“Wow. And where does Sue live?”
“With Jim, of course. In Northfield. They have this amazing log house right on the river. You’d love it.”
“You’ve been there? To Minnesota?”
“Well, of course. He couldn’t really consider me as a primary without Sue meeting me, could he? That’s where I’ve been these last few days.”
“You interviewed with Sue, too?”
Laurel laughed. “It wasn’t an interview. Jim and I met first. And then, because we liked each other, he invited me to meet Sue.”
“And she gave the thumbs-up?”
“Pretty much. She said we could try it out.”
“God, Mom. I can’t believe you haven’t told me any of this. Wait, let me get this straight. Jim and Sue want you to be part of their . . . their threesome.” Jessie immediately disliked the sound of this. “Their relationship.”
“Yes.”
“And will you and Sue be . . . involved, too?”
“Oh, no,” Laurel said.
“I was just asking,” Jessie said. “I’m not sure how it all works.”
“Well, to be honest, I wondered the same thing at first. But no, Sue is not interested in that. In fact,” Laurel’s voice turned conspiratorial. “Sue’s not very interested in sex. That’s why they placed the ad.”
“Oh.”
“She and Jim have very disparate sex drives. They thought another primary would help.”
“Oh.”
“So, when we get back from the Boundary Waters—”
“What? Where?”
“The Boundary Waters. Where we’re taking the canoe trip.”
“Oh, right.” Jessie had already forgotten about the canoeing. “Is Sue going, too?”
“Well, she normally would,” Laurel said. “But she couldn’t get the time off work.”
“So it will be just you and Jim.”
“Yes.”
“How romantic.”
“I know!”
“When do you leave?”
“In two weeks. Jessie, I’m so excited.”
“Mom, I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but don’t you think you should be a bit more cautious? I mean, you really don’t even know this Jim person at all. And you’re going to go who-knows-where in a canoe with him? What if he’s—?”
“Oh, Jessie.”
“What? It’s dangerous, Mom.”
“Well, I appreciate your concern. But you wouldn’t think like that if you met him. Plus, by my age, I’ve learned to trust my instincts.”
“Mom, I’m just worried about—”
“Well, I thank you very much for your concern,” Laurel said perfunctorily. “But I’m not going to let you ruin this for me. I haven’t felt this happy in years.”
Jessie sighed. She could tell there would be no talking her mother out of it. “Just be careful, okay?” she said. “And take bug spray. I hear the mosquitos can be bad there this time of year.”
Laurel laughed. “Oh, I will. Jim has it all planned out, don’t worry.”
Later, Jessie had to admit that Laurel’s instincts had been uncharacteristically trustworthy. Laurel had come back from her trip to the Boundary Waters bug-bitten and in love. Two months later, she called Jessie to tell her that she was moving to Minnesota.
Again, Jessie tried to reason with her. What about her house? Her job?
“Well, I don’t have to be here to sell the house, you know. It’s probably better if I’m not.”
“Mom, you can’t sell the house.”
“Why not? It’s not like I’ve been very happy there, especially since Mom died.”
“But . . .” How could Jessie say that it was not her mother’s memories she was thinking of, but her own? That house, those pastures, the barn . . . the best parts of Jessie’s childhood were there. Laurel couldn’t just sell them. She tried, haltingly, to explain this to Laurel.
“Well, it’s not like you spend any time here anymore,” Laurel argued. And she was right; Jessie rarely visited Laurel at Baymont now. There were just too many other places to explore.
Jessie shook her head; this was all beside the point. Every relationship Laurel had ever been in had ended in heartbreak and disaster. If this one was no different, and Laurel had given up both house and job to make it work, where would she be? She urged her mother to reconsider.
“What would you say if I was giving up everything for a man I’d only just met?” she asked finally.
“Oh, Jessie. We are hardly in the same position. You have your whole career—your whole life—ahead of you. And I’d been thinking of leaving the office anyway. It’s time for a change. And I’m not that far from retirement, you know.”
