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As soon as she had him settled on the floor with stackable buckets, he took off his sock and started chewing on it. The sock had a little rubber tic-tac-toe pattern on the bottom. For traction, Carmen figured.
“No, Joe. Don’t eat your socks.”
Jesse was watching the cars go by through a small pane of glass just the height of his face at the side of the front door. “Hey, Jess. What do you see?”
Jesse didn’t answer. Carmen liked the fact that though grown-up people felt the need to check in with a lot of useless questions and statements, children rarely felt the need to answer them.
“I have to make a pee,” he said after a while. Carmen picked up Joe and followed Jesse upstairs. For some reason Jesse only liked to use the bathroom upstairs. She decided to change Joe’s diaper while she was up there. She laid him down on the diaper pad and let him gum the tube of ointment. Could zinc oxide hurt you if ingested?
She opened the top drawer of his bureau, admiring the neat assortment of socks, all carefully matched, all primary colors, all with the little tic-tac-toes on the bottoms. Mrs. Morgan seemed like an intelligent woman to be spending so much energy on socks. Hadn’t she gone to law school? Could you be overqualified for this job?
Carmen thought of her mother sitting at the kitchen table of the old house, dragging a fork along the bottoms of Carmen’s new birthday-party shoes so Carmen wouldn’t slip on the shiny floors at Lena’s house.
Downstairs, Carmen called her mom at work. “Hi,” she said when her mom answered. That was really all she wanted to say.
“Nena, I’m glad you called.” Christina was breathless. “I’m going out for dinner with David tonight. If that’s okay. There’s, uh, lasagna in the freezer.” Her mother sounded distracted. Not distracted as in looking for the stapler, but deeply distracted.
“Really? Again?” Carmen paused awhile, wishing her mother would pick up on her mood.
“I won’t be late,” her mother assured her. “It’s crazy this week.”
“Well. Okay.” Carmen’s voice was soft. “Bye.”
There had definitely been a time, maybe as recently as the day before, when Carmen would have loved the idea of a night with the apartment all to herself. But right now she didn’t.
An hour or so later she checked her messages. There was one from Paul, returning a call of hers. There was one from Porter. The notorious after-date phone call. If a guy called within three days, he liked you. If he waited a week, that meant he didn’t have any better options and was probably just trying to get lucky. If he didn’t call at all, well, that-was obvious.
Porter’s call fell just inside the three-day mark. And an hour before, this also would have mattered to her.
Tibby,
Well, here are the Pants. I admit I didn’t exactly set the world on fire. I got scolded by my boss and watched a trendy fifty-year-old try to buy them. I hope you’ll do better.
Anyway, I don’t know what Camen told you, but I’m totally okay about Kostos and his new girlfriend. I was the one who broke up with him, remember?
Have fun with the Pants. I miss you. Call me later tonight if you are not out being cool and sophisticated with your cool and sophistcated new filmmaker friends.
Love,
Lena
You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
—E. L. Doctorow
Lena loved Carmen’s kitchen. It felt safe and contained, unlike the sprawling renovation at her house, with all its gleaming white and silver steel and too-bright halogen bulbs. Also, Lena loved the food Carmen’s kitchen had in it. It was all avocados and low-fat chips and herbal teas—girl stuff. None of the giant twelve-packs of beer and endless pork chops that jammed up the fridge at her house. There were so many fewer compromises in an apartment for two than in a house for four.
“Honey, would you like a glass of iced tea?”
Lena looked at Carmen’s mom. She appeared to be rearranging the pots in the lower cabinets. Her hair was back in a ponytail, and she looked like she was about twenty. Christina was always pretty, but Lena had never seen her look as animated and happy as she looked today.
“I’d love one,” Lena said.
Carmen was scanning the movie section of the newspaper. “I’ll have one too,” she said without looking up.
“How’s your mom?” Christina asked over the noise of the sink. She always asked this of Lena in a slightly guilty way, as if she were trying to pick up her dry cleaning without the ticket.
“She’s all right.”
“And how is your boyfriend? What’s his name?”
