The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(62)

Nora




A couple of days after our argument at the restaurant, my mother asked me to go shopping with her in Palm Desert. We’d never performed the usual mother-daughter rituals together—no spa dates, no tea time, no rom-coms, no crafting or baking for us. Part of this was my fault, because when I was growing up I spent far too much time locked up in my room, listening to music, but the other part was that my sister genuinely enjoyed these outings with her and I never wanted to be a third wheel. My mother’s invitation was therefore highly unusual, and I took it to mean that she was calling a truce after our skirmish about the sale of the Pantry.

Mercifully, it was a weekday, and Macy’s was mostly empty. My mother seemed to be in good spirits, holding on to my arm as we walked around the department store. She bought a casserole dish and a set of stainless-steel measuring cups, but spent the better part of the morning helping me pick out some clothes. I had brought only a few things with me from Oakland, and needed a pair of pants, a few shirts, a couple of dresses. We were in the shoe section when it struck me that we were doing something completely ordinary, that we were returning to the mundane tasks that make up most of our existence. Standing in front of a display that advertised a 20 percent discount on summer shoes, I picked up a tan sandal with an ankle strap. “What do you think?” I asked.

“It won’t go with your new pants,” my mother said.

“No?” I put the sandal back on the table and held up a classic black pump with a high heel. “What about this?”

“That’s much better.”

A sales clerk who’d been watching from a few feet away came over, and I gave him both pairs of shoes. Then I sat down across from my mother. New strands of gray streaked through her hair and there were dark pools under her eyes. She was still in mourning, and would be for a long while yet. But how much did she really know about the man she was grieving? The question had been nagging at me ever since I’d received that phone call from the jewelry shop. “I’ve been wondering,” I said. “Why exactly did Dad buy that cabin?”

“You know why. So he could rent it out.”

“But he didn’t rent out to tourists that often, did he?”

“In the beginning, he did. But there was always trouble. Someone would plug the toilet or burn something in the toaster oven or break dishes and not replace them. I warned your father about this, but of course he never listened.”

Across the sales floor, a tall blonde was sipping an iced coffee as she went through the sales rack, methodically checking every pair in her size. What did my father’s mistress look like? Was she young and pretty, the way I had imagined at first, or was she someone with more substance to her? Some wit or personality. She had to be someone special if he was breaking up his marriage over her. In which case, how could my mother not know about it? “So if Dad didn’t rent out the cabin much, why did he keep it?” I asked.

My mother thought about this for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was hoarse. “I think your father really liked being a landlord. No one in his family owned a house before. The cabin made him feel, I don’t know, like he was successful.” She rubbed her eyes with the palm of her hand.

So she had no idea what had been going on, and all I had accomplished with my fact-finding mission that morning was to stir up her grief. I shouldn’t have asked, I thought. I looked away, desperate for another subject of conversation, and was relieved to see that the sales clerk was returning with the shoe boxes. I tried on the black pumps first.

“They look great on you,” my mother said.

“You like them?”

“Yes. Are they comfortable? Walk around, see how you feel.”

I took three hesitant steps; I wasn’t used to high heels. “They look, uh, professional.”

“Exactly,” my mother said, clasping her hands. She was gazing at me with an expression I couldn’t quite decipher and I looked at the shoes again, wondering if I’d missed something. “You know,” she said after a minute, “it’s not too late to go to law school.”

“What?”

“You’re young, Nora. Three years will go by quickly. And you can afford to go back to school now, with the life insurance money.”

“What are you talking about, Mom? Why are you bringing this up again?”

“Because you would be a great lawyer, I’m sure of it. The neighbors told me yesterday that their daughter Jessica passed the bar exam. Remember how she used to ask you for help with her math homework? She couldn’t finish it without you, and now look at her. A lawyer! She’s going to work for a big firm in San Diego.”

So this was why my mother had asked me to go shopping. Not because she wanted to spend time with me, but because she wanted to convince me to start a proper career, be more like Salma, or more like Jessica, or more like someone else. This was not a new conversation. We’d been having it in one form or another since I’d given up on medical school and decided to study music instead. The thought of having this argument again, sitting here in the shoe section at Macy’s, was intolerable. She was intolerable.

Only a moment earlier, I’d been feeling sorry for my mother and betrayed by my father, but now everything shifted. Whatever else he did, he’d never wished me to be a different person. He wouldn’t have staged an ambush like this or tried to convince me to give up on the only thing that gave meaning to my life. His love was free. But my mother’s love was a war. It was fought every day for the sake of shaping me into somebody new, somebody better. Even if I had gone to medical school or law school or business school, she would have found something else in me that needed to be improved, and would have made it a point to tell me about it. What was even more infuriating was that my mother never behaved like this with my sister. Salma could do no wrong.