“Mom, you’re only forty-nine.”
“I’m almost fifty, Jessie. And that’s not the point. If it was what you wanted, I’d support you. You know that.”
Jessie had to admit that she was right. Laurel had never been the voice of caution. So she said nothing more, listening as Laurel talked about Jim and Sue’s house, with its myriad of bedrooms and large front porch. When, at last, she had told her daughter everything, silence settled between them on the line.
“Jessie? Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“Well?” Laurel said. “Do I have your blessing?”
“Okay, Mom,” Jessie acquiesced after a pause. “If you think it will make you happy.”
CHAPTER 31
Jessie
After Laurel moved to Northfield, Jessie rarely heard from her. Still, during their occasional phone calls, her mother sounded cheerful and relaxed, and slowly Jessie began to relax, too. She stopped waiting to hear her mother’s weeping voice on the other end of the line, telling her that it was over, that it hadn’t worked out. Then, one Sunday afternoon late in October, Jessie was kneading bread dough at the counter when the phone rang. She answered it with hands caked in dough.
“Jessie, I have to talk to you. Do you have a minute . . . a few minutes?” All of Jessie’s trepidation about her mother’s new relationship returned in a rush. She clutched the phone to her ear with her shoulder.
“Just a second, Mom,” she said. She set the phone down on the counter, rubbed the biggest clumps of bread dough off her fingers, and sat down at the kitchen table.
“Oh, Mom,” she said. “What is it? What happened?”
There was a hesitation on the other end of the line, and Jessie sighed audibly.
“Oh, Mom,” she said again. She spread her hands in front of her, studying the broken nails and ripped cuticles visible beneath the white of the flour. “What happened? You can’t start a conversation that way and then beat around the bush.”
“Well,” Laurel began. “I feel, I don’t know, shy about it.”
“Shy?” Jessie had never known her mother to be shy. “About what?”
“Well,” Laurel said again. “We’re trying to conceive . . .”
Jessie waited for her mother to finish her sentence. “Conceive of what?” she prompted finally.
“Oh, Jessie. You know this is hard for me to talk about. Conceive a child, of course.”
It was impossible not to laugh. Laurel was, what, fifty-one now? Hadn’t she been menopausal for years?
“Isn’t that sort of impossible?” she finally asked, as kindly as she could.
Laurel laughed, clearly enjoying Jessie’s confusion. “You’re right. I can’t physically have a child at my age,” she said. “But I can still have a child.”
Jessie waited in silence for her mother to go on.
“Oh, Jessie. Don’t you get it?” Laurel said at last. “Sue will have the child. Jim will be the father. I’ll be . . . well, I’ll be a co-parent.”
“Oh,” Jessie said flatly. “I see.”
“Well?”
“I thought you were done having kids, Mom. Isn’t that why you had your tubes tied?”
“Well, I thought I was, too. But that was then, this is now.” She giggled nervously.
“And things change, don’t they? Sue wants a child—there are lots of health benefits, you know. Lower rates of cervical cancer. And breast.”
“Sue wants to have a baby so she won’t get cancer?” Jessie asked dryly. “Come on.”
“Well, that’s not the only reason, of course. She wants . . . you know . . . the experience—”
“Oh.” Jessie did not know. She had always assumed, growing up, that she would have children, but recently the idea of trying to steer her life in that direction filled her with a strange mix of inertia and dread, as if she were on a raft adrift in the doldrums and her supplies were running low. Better, she had decided recently, to let the wind take her where it would. She did not mind the thought of being an old maid. She could almost imagine the cottage where she would live in her dotage, the counters cluttered with canning jars while the daylilies bloomed outside her window.
“And Jim’s on board. So honestly I didn’t have a lot of choice,” Laurel was saying. She laughed again nervously. “It was either get on board or . . .”
“Get on board or abandon ship?” Jessie offered. “And you don’t want to leave.”
“No. I don’t want to leave,” Laurel said.
“I see.” Again, silence descended between them.
