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“It’s so great to finally meet you,” I said. “Griffin speaks of you so fondly. I can’t tell you how glad I am that we are finally face-to-face.”
Emily looked at me like I was speaking Russian, which I was starting to wish I was.
“Funny enough, I have a dog named Mila, which sounds a little like Emily.”
Was that really how I thought I was going to turn things around? By telling her that her name sounded like my dog’s?
“Is that right?” she said.
I nodded, reluctantly. “I’m not saying they rhyme or anything, though almost, I guess . . . if you say it fast enough . . . or slow enough . . .” I started to fade out. “I love her a lot.”
Emily turned from me and looked at her son.
“I ran over a soccer ball in the driveway,” she said. “You need lights on out there, Griff. Downlights, up in the trees. Don’t you know that? It could have been a person.”
“Mom, what are you doing here?” He pulled his shirt down over the part of his stomach that was still showing. “At midnight?”
I reached down for my bra, tried to push it under the bed. First with my hands, then, as I felt Emily glancing back in my direction, far more awkwardly, with the side of my foot.
“I got a phone call that my sons’ lives are falling apart and, so, I thought I should probably find out in person what’s going on,” she said. “I got in the car after tonight’s lecture and here I am. As soon as possible. To find out. So start talking.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Make it less so, if you don’t mind,” Emily said, her arms crossed in front of her chest.
This standoff was so strange—and I was still in so much shock at meeting his mother, who apparently thought it was appropriate to open Griffin’s bedroom door unannounced, and then make demands—that it took me a minute to realize what she had said. What had gotten her there. In front of us. That her sons’ lives (plural) were falling apart. Both Jesse’s and Griffin’s. What was falling apart in Griffin’s life, in her mind? He was a successful chef, opening his own restaurant for the first time. He was doing great. All that had changed was that he had married me. Which was when I started to understand that that was exactly her problem.
“Wait. Jesse called you?” Griffin said, surprised.
“No,” she said. “And that’s very comforting, let me tell you. Gia and Cheryl did. They called together.”
This was when Emily Putney turned back to me. This was when she decided she wanted to deal with me.
“You must be Annie?” she said.
And then she gave me a look. She gave me a look—how can I explain it?—that made me want to say no. That made me seriously consider it. But before I could, I heard someone barreling up the stairs, covering at least two stairs at a time.
We all turned to see Jesse—out of breath, a twin under each of his arms, their faces and hands covered in tomato sauce and orange juice and powdered sugar.
“Hey Ma!” Jesse gave his mother a big smile. “I thought that was your car I saw out front! You realize that’s the twins’ soccer ball you crushed underneath your back tire, right?”
“Darling,” she said, “of all the many questions that need answering right now, I’m not sure that is going to come first.”
Everyone dispersed in quick succession: Emily going to put down the boys, the bigger boys heading downstairs to have a talk with her. I, meanwhile, took a shower and got into bed, not even stopping to put the photographs away, just trying to will myself to fall asleep, to make the day over.
But I couldn’t. I just lay there in the dark, my eyes slowly adjusting to the sliver of moonlight coming into the bedroom, until I was making it out again. Those beautiful designs on the bedroom ceiling, the letters and numbers making up some sort of formula that I didn’t yet know how to understand. This was what I was trying to do—understand that formula—when Griffin came upstairs and got into bed with me.
I expected him to say that he was sorry—sorry for his mother, sorry for the awkward intrusion into our home happening at the end of such an already tough day for me—but he was quiet, his arm over his eyes, waiting to see whether I wanted to talk. Waiting to see if I was going to say out loud what I was starting to feel inside: this was all becoming a little too much for me.
“My mother knew we were married,” Griffin said, finally. “I called her when we left Las Vegas. You should know that. I called her long before that, four days after we met, and told her I wanted to marry you. Whenever you’d have me. You should know that too.”
I turned toward him. “You did?”
He nodded.
“That’s very sweet.”
He paused. “She just knew Gia for a long time, Annie, that’s the thing. They were close. Gia was always kind to her. Patient with how Emily can be,” he said. “It may just take her a minute. To adjust.”
