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CHAPTER 15
Clara
Mouth agape. No words coming out. Eyes wide and unblinking. The same look everyone wore when they saw my mother for the first time.
“She’s forty-nine,” I said, answering the question Ian was too dumbstruck to ask. “Those pictures are from her birthday last year. We went to San Diego for a week.”
“She’s yourmother?”he said. “How old is she?”
“I just told you, forty-nine.”
“And she’s your mother?”
“Yes,” I said, “she’s my mother.”
I was used to people going into shock when they realized that the woman who out-beautied me by about a thousand percent was my mom. But I wasn’t used to them going into stupid. “In case you’re wondering, she’s forty-nine. She’s my mom, by the way.”
He returned his gaze to the phone. Then back to me. Then back to the phone again. Then back to me.
“To answer your next question, yes, my father is the culprit behind my thighs and eyebrows.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just... how is it possible to look like that at forty-nine? Has she had work done?”
“Just a tummy tuck from when she dated a plastic surgeon,” I said. “The procedure was her Christmas present.”
“And that’s it? This is really what she looks like?”
“She dyes her hair, if that counts.”
“She looks very good for a woman her age. For a woman any age, for that matter. Is she a model or something?”
The traffic was increasing as we approached the city, and I pumped the brakes a little harder than necessary. “Something like that,” I said, struggling to maintain a neutral demeanor. I tended to get defensive the minute I suspected someone was about to start judging—or misjudging—my mother, and I could already feel myself getting worked up emotionally.
“What about your dad?” he asked.
“What do you want to know about him?” I said.
“What did he do for a living?”
Ah, there it was, as predictable as time. Ask about the woman’s looks. Ask about the man’s personality. “From what I gather from my mom,” I said, “he stood under bridges and made people answer riddles if they wanted to cross.”
He laughed. “So I take it you didn’t know him?”
“He was gone before I was even born.”
“In that case, you were better off without him. What the hell was a woman like your mother doing with a troll like your father in the first place?”
Yet another question I’d grown accustomed to answering. “Falling in love,” I said. “Dreaming of a happy marriage with children and a house with a white picket fence. The same thing as any normal, average-looking person. If you can imagine such a thing.”
I regretted my sarcasm as soon as I heard it echoing through the car. But it was incredibly frustrating when people automatically assumed that, because my mother was beautiful, her life was easy and she got everything she ever wanted handed to her on a silver platter when, in fact, the opposite was true.
“I’m sorry,” Ian said. “Did I say something wrong?”
As the traffic slowed to ten miles an hour, I hit the blinker and moved into the less-congested middle lane. “Kind of,” I said. “But I’m not mad or anything. Everyone does it. Not just men. Women do it, too.”
“Women do what?”
“React the way you did when you saw my mother. Ask the same questions.”
