Always Happy Hour: Stories(62)

My mother asks what we’ve done, who we’ve seen—questions that are simple and unobtrusive and yet I don’t want to answer them. I feel like a child, hiding in my bedroom and hating everyone from behind my closed door. I had no reason to hate them; my family always went way out of their way to make sure I felt included. They let me decide where we went for dinner, what movies we rented, but these things only made me feel like more of a stranger.

“Do you need me to come out there?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “Why would I need you to come out here?”

“To help you get settled.”

“I am settled.”

“I could help you decorate.”

“I already did that, Mom. You know I already did that.”

“I just miss you, is all,” she says, after a pause, and I tell her I miss her, too. I wonder whether she really loves me, if she’s had to fake it over the years. I haven’t been easy to love and it’s not the kind of not-easy-to-love that makes people love you more. I tell her she’s welcome to visit, but I don’t need her help. The cat climbs up my chest and peers into my face. She has such big pretty eyes: bright green, too close together. She begins to purr, a low rumble that grows and grows and I scratch her head, the place where her tail meets her body; the hair comes out in tufts.

“How’s Dad?” I ask. My father is on a weight loss diet through the hospital. He has two shakes a day and a small dinner at night and the food comes in boxes and powders.

“He’s lost twenty-four pounds,” she says. “The doctor took him off some of his medication.”

“That’s great.”

“He’s looking so good. He only cheats when we go to the movie.”

“That’s great,” I say again, and it is. My father is doing something that none of us thought he could do. He’s changing his life long after he seemed to have given up. Even he thought he would fail.

“I have to go,” I say. “There’s someone at the door.”

“Look through the peephole first,” my mother warns.

“I will. Beth probably forgot her key.”

We hang up and I try to rearrange myself without disturbing the cat. If I move too much, she’ll leave. I take off her collar, pulling apart the clasp, so she doesn’t jangle all night and keep me awake. She paws at it lazily as I place it on the table. Then I close my eyes and pray, which is something I do every night. It’s a habit, like so many things, but mostly I keep praying because something bad will happen if I stop. I say “Hail Mary” after “Hail Mary,” which I prefer to the “Our Father.” I remember the Protestants growing up, how they accused me of worshiping a false God. I would explain that I wasn’t praying to Mary, but asking her to intercede on my behalf, though I wasn’t sure I knew what the difference was and the Protestants were never swayed, not one bit.

I think about a daydream I used to have. It started after I heard a story about a woman who was adopted as a baby. Her adopted family was nice and rich and white and she knew she was lucky but she was half-black and had an afro and never felt like she belonged. She began taking drugs. And then, in her early twenties, she stopped taking drugs and searched out her birth parents. Her mother was dead but her father was alive and lived in West Africa. She wrote him a letter and he contacted her. He told her she was a princess. He said he had always loved her and that she could move to this West African nation and lead it, if she wanted. So she went there and there was a parade in her honor, all of the women of the village lined up on the sides of the road wearing the same dress, singing her name. Welcoming her home. Even though she was a princess, she was too American to stay there and didn’t want to lead a poor third-world country. I didn’t like that part of the story so I would try to forget about it and concentrate on the women of the village singing my name, wearing the same blue dresses made special for the occasion.

The cat slips under the bed and I’m alone. I get on the floor and try to pull her out by a paw, but she swipes at me with the other so I take one of the boxes instead. There are two of them, full of pictures. I flip through a stack: I’m twenty-three, twenty-five, twenty-eight; we’re at the Statue of Liberty, Disney World, Cancún. Having drinks at a TGI Fridays somewhere in Florida. There isn’t a single place I’d want to return to, not a single place that interests me at all. I used to research these vacations for months only to end up in the most obvious locations.

I study the framed photograph of the two of us that used to sit on our dresser: my hair was thicker and my teeth were whiter and I was wearing a navy blue bikini I don’t have anymore. I think about calling him but he won’t answer. The last time he picked up, he said, Do you want me to have to change my number? Is that what you want?

I hear my sister unlock the door, heels clicking on the hardwood. She opens my door and I can feel her standing there, but I don’t turn.

She sits next to me and takes the framed photograph out of my hand.

“I was prettier then.”

“You weren’t prettier,” she says. “Only younger. I think you’re prettier now.”

“Every day I find new things wrong with me.” I take the picture and put it in the box, push the box under the bed.

“Why’d you leave?” she asks. “I was worried.”