Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  “Nick, can we not—”

  “Hilary, I should have said this before you left this morning, but you ran out the door so fast, I never got a chance.”

  “I was in a rush, which was partly your fault.” I’d spent the night at Nick’s place, intending to stay long enough for him to cook me breakfast and entice me to chuck the whole road-trip idea, pleading typhoid or something equally convenient. The majority of me had wanted to opt for a weekend in bed with the man I hadn’t seen nearly enough of lately, or at the very least, go back to bed for seconds.

  As soon as I got out of the shower, though, I’d sensed he had something on his mind, and in typical Hilary fashion, I’d changed the subject to Top Ten Reasons Why Hilary Should Stay in Boston and Avoid Her Mother, and let him shove me out the door toward my mother before we could discuss anything more serious than where my underwear had gone.

  Okay, so my version of being broken up involved still seeing him, but not “seeing him” in a serious manner. I liked it that way. No expectations, no strings attached, but I still had Nick to wake up to every morning.

  Any guy in his right mind would like it that way, too. But Nick, apparently, was losing his mind.

  “You can’t run from everything for your entire life,” Nick said now. That was the biggest drawback to dating the same man for years. He knew you too well. “Once in a great while you’re actually going to have to have a serious conversation. Or at least a few serious thoughts. I’d like one of those to center around me.”

  Across the way, Reginald had finally picked a shrub. He looked at me, then shoved his whole face into the bush, as if embarrassed. A minute later, he let out a grunt of relief and began watering the grass beneath him. I wondered at the irony of that, given the conversation with Nick. “What kind of serious thought do you mean?” I already knew the answer, but hoped maybe his spiel had changed in the last few months.

  “Marriage.”

  The line hummed between us, silent yet pregnant. Reginald had finished his first order of business and was busily scoping out a second location. “Nick, I gotta go.”

  “Don’t do that. This is exactly why I didn’t bring up the subject last night. I knew you’d run. You have a million-hour trip ahead of you. All I want you to do is to think about it while you’re driving.”

  “Nick, we’re not even technically dating. Last I checked, we’d decided to take a break.”

  Uh-huh. Which was exactly why I’d spent the night snuggled up to him and sinking into the center dent of his queen. Because I wanted a break.

  Yeah, a break from any serious talks, and a return to the relationship we’d had before Nick had gotten this marriage hair up his butt. Lately, he’d been worse than the girls in my senior class who’d snuck peeks at issues of Bride behind their American History textbooks, as if the whole point of graduation was to get them into a white dress and a lifelong union with the pimple-faced kid who’d asked them to the senior prom.

  “I told you I wasn’t going to spend another three years of my life in the same place,” Nick said. “I’m forty, Hilary. I want more than just a girlfriend to sleep with on Friday nights. I want a life.”

  “Are you nuts? Most men would give their right testicle for a woman who didn’t want anything out of them but a night in bed and the occasional help installing a garbage disposal.”

  On his end, I heard Nick let out a sigh, which sounded so odd, so out of place. In all the years we’d been together, I’d never seen Nick sad. Never seen a side of him that wasn’t celebrating a good time. But lately, there seemed to be less of the party Nick and more of some other man I didn’t really recognize, which was part of what had driven me to push him away. Now I knew why.

  It had been self-preservation. I wasn’t cut out for what Nick wanted, but I also couldn’t let him go.

  “Marriage isn’t always a bad thing, Hilary.”

  Reginald had found his second location and was cheerfully creating a hideously smelly mountain on it. I looked around, figured we were in the woods, not in a public rest area, and I could get away with calling it a nature dump and leaving it to feed the flora and fauna.

  “For some people, it is. I told you already, Nick, I won’t marry you. It’s not about you, it’s about me. Why can’t we keep going the way we were? Why do we have to change?” Hadn’t he been happy thus far? I had been. Wasn’t that enough?