“Wow, so you’re going to have a kid,” Jessie said at last. “I can’t believe it.” Her voice sounded deflated and hollow even to herself, but Laurel did not seem to notice.
She laughed shrilly. “Well, we’re not pregnant yet.”
“Don’t you think it might be a little . . . a little odd for the kid?”
“Jessie!” Laurel was indignant. “I’m surprised at you. Lots of children have two mommies, two daddies. There are thousands of kids in this country with only one parent. Ours will have three. Who can argue with that?”
Now Jessie laughed. “Well, I think there are a lot of people who would argue with that, Mom, and so do you.”
“I know!” Laurel said. She sounded gleeful. “But we’ll show them.”
When she hung up the phone, Jessie’s stomach felt raw, her thoughts muddled. Her first instinct was to call her father and tell him what Laurel had told her. She could almost hear his booming laughter. He would see it, she guessed, as yet another of Laurel’s theatrics. In her father’s mind, Laurel lived her life as if her every experience were to be headlined: Grief-stricken mother loses daughters in sexist custody battle; free-thinking polyamorous triad raising healthy, well-adjusted child. It would be comforting to collude in his amusement, rather than attempt to comb through the tangle of her own reactions.
For a few moments, Jessie returned to kneading the bread dough on the counter, but even the rhythmic motion of her hands in the soft dough did not soothe her as it usually did. Quickly, she plopped it in a bowl, covered it with a kitchen towel, and looked around the room for a warm place to let it rise. It was cool in the house; the weather had changed today, but Jessie had not yet brought in wood for the woodstove. Jessie turned the oven to warm and placed the bowl with its towel inside. Then she quickly rinsed the caked dough from her hands and found her running shoes in the bathroom where she’d kicked them off the night before.
Outside, the skin on her arms tightened against the cool of the evening. She began running at once, knowing she would not be cold for long. Soon enough, the work of her cells turning adenosine diphosphate to triphosphate would warm her body, the endorphins released by her pituitary gland would calm her mind. Even as the thought formed, she laughed at herself; no wonder Leah called her a geek. But it soothed her, this knowledge of her body’s inner workings. Life could be a difficult thing to make sense of; she might as well understand what she could.
Jessie looked up at the desert sky. The moon, almost full, slid dramatically from behind a film of clouds, and Jessie felt her chest filling with the beauty of it. She kept her face tilted toward the sky as she ran, trusting her feet to find their own way along the gravel road. Only when she had run a half a mile or so from home did she permit her thoughts to return to what Laurel had told her.
Really, it was no concern of hers. She thought of the objection she had half-raised to Laurel on the phone, but she knew that what other people might think of her mother’s choices was not what troubled her. Was she worried for the child? She had never met Jim and Sue, but she sensed they might be a little odd. Still, children were resilient and adaptive; surely the child would be fine.
As she ran, Jessie felt her thoughts circle in on the one reaction she had not allowed.
“Are you jealous, Jessie?” she asked herself aloud.
For that was it, she realized suddenly. She was a little jealous. She was Laurel’s daughter. For all intents and purposes, she was Laurel’s only daughter. It had not been an easy nor a simple path—not one, certainly, that she would wish on any child. But it was part of who she was. On a day-to-day basis, she rarely thought of her mother, and Laurel, caught up in her own life now, rarely called her. Yet despite the infrequency of their communication, Jessie never doubted that Laurel valued her. Jessie had been the faithful one. She alone had not refuted Laurel’s claims to motherhood.
All that would change now. Laurel would claim this new child with all the passion of her convictions. This child would be her flag to wave to the world: Look at us! Look at what we can do! But she—or he—would also be Laurel’s personal chance at redemption, her last shot at sterling motherhood: the child that she would not leave.
