I close my eyes for a second.
Every year until I left. I walked past that fire escape every spring for eighteen years. They were just there, part of the landscape of the apartment, like the creak on the third stair and the window that wouldn’t open when the weather got hot.
"Why peonies?"
A pause. "I just liked the way they smelled."
I smile at the kitchen wall.
That's exactly what James said she'd say.
We make plans to talk the following week. Before she hangs up, Mom says, "I'm glad the book is done, Jade." Notcongratulations.Notwell done.Just:I'm glad.Like it means something to her personally. Like she's been waiting for it too without knowing she was waiting.
Mom comes to visit three weeks later.
By then we've had four phone calls. The stilted quality of the first one is mostly gone—replaced by something more ordinary, the rhythm of two people who once knew each other and are slowly finding out if they still do. I've told her about the beach and the jasmine on the south wall at the Crawford estate and Phoenix's jacket that lives on the hook by the door. She's told meabout a colleague at the hospital she can't decide about, a novel she's reading that she thinks I'd hate and a street market near her apartment.
She's been talking to me like I live somewhere. Like I'm a person with a life she wants to know about rather than a daughter she's responsible for. That's new. I don't know exactly when it changed.
When I give her the Malibu address she reads it back to me twice to make sure she has it right. I hear the pen scratching on paper on her end.
I hang up and stand in the kitchen for a moment with my phone in my hand. Then I go back to my desk and open the manuscript and start the revisions.
35
JADE
Mom arrives on a Tuesday. I hear her car in the drive at two in the afternoon. I've been at my desk since morning, the manuscript open to chapter twelve where Olive told me the protagonist needed something to hold. I save my work and go to the front door and open it before she knocks.
She's standing at the end of the path looking at the house.
Not at me. At the house. She has her overnight bag over one shoulder and her coat over her arm even though it's warm, and she's just standing there taking it in — the white stucco, the front garden, the terracotta pots along the path that Olive helped me plant in September. I don't say anything. I lean against the doorframe and wait.
She takes a full minute. Maybe more.
Then she looks at me and opens her arms.
I step off the porch and hug her on the front path. She's smaller than I remember. Her arms go tight around me and we stand there for a moment in the afternoon with her coat crushed between us.
"Hi, Mom," I say into her shoulder.
"Hi, baby.”
When we pull apart, her eyes are bright with a bit of tears pooling at the bottom. Fighting back my own tears, I whisper, “come in.”
Mom moves through the rooms slowly. I follow at a distance, not exactly guiding her, just staying nearby. She stops at the desk first—the one in the corner of the living room where I write, with the manuscript pages stacked beside the laptop. Revision notes in my handwriting cover three sheets of yellow paper. She takes everything in without touching a thing.
“How’s it going?"
“So, so. Olive had notes.”
Mom almost smiles and keeps walking. She pauses in the hallway at the hook by the door where Phoenix's jacket hangs. It’s dark gray, well-worn, the one that lives there permanently because he always takes it off the second he's through the door. She looks at it for a second. Doesn't say anything. Then she moves on.
The kitchen is last.She goes to the window above the sink and stands there looking out at the view. The hills in the middle distance, the scrub and the pale grass, how the light falls across it all in the afternoon. Not the ocean—you can't see the ocean from this window, just the land side, the hills rolling away. She stands there for a long time.
"You told me about the view.”
“Yeah, isn’t it beautiful?”