  “Because I’m tired of the status quo. I’ve been tired of it for a while.” He drew in a breath. “I’ve asked you to marry me at least a hundred times since I met you, but I don’t know if I ever meant it before now.”

  “That was always cool with me. It’s kind of like playing the game of Life. We can put those little blue and pink plastic kids in the car and drive them around the board, but never have to change a diaper.” I had, indeed, liked the thought of being asked, but not the thought of actually putting on a white dress and pledging forever.

  Even now, the words iced my ears, tightened in my chest. I sucked in some air, held it for a long while. Above me, a bird squawked at another, then fluttered away. A turf war? A marital spat?

  “I mean what I’m saying,” Nick went on, ignoring my attempt at a joke. “I want you to take me seriously this time, because I’m not going to ask again. If you don’t want to get married, then…” At this, he paused, and again, I could hear another Nick on the other end, a more serious, no-beer-in-hand man. “Then that’s it, Hilary. We’re through.”

  Something hard and cold slithered down my throat and landed with a thud in my gut. This was a different tone than I’d ever heard from the man who built entertainment centers and kitchen cabinets for a living. A man who worked with his hands, making wood bend to his will, polishing it until it shone with his reflection.

  Today, there was finality in his voice, commitment. It scared me and made me want to end this trip before it began, run back to his apartment and shake that feeling out of him. What if I ended up on the other side of the country—

  And lost him in the process?

  Tomorrow, I reassured myself, dismissing the foreboding in my gut, Nick would feel differently. He always had before. I smiled, and slipped back into joke mode. “Are you giving me an ultimatum, Nicholas Warner?”

  “Yes, I am.” He sounded tired, lonely, and if I could have, I would have crawled through the phone line and teased him with a touch, a kiss, until this somber mood lifted and we were back to all lightness and fluff.

  I did that well. I was, after all, my father’s daughter. It was the serious, let’s-stick-together-forever kind of thing that I had trouble with. Nick knew it, but he persisted, either because he had some fairy-tale version of our reality playing in his head or he was a glutton for punishment.

  Reginald had finished his business and was now twirling around me, wrapping the leather leash against my legs. I stood there, bound by a pig in one place and by a man wanting more than I could give in another.

  “I have to go, Nick. I’ll call you when we stop tonight.” I hung up the phone before he could say anything else, like that he wouldn’t be there when I called. Then I untangled myself from the pig and headed back to the car.

  I didn’t want to think about Nick’s words for the next gazillion miles. I didn’t want to ponder marriage or anything more committed than a date for Friday night. I wasn’t good at that kind of thing and I was too old to learn a new trick.

  Woods behind me. My mother and an endless cross-country trip ahead of me. Nick somewhere in the next county, expecting an answer. I considered ditching it all and heading into the forest.

  Considering I’m the type of woman who can’t survive without indoor plumbing and take-out Chinese, I’d have better survival odds with my mother.

  three

  I reached the Mustang, opened the door to let Reginald in, giving him a little shove when the speeding traffic whipped by and freaked him out, causing him to skitter back, bumping into my knees, nearly knocking me over. “Come on, Reginald,” I said, pushing on
his rear, but Reginald held firm on the road, refusing to move.

  Then I saw why. It had nothing to do with rushing semis. And everything to do with a six-foot cardboard cutout sitting in the backseat, unfolded but still crinkled in four places. “What the hell is that?”

  “Your father.”

  It was indeed, a giant picture of my father, like one of those stand-up G.I. Joes they put in stores to tell young men and women the Army wants them. The photo, so lifelike and real, socked me in the gut, rolling over me with memories. For a second, I could really believe he was there, then reality slapped me.

  It was as if my mother had given me a Christmas present—the one I really, really wanted, the top one on my list to Santa—but after I’d torn off the wrapping and exclaimed with delight, the box turned out to be empty.

  “Why is this in my car?”