So that’s it, Jessie thought. I’m jealous. And simply in the naming of it, the feeling began to disperse into the cool night air. Jessie’s head felt clear again, her thoughts transparent. She smiled to herself as she ran. Laurel was going to have a baby, and Jessie would be an aunt. Unlike motherhood, being an aunt was a role she could imagine. She would send the child books at Christmas, A Fish Out of Water and The Velveteen Rabbit, and all her other childhood favorites. Later, when the child was bigger, she would teach her how to play cat’s cradle, to build a fire, to tie a slip knot . . .
It wasn’t until Jessie was almost home that she thought to correct herself.
“I won’t be the aunt,” she said aloud, coming to a stop on the dark road. “I’ll be the sister.”
The realization deflated her. She sprinted the last seventy yards to her house, trying to recapture the calm she had felt. She opened the front door, her heart still pumping hard. Inside, a strange burning smell hung in the air. She had forgotten to turn off the oven before she left, and the towel draped over the bowl inside was crinkled and warped at the edges, the oven filled with gray smoke.
“Shit,” Jessie said, tugging the towel off the bowl and burning her fingers. The dough inside had risen to a plump, soft ball, its surface just beginning to crust. Jessie sniffed at it. Then she greased a baking sheet with a paper towel she’d wiped in butter and plopped the loaf on top to bake.
In the morning, she had toast for breakfast with homemade blackberry jam, ignoring the slightly singed taste of the bread. It would be a waste to throw it out.
CHAPTER 32
Jessie
The plane dipped as it began its descent into Minneapolis, and Jessie’s stomach dropped with it. She clutched at her armrest, and then immediately let go, embarrassed by her fear. It made no sense. Jessie had flown on an airplane at least once a year since she turned seven, she and her sister departing for northern California almost as soon as school was out in June. How Jessie had loved those flights as an unaccompanied minor. While her sister had cried and clutched at Sarah while they waited to board, Jessie had felt charged with anticipation. In another moment, the stewardess would lead the sisters onto the plane alone. Alone. For an hour and a half, she and Emma would be parentless, and, oh, the thrill of that.
Usually their flight to Sacramento had been nonstop, but a couple of times they had changed planes in San Francisco for a puddle jumper. Jessie had loved hurrying through the unknown airport, the stewardess’ heels click-clacking beside her, all the people streaming by. She could s
till remember vividly the impulse that had come over her then: to pull her hand free and disappear into that river of people. She had not given into it, of course—she would not have missed the summer at Baymont for anything—but still it had been exhilarating to feel so close to such utter freedom, to be separated from it by nothing more than the stewardess’ thin fingers wrapped gently around her hand.
Never once, in all those years of flying, had Jessie felt afraid. But now, as the plane shook violently from side to side and then dropped suddenly through the sky, Jessie couldn’t help her sharp gasp for breath. The man next to her smiled sympathetically.
“Nervous flier?” he asked.
“Not usually,” she muttered. She turned to the window, but all that she could see beyond the rain-streaked pane was the fuzzy gray-white of clouds.
“It’s just the storm that’s creating turbulence,” the man reassured her. “It’s not really dangerous.”
“I know that,” Jessie said, more sharply than she’d meant to, then snuck a glance at him, hoping he hadn’t noticed her tone. “Is Minneapolis home?”
“Yes. For you?”
“No, I’m—” For a moment, Jessie was tempted to say too much, just to take her mind off the violent tremors of the plane. I’m going to visit my polyamorous mother in Northfield. She moved there five months ago to live with her primaries, and now they’re trying to have a baby.
“Just visiting,” she said.
“Look.” The man gestured toward the window. “We’re through it now.”
The gray beyond the window had transformed into a brilliant green. Rain drops still splattered against the glass, but beyond them the trees were clearly visible. Such green! Jessie had lived in one desert or another for all of her adult life. The desert suited her, she thought. She was not an indulgent person; she did not like to take even her most basic needs for granted. But now, looking through the rain-splattered window to the ocean of green beyond, Jessie felt the tightness in her muscles give way. She put her hand to the glass, wishing she could feel the moisture on the other side. In another moment, the wheels had touched the tarmac and the plane was roaring along the runway.
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