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“I’ll come down to your office in an hour,” I tell Leo as I get out of bed with my phone in hand. “I promise.”
“That’s what you told me last week,” he reminds me.
When he starts banging again, I curse under my breath and pad out of the cramped living room-slash-dining room. I have to dodge the riverscape painting that sits half-completed on my easel as I make my way into the bathroom and close myself inside.
Seated on the cold lid of the toilet, I slump down with my elbows on my knees and accept my mother’s call.
“I tried to call you yesterday,” she says after we move past the usual preamble and hellos. “You didn’t pick up, so I figured you must’ve had a busy day working.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry I missed you, Mom. Things have been crazy here.”
“You sound tired, honey. Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine.” I straighten up when I hear the concern in her reedy voice. Thankfully, Leo’s decided to quit his pounding and shouting, so my attempt to reassure her stands at least half a chance of being believed. “Everything is going great with me, Mom.”
“Oh, that’s good, sweetheart.” I picture her face on the other end
of the line, her relieved smile, which I can hear in her voice. “Tell me about your new painting. Did your friend at the gallery like it?”
“Yeah, she did. Margot thinks it’s going to do really well.” The lie slides off my tongue without hesitation, but it leaves a bitter residue of guilt in my throat.
“Of course it will do well, honey. They all have. How many paintings have you sold now?”
I shake my head in silence, grateful that I don’t have to look her in the eye every time I feed her this fairy tale of how I want her to imagine my life here in New York. She’s given me so much, made sacrifices I can never hope to reconcile, all in the hopes of offering me a better life than she’s had.
And while I know she loves me unconditionally, I feel a responsibility to make something of myself. I want to prove to her—and to myself—that I might actually be worth all of it one day.
“I’m not sure how many paintings I’ve sold, Mom. I guess I haven’t kept close track.”
“Well then, we’ll have to make a list next time we talk,” she suggests cheerfully.
“Okay, sure,” I say. “Let’s do that.”
“I’m just so proud of you, Avery. I always have been. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, Mom. I know.”
We talk for a little while about inconsequential things. The group of ladies she plays cards with on the weekends. The awful weather, which, she informs me, is making her arthritis act up. It soothes me, our conversation about everyday minutiae. I crave the normalcy of it, even though it also makes me ache sometimes that it’s been so long since I’ve been to see her.
After a few minutes, she sighs. I try not to hear the decades of weariness in that slow exhalation.
“Well, honey . . . they’re telling me I have to wrap up now. My call time is almost over.”
“All right,” I murmur. “I know.”
It’s never easy to say goodbye to her. Our allotted fifteen minutes always go so fast.
For the past nine years, this has been our primary connection to each other—a handful of sentences shared over the airwaves, meted out in daily quarter-hour increments.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, sweetheart.”
“Okay, Momma. I love you.”
She starts to tell me she loves me too, but the prison call timer runs out and our conversation is cut off before I can hear all of the words.
Chapter 6
I made good on my promise to my landlord. Leo had practically choked when I showed up at his office that same day to inform him that I had vacated the apartment of my few belongings and then proceeded to pay my back rent—all twelve-hundred dollars and change—in cash.