“Kostos,” Lena said reluctantly, never eager to discuss her love life. “But he’s not my boyfriend anymore. We broke up.”
“Ohhh. I’m sorry. Was the long-distance thing too hard?”
Lena liked that explanation. It was succinct and it didn’t necessarily make her sound like a lunatic. “Yes. Exactly.”
Christina took a full pitcher from the refrigerator. “Reminds me of your mother. She must know what you’re going through.”
Lena was bewildered. “We haven’t really talked about it.”
Christina didn’t seem to realize that not all mothers talked to their daughters about everything all the time.
“Anyway, I don’t think she knows anything about long-distance relationships,” Lena said.
Christina lined up three glasses. “Of course she does. She was with Eugene for at least four or five years.”
Lena looked doubtfully at Christina.
Christina and Lena’s mom hadn’t been close for a long time. Christina’s memory seemed to be getting jumbled, maybe on account of her own love affair.
“Who’s Eugene?”
Carmen had now torn herself from the movie section. She was looking back and forth from Lena to Christina.
“Who’s Eugene?” Christina repeated. The look on her face slowly transformed from surprise to uncertainty to anxiety.
“Uh …” She turned her back to the girls and poured the tea.
“Mama? Hello? Helloooooooo?”
Christina took a long time stirring in the sugar. When she turned back around, her face didn’t look open anymore. “Never mind. I might be mixed up. It was all a long time ago.”
Christina was a lovable, big-hearted, totally sweet person, but she was a bad actress and a horrible liar. Lena had believed she was mixed up before. Now she felt certain she wasn’t.
Carmen’s eyes were narrowed like laser beams on her mother’s face. “Never mind? Never mind? Are you joking?”
Christina cast a longing look at the door. “I’ve got to call Mimmy, honey. It’s already afternoon.”
“You’re not going to tell us?” Carmen looked as if she were ready to explode.
Christina’s eyes darted around nervously. “There’s nothing to tell. I was mistaken. I was thinking about someone else. It’s not important.” She snapped her mouth shut and left the kitchen in a hurry. She knew as well as anyone that Carmen didn’t let a person off the hook easily.
“It’s not important?” Lena echoed faintly.
Carmen looked at Lena knowingly. “That obviously means it is.”
“Who’s Eugene?”
Lena let it drop quietly between dinn
er and dessert as her mother loaded the plates into the dishwasher. Lena was clearing the table. It was just the two of them in the kitchen. Effie was at a friend’s, and their dad was reading the newspaper in the dining room.
“What?” Ari turned around.
“Who’s Eugene?”
Right away Lena knew she was causing a disturbance.
“Why are you asking me that?” Her mother was holding a plate in each hand.
“I just … want to know.”
“Who told you about him?”
“Nobody,” Lena said. If her mother wasn’t giving any information, then she didn’t feel like giving any either. Besides, she didn’t want to get Carmen’s mom in trouble.
Ari’s face took on a frustrated, unpolished look. She seemed to be calculating in a hurry. “Well, I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Then why are you whispering?”
Lena hadn’t meant to torture her mother, but that was how it was working out.
“I’m not,” she said, also in a whisper.
Lena stopped. This was feeling a little out of control. She wanted information, badly. The harder it was to get it, the more critical it seemed. On the other hand, the look on her mother’s face scared her a little.
Lena’s dad ambled into the kitchen. “How about some cheesecake?” he asked agreeably.
Lena’s mother cast her a look that said, in no uncertain terms, Do not open your mouth or I will ground you until you are an old woman.
“I’m going upstairs,” Lena informed the granite countertop.
“Nothing sweet?” her dad asked. They had a common love of dessert.
“Not tonight,” she said.
“Do you think Mom had a boyfriend before Dad?” she asked Effie when she appeared in Lena’s room awhile later.
“No. Nobody important.”
“What makes you so sure?” Lena asked.
“Because she would’ve told us about it,” Effie reasoned.
“Maybe not. She doesn’t tell us everything.”
Effie rolled her eyes. “Mom has a very boring life. Maybe there isn’t anything to tell.”