  “Your father always wanted to travel and never got the chance. I thought we’d take pictures along the way, of him enjoying the different stops we’re going to make.” She held up something small and silver. “Look, I even bought a digital camera so I can send the pictures back to Erma and Rhonda.”

  A digital camera? My mother, the one who had yet to install cable or buy a VCR and had fought the touch-tone revolution like some people resisted root canals, had bought a digital camera?

  I stared at her, searching for signs of early dementia. “That’s insane.”

  “It’ll make for great memories.” She put the camera into the ashtray that now served as my change dish. It snuggled up to my cell phone, twins of technology.

  “Of what?” I lifted Reginald into the backseat, grunting under his hundred-twenty-plus-pound body. He scrambled away from me, nicking the vinyl again, and began searching under the front seat. No wild mushrooms there, I wanted to tell him, just some cold, hard French fries and a couple dimes.

  Reginald knocked into the image of my father, and suddenly anger rushed over me. How could my mother be so cavalier about my father?

  “What were you thinking, Ma? That us and Flat Stanley here were going to be traveling the globe? Dad died five years ago. I don’t think he cares about seeing the world’s largest ball of twine.”

  Silence carpeted the car, as heavy and uncomfortable as tacky shag. Outside, the traffic whizzed past in a high pitched whine and tornado-force winds, shaking the sports car.

  “Your father and I never had an opportunity to go anywhere outside of Massachusetts. We even honeymooned on the Cape. But he always said he wanted to travel, and tried to talk me into taking time off to see more than the state of Massachusetts. One day, I kept telling him, I would. Then one day passed, and it was too late.” She watched a moving van rush by, its white rectangular belly shimmying. “I want your father to experience this with us.”

  “But, Ma, he’s gone,” I said, as gently as I could. I slipped into the driver’s seat and gripped the leather steering wheel, right then missing my father and the way he could intercept an argument between us, serve as the mediator, the cushion between our personalities. I wanted him to come along and cajole my mother out of this insanity with one of his “Oh, Rosemarys” and give me that secret smile that said he and I were on the same side in some battle neither of us had asked to fight. But he wasn’t coming and I was left alone, not quite sure how to deal with her. “You do know that, right?”

  “That doesn’t mean I stopped loving him.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.” My paper father grinned back from the rearview mirror. I remembered when the picture had been taken. I’d been twenty-five and my mother had talked me into taking a beach vacation with them, in Truro. At the time, I’d just ended another crappy relationship and blown my paycheck on a beater box that redefined the state lemon law. A parental-funded vacation sounded like a really good idea, until a once-in-a-zillion-years cold front had moved in, forcing us all indoors for the better part of the week.

  But not my dad. He was, as he always had been, determined to have a good time, regardless of the weather. The photo on the cutout was one of my father standing on the beach in shorts and a T-shirt, ignoring the biting wind sweeping along the coast. When I’d taken the picture, he’d been happy and laughing, daring me to dip a toe in the Atlantic.

  It was a good memory, one I’d tucked into my mental files and pulled out from time to time.

  But that didn’t mean I wanted a two-dimensional version in my backseat.

  “I need him along,” my mother said, her voice soft and quiet for a brief moment before she stiffened and slipped back into being Rosemary Delaney, lawyer.

  I glanced over at her and knew, even though she was not the type to show it, that she missed him, too. I wondered sometimes if the ache in her heart bordered on that same fierce knife edge as mine. If the same questions haunted her nights, the same what-ifs rolled around in her head, playing a game that couldn’t be won, because he wasn’t there to fill in the blanks.

  Their marriage may not have been perfect, but she was alone, more alone than I because he’d been her spouse, her other half, and if it gave her comfort to have a pig and a six-foot picture of my father along for the ride, who was I to argue?

  I had Nick, after all.

  “Okay.” I reached for her hand. It felt cold beneath mine, and I realized I could count the number of times I’d purposely touched my mother. Either way, this was the right thing to do, and the right time to do it. Our ivory skin was nearly a perfect match, long thin fingers blending one into the other, lacing together for a brief moment of bonding. “It’ll be nice to have Dad along for the ride. Kind of like a guardian angel.”

