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Lorrie

October, 2011 — Cleveland, Ohio

When the waiter brought out my birthday cake, “When Doves Cry” was playing softly in the background, which pretty much ruined the whole night.

A woman should be able to turn fifty without Prince slipping through the restaurant speakers, grabbing her by the heart, and dragging her backward through time twenty-seven years, all before the ganache arrives.

One second, I was sitting at Hudson’s on Shaker Square with a linen napkin in my lap and a wineglass I’d been pretending not to finish too quickly. The next moment, I was twenty-three again, stretched out beside my parents’ pool in Maple Bluff, the chlorine drying on my skin, a man’s button-down white shirt hanging open over my swimsuit, and the liner notes from Purple Rain spread across my lap.

Dean Wyatt had been lying beside me, one arm behind his head, listening to the cassette as though it might tell him something important if he stayed quiet long enough.

“You ever think music knows things before we do?” he’d asked.

At twenty-three, I’d laughed. At fifty, I knew better.

“Mom.” Claire’s voice snapped me back to the present so quickly I nearly spilled my wine. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying.” I dabbed my cheeks with the napkin.

“Your chin is wobbling.”

“My chin doesn’t wobble.”

She gave me a long, patient look. “Okay.”

Across the table, my son, Ben leaned back in his chair, looking amused and faintly alarmed.

Both of my children had inherited their father’s Midwestern suspicion of public emotion, although Claire never missed a chance to take photos. Some days I wished cell phones and the internet had never been invented.

My daughter was twenty-six, glossy and beautiful in the effortless way young women often are before they understand the amount of money older women spend trying to look effortless as the years pass.

She had my mother’s cheekbones, Paul’s pale gray eyes, and thick brown hair that fell over one shoulder without a single visible gray root or bit of thinning around the temples.

Her phone sat face-up beside her bread plate because she always wanted to stay in touch, no matter what. It was as if she and her friends believed turning their phones over, or heaven forbid, off, might cause the world to proceed without their permission.

Ben sat beside her in a thrifted leather jacket and jeans. He was tall and loose-limbed, with dark curls, my smile, and expensive sneakers that appeared to have been designed by a committee of astronauts.

They were good children. They were also spoiled, which was a word mothers tended to replace with fortunate when speaking to other people.

Claire was typing beneath the table with the concentration of a neurosurgeon. Ben had already asked whether my old vinyl records were still in the attic because original pressings were “insane right now.” Then, before the bread arrived, he’d mentioned that his Brooklyn rent had gone up again in a tone suggesting I could possibly arrange an unfortunate accident.

“Not really an accident,” Ben said when I arched a brow at him. “Just financial discouragement.”

“Your father is a stockbroker, not the Godfather.”

“Shame,” Claire said without looking up. “That would’ve been useful during my bad-relationship years.”

The waiter approached with both hands out, elbows tucked, carrying fifty lit candles with the care of a man transporting nitroglycerin through a crowded dining room.

Claire had ordered the chocolate ganache cake three weeks ago and called twice to confirm it, because my daughter had inherited my need to appear competent in every situation.

Hudson’s held an eighties night on Fridays, which was why she’d chosen it and why I’d agreed. A Rubik’s Cube sat on every table where a tasteful votive should have been. A Pac-Man machine blinked near the coat check. The cocktail menu offered something called a Material Girl Margarita, rimmed with pink sugar.

Madonna never would have accepted pink sugar. Red, possibly. Pink was an insult.

Claire had called the decorations cute while I’d called the fog-machine cord near the bar a lawsuit waiting to happen, and my son had estimated the resale value of the Pac-Man machine.