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“It’s not going to.” I tossed the polishing rag on the table, realizing I had been twisting it into a rope. “I just need a little help right now. I won’t waste this time, Mom. I will make it. I just need a little support to get there.”
“I will absolutely not support this.” She buried her face in her hands, and then looked up at me. “You’re crazy. You need to get real.”
I set my jaw. “Well, I did it.”
She rolled her eyes and stood. “Then you’ll have to fail on your own.”
“I’m not going to fail,” I said, swallowing. Hoping I believed it. “That’s so dramatic,” I added, but didn’t know if she could hear me.
She opened the sliding glass doors that led to the backyard, stepped through, and closed them again. I watched her spray and wipe in wide loops.
I cupped my hands around my mouth, pressing them to the pane. “How can I prove to you that I’m not crazy?”
Mom narrowed her eyes, her reply muffled. “Who knows.”
I watched her work, remembering the looking-for-a-man days she had talked about. I was a toddler. I remembered the cat-piss smell of our neighbor Mrs. Klein’s house. Of weeping and weeping until I fell asleep, waking up in the middle of the night and crying again until a grumpy, exhausted Mrs. Klein handed me a dusty juice box and a handful of stale crackers from her bathrobe pocket.
I remembered the relief when Mom was the one to wake me up in those days. Mom with her dimples and big, soft chest and constant, quiet tongue clicks, like a train slowing down. She wore Lancôme perfume, from a beautiful bottle with gold-plated lettering spelling La vie est belle. I used to sit in her room, tracing the letters with my finger.
Mom tapped on the glass. Look, she mouthed, pointing to the tall wooden fence that surrounded the Floriens’ pool.
On the far corner sat a big bird with a green head and a white breast.
Mom slid open the door, letting in the warm, humid air. “It’s a green heron!” she said, her voice clear and bright, anger lingering at the edges. “The only advantage of working for people with pools.”
All this talk of dreams and passion. I didn’t know exactly what I meant, either. It was like foraging for notes in the forest. Always not that, not that. Not Mom’s life. Not law school. But it was as if I could never say that, that’s it. I had it briefly at the Skylark, after we’d played, that I knew.
I would find it again.
I pointed to the heron, nudging Mom’s shoulder. “Maybe it’s a good sign.”
“Don’t be stupid, Cass,” she said, wiping her forehead with a blue-rubbered hand as she looked on. “That’s just a bird.”
