He looked at the sky for a long time. He was either waiting for divine inspiration or he wasn’t going to answer. Just when she was thinking she would get up and go inside, he said, his gaze still on the sky, “She was a good mother. Maybe not as good as you, but she did her best, and her best was pretty good. I wasn’t always kind to her as a kid. I’ve never said this out loud before, but it’s one of my greatest shames.”
He met her eyes.
Wow. She needed to tread carefully here. “What, you were a wild child?”
“No. It’s more that I saw how my dad treated her, how he regarded her, and copied him. Not necessarily consciously. But Iwasconscious, from a young age, of wanting him to like me, to think well of me. My mom wasn’t… This is going to sound terribly snobbish.”
“Since when has that stopped you?” It was out before she could think better of it, and it was probably the wrong thing to say.
He huffed a wry laugh, so perhaps she hadn’t misfired. “Touché. She isn’t book smart. They met when he was a customer at her restaurant—she worked at this high-end steak house that my dad would go to if he had to be in the Twin Cities for something. She still works there.”
“Lots of people aren’t book smart.”
“Tell that to my inner sixteen-year-old who thinks he’s writing the Great American Novel.”
“You started writingIn Timewhen you were sixteen? No wonder you’re having trouble getting the second one done.”
The laugh this time sounded more earnest. “She lives in an apartment in Minneapolis, and my dad lives on a lake a couple hours northwest of the Twin Cities.”
“When did they divorce?”
“They didn’t. They were never together.”
“Even when you were little?”
“Nope. They had their fling. She got pregnant.”
“Kind of like Reggie and me.”
“Except you and Reggie got married. My dad always maintained that he was a loner, that he needed solitude to work—what you would call the cocoon approach to writing. I would go stay with him for six weeks in the summer. My mom and I would usually go to his place for Christmas. Sometimes he’d stay at ours if he had to be in town for something else.”
“How very evolved of them. The poster people for healthy co-parenting.”
“I don’t know that theywerejust co-parenting, though. I said just now that they had their fling, but I’m not sure that’s all it was. On the rare occasions we were all together, they slept in the same room—when my dad was in Minneapolis for a book event, say. Or when my mom dropped me off for my summer visit—she would stay a couple days before she headed home.”
“Ah. Well, if it worked for them…”
“It worked for my dad. You know what else worked for him? A similar arrangement he had with the librarian in the town closest to his cabin.”
“Ah.”
“No kids came of that one, though.” He paused. “As far as I know. But we would go into town once a week for his grocery run, and we’d usually have dinner with her. Mary was her name.” He shrugged. “She was nice. She was always giving me books. But I knew I wasn’t supposed to tell my mom about her.”
“So you didn’t.”
“I didn’t. And the stupid thing is I can’t remember if my dadtoldme not to tell her or if I just knew.
“I took to reading as an escape, like you did. My mom wasn’t much of a reader. She was always wanting me to watch TV with her, but I always told her I would rather read.”
“Ah, things are becoming clearer. Also, I feel a certain amount of solidarity with your mom.” She was trying to keep things light, but not too light. She was trying to keep them in a sweet spot that would keep him talking.
“As I said, I’m not proud of it. But I knew my dad would ask about my reading—to his credit, we did talk on the phone every Sunday night during the school year. He would ask about my reading, and it wasn’t good if I was on the same book two weeks in a row. He would ask about books, but he never asked about TV or movies. If a TV show got mentioned, in a general sense, he would always say, ‘Television makes small minds smaller.’”
Yikes.“You must have been lonely.”
His brow furrowed. “How do you mean?”
“Lonely. Longing for the company of other people.”
