“You need to be thinking about downsizing yourself,” my mother informed me.
I shrugged. “We have the rare Bronxville ranch, all on one floor.”
“Is it?” she asked.
“It was this morning.” Surely she wasn’t doubting my memory on this one.
“I told Lucas we were going to the market,” she said. “Is there anyplace you want to go?”
“I’m happy to go to the market.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been already. I just don’t want to walk in the door having some big conversation about Eddie. Nobody wants to hear their wife talking about her ex-husband.”
“Lucas knows about Eddie, doesn’t he?” Anything was possible.
“I was briefly married to an editor who took a good job in New York City when I didn’t want to live in New York City. I wanted to raise my girls in the suburbs. Just one of those things.”
“You could have raised us in Bronxville or Maplewood.”
“Eddie was adamant about living in the city,” she said.
“That’s what you told Lucas?”
“He knew about your father, of course, I had the two of you girls to show for that one, but we never talked much about Eddie. If you don’t have children with someone, the marriage doesn’t count.”
“Jonathan and I don’t have children.”
“I’m not talking about you and Jonathan,” she said. “I’m talking about Eddie and me.”
“The raspberry farm,” I said.
“What about it?”
“I want to go to the raspberry farm.” It had come on me like divine inspiration.
My mother turned her big sunglasses in my direction. “You’re kidding me.”
“It’s a quiet place to talk,” I said. “And anyway, I’ve never seen it in good weather.”
“I’ve never seen it at all,” my mother said.
“You never went up there?”
“Why would I?”
“I don’t know. Eddie and I could have died there. We didn’t die there. Leda loves raspberries. That makes it a seminal location in our family history.”
My mother shook her head. “You didn’t almost die. You got a cut.”
I leaned back into the Audi’s comfortable leather seat, regretting everything. “Raspberry farm, please.”
My mother did not agree, but at the next light she turned the silver sports sedan and started in the direction of High Street.
A raspberry farm saw no more business in May than it did in January, but in May there were preparations going on, mostly of the digging and planting variety. Ours was not the only car on the road.
“Will there be a reenactment?” my mother asked. “Shall I crash the car into the woods?”
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about any of this in a long time, and now I am. I’m thinking about the accident, I’m thinking about Eddie, I’m thinking about your divorce.”