  She smiled at me and a flicker of a tear shone in her eyes. “Thank you, Hilary.”

  I nodded because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Then I buckled up and steered the car back into the busyness of I–93.

  A few more miles passed, with neither of us saying anything. Reginald lay down in the backseat, let out a piggie yawn and went to sleep.

  But the peace didn’t last long. My mother and I were pretty much like two Middle Eastern countries. We’d get along for a while, then one or the other would say or do something that would resurrect old battles again.

  She drew first fire.

  “Hilary, have you given any thought to your career?”

  “Ma, can we save the heavy conversations for boring states like Iowa?” I eased into the exit lane leading to the toll road and rolled down my window in anticipation of the upcoming take-a-ticket booth. “We haven’t even left Massachusetts yet. There’s plenty of opportunity for you to give me well-meaning advice later.” I pointed to the road atlas lying open on the console between us, the map of the United States spread across two pages. “See that long green line? We have that whole time to talk.”

  “I know how to read a map, Hilary.” She toyed with the clasp on her purse. A Kate Spade, I noticed, something that surprised me. I don’t know why. My mother was as entitled to nice things as anyone else. I guess I never pictured her plunking down several hundred dollars for something to hold her compact.

  How well did I know my mother? She’d surprised me more than once in the last few years. The pig, the digital camera. Now the Kate Spade.

  She sighed. “As long as you’re happy working in a strip joint.”

  Then again, there were times she said and did exactly what I expected.

  “It’s not a strip joint.” I ignored the barb and dutifully took the white ticket from a skinny man with glasses and all the job enthusiasm of a rubber plant. “It’s a plain old bar. And I manage it, not just work in it.”

  “You could have been so much more.”

  I had the college degree, she meant, which should have been my one-way ticket to achievement. With a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UMass, my mother figured I had the goods to be President—or something close. I’d taken the degree, put it in my closet and never used it to figure out myself or my family, because the classes clearly hadn’t prepared me to see the problems all aro
und me. Or to figure out what anyone was thinking after the fact.

  Instead, I’d ended up working at Ernie’s Bar & Grille during my junior year, and never left. Ernie was generous with vacation, turned a blind eye to the occasional late lunch hour, and in general didn’t gripe much to his help. He’d added the “e” onto Grille eight years ago, hoping it would boost business by giving the place an air of sophistication.

  It hadn’t.

  He made me manager in a fit of desperation when his cousin Rita had walked out in the middle of a Friday night after a fight with her boyfriend over some barfly who’d made a pass at her. I convinced him to take all the things named “roadkill” off the menu. Whether or not the entrées were really peeled off the pavement didn’t matter; the novelty of ordering dead animals went away after the first time or two. It also took a bit of convincing, and a case of Heinies, to get Jerry, the chef, to stop frying every single thing he served, but once he expanded his repertoire and word got around, Ernie’s started making a decent income.

  After that, Ernie gave me a generous raise and “retired,” leaving me in charge most nights. Which was the way I liked it. I called my own shots, and sometimes closed my eyes and pretended the red and gold décor belonged to me. It wasn’t much, but it was better than working in the suffocating environment of an office or sporting a “53 Years of Service” button on a McDonald’s uniform. And, with Nick working his own hours in his carpentry business, it left us free to pretty much do what we wanted. We were both night owls, so it worked out perfectly for our lives.

  Until Nick started talking about having an “ordinary” life six months ago. Settling down in the suburbs. In a house with a fence. I glanced over at my mother and wondered if maybe the two of them had cooked up a conspiracy.

  “The partners are looking for a legal secretary,” my mother said. “How fast are you typing these days?”

  “The last thing I typed was my papers in college. Besides, I don’t want to be a legal secretary.”