“I might have fun.”
“You might.”
“And if I don’t, I can suck it up for a few months and move back to the dorm for the summer.”
“And speaking of summer, you know there’s always a room for you here.” Which he wouldn’t use. She had no idea how it had happened, but Cal was committed to a career in government. “And at your dad’s, of course.” Which was the house he’d grown up in, where he would probably want to spend the majority of his timeshould he, for some inexplicable reason, ever decide to come back to California.
She regrouped. This was not about her. “My point is, you have options if you end up not liking being in the apartment.”
“I think I’m going to do it.”
“Great!”
They talked a little longer. Cal was a good kid. Though he had called solely to get her advice on the housing situation, he didn’t want to make it seem that way. Again, she had to stifle a laugh. She was amused by how easily she could read him.
“Any progress onGreen Light?” he asked, and even though she was laughing at him internally, she appreciated that he was polite enough to ask about her life.
“Not really. I had a meeting with a new potential director. She’s not a big name like Tolhart was, but she has a solid track record and she was nominated for an Emmy a couple years ago. I was hoping if I could get her attached, we might be able to scare up some new money.”
“But? Is there abutcoming?”
“I don’t have a great script. I can almost guarantee she’ll pass.” As she, a woman on an upward trajectory, should.
“Crap.”
“It’s OK. Sometimes projects don’t work out.”Even projects that feel like they have your whole heart wrapped up in them.
Silence. Poor Cal didn’t know what to say, or how to extricate himself from Sad Mom. “I should go, hon.”
“OK.” He smiled at her, his little-boy face visible inside his almost-a-man face; he was a nesting doll that only she could see. Something turned over in her chest. “Thanks, Mom.”
She hung up and tilted her head back and squinted at the sky. The feeling of respite she’d had in the pool endured.
But she should go inside; she wasn’t wearing any sunscreen. Justbecause she’d given up injectables didn’t mean she was inviting wrinkles.
“You’re a good mom.”
Blair was startled by the matter-of-fact observation from across the pool. She had two thoughts in quick succession. The first was that if she’d had such a thought about Jack, she would never have verbalized it. To have done so would have seemed too vulnerable in a way she could not quite articulate.
The second was an impulse to hope he was right, to lunge toward the idea with an urgency that felt unbecoming and destabilizing. She tried to cover by saying, breezily, “I try.”
No. That, or at least that delivery, had been wrong. Disingenuous. They had the pool between them, which made telling the truth less daunting. “It’s hard for me with Cal, because he and I are so different. But I know him. I know how he thinks, and what he fears. So I think I can rise above our inherent differences and give him good advice. But… I might be full of shit.”
“The fact that you’re entertaining the notion that you might be full of shit proves my point. You’re a good mom.”
She wanted to ask him to elaborate, to lie back and bask in his praise, but she restrained herself. “Thanks. I miss them so much. Both of them, but Esme’s absence is a fresh wound, whereas Cal’s has scabbed over. Cal was always more of a loner anyway. Not in a worrisome way, just that he was born sort of self-contained. Esme and I are tight. She never really did the aloof teen phase. She always wanted me around, at least to some degree.”
She stopped herself there. That was more of a monologue about her kids than Jack had signed up for, or could possibly want.
“I don’t know anything about parenting,” he said, “but that seems rare.”
“I don’t know if it is or it isn’t, but it’s awesome. Was awesome. It’s weird to think about Esme going about her days and not knowwhere she is, or what she thinks about stuff. She calls a lot, but it’s not the same.”
She let a few moments of silence pass, and when he didn’t turn his attention back to his computer, she asked, “What’s your mom like? Everyone knows your dad, and I bet everyone asks you about him”—he dipped his head in a way she interpreted as indicating agreement—“but what about your mom?”
“My mom was—is—a waitress.”
“That’s her job, but what is shelike?” She wasn’t sure why she was so curious. But she was, and she’d told him about her family—her crappy parents and her awesome kids.
