpa. Maybe this book is his only hope for some jollies. In the end I give him the discount; Margins isn’t going to miss its $1.99 that much. Normally I’m tough about these situations—questionable returns, expired coupons, complicated lies about lost receipts. But it will make me feel good to help this man get the most out of his allotment of happiness—which I’ve learned over the past year is limited for all of us—and I want to feel good.
“Happy Presidents’ Day.” I slip his receipt into the bag.
“You, too, sweetie.”
Aw.
What I need is to talk to Dylan about Mandy. About how it felt to take her stuff up to the guest room. About her flowered dress and eerie eyes. About how I’m torn between wanting to keep an eagle eye on her to protect Mom and wanting to say, Fine, you didn’t ask my opinion, and now it’s your problem. About how I’ve felt for months now that some universal force has been slowly inflating a balloon inside me to see just how much I can take before I pop.
Not much more.
After making sure there are no approaching customers, I pull my phone out of my apron and start a text to Dylan.
Store basically empty if you want to come hang out. I’ll buy you a snickerdoodle.
By the time I thumb type snickerdoodle, Annalee is walking in, and I shove the phone back into my apron pocket without hitting Send.
“It’s getting cold out there. Still dead?” She looks around the store while unwinding her striped scarf.
“One customer since you left.”
She pulls her brunette braid over her shoulder and fingers the end. Annalee, who I think
is like twenty-seven or something, probably won’t ever be a legend in the bookselling business, as she doesn’t know that much about actual books, but she’s a great manager: completely reliable, never gets sick, is never short at the end of the day, never messes up the schedule, never loses her cool with employees or customers, and rarely takes a day off. So it surprises me when she says, “I’m thinking of leaving early. I can count out register two and have Ron close up the coffee counter. Can you handle the rest?”
“Of course.” I’ve been working here nearly two years. I could run the place if I had to. That’s another thing that makes Annalee a good manager, if not an expert on literature—she’s taught me how to do everything she does. “In case something happens to me,” she said once, matter-of-factly. “Like we’re robbed and I get shot.” The only thing I don’t know is how to get into the safe; I’ll just throw all the cash and paperwork into the drop for her to deal with in the morning.
“Doing anything fun?” I ask. “Or not feeling well?”
One corner of her mouth turns upward. “Don’t laugh.”
“I won’t.” Though, it must be said that I would love to laugh. I would love to hear something funny right now—truly funny so I can laugh something other than the bitter “Life Is Unbelievably Shitty” laugh that’s become my standard.
“There’s a Doctor Who marathon on tonight, and I forgot to set my DVR. I don’t want to miss it.”
Now that’s funny. I laugh.
“Jill!”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have promised.”
“It’s the original,” she says, defensive.
“Enjoy.” Later, when she’s gone, I straighten up the display tables and endcaps, turn out the lights in the back way earlier than usual, and stay at the counter chatting with Ron, keeping my eyes on the doors in the hope Dylan will walk through. Then I remember I never sent the text.
