The Bookseller(83)

Now, recalling that moment, I gaze appreciatively at my mother. I am grateful for this memory, for this understanding that in the other world, she is not only my advocate but my child’s as well.

And then I remember that in that world, she is no longer there. That she will never be there again.

I don’t want to think about it. I wrench my mind back to the current conversation. What were we talking about? Not children, because in this world I have no children.

Oh, yes. Now I remember. Companionship.

“I agree,” I say softly. “I can see that if one were married, companionship would be the most important part.”

She nods, studying the sweater in her lap. “It is,” she concurs. “You know, the other part . . . the physical part . . . that’s not always all it’s cracked up to be.”

Jeepers. She really is telling it all, isn’t she? “Do you mean . . . you and Dad . . .”

“Gracious, Kitty, that’s hardly something I’m going to discuss with my daughter.” She pulls yarn from her bag, and Aslan bats at it. “Get away, you.” She pushes his paw away, and he jumps down, heading for the kitchen, no doubt wondering if there is any food left in his bowl.

“But you’re all right, aren’t you?” I face her, my slippered feet on the floor. “You and Dad—everything is all right? You’re happy, aren’t you?” My voice becomes a hoarse whisper. “Please tell me you’re happy.”

She smiles. “Your father and I have been married for a good many years, and we are lucky that we still like to spend time together. We’re lucky that we know how to find common ground. Do I want to be with him all day long? Does he want to be with me all day long? Goodness, no. He has golf and reading; he has friends and plenty to do. And I have my knitting, my ladies’ club, my volunteer work at the hospital. In the evenings, we have each other. True companionship? Yes, we have that. But that doesn’t mean we need to spend every waking moment together. And that”—she pulls more yarn from her bag—“is how it ought to be.” She frowns. “You want a companion, yes. But you’d never want someone to be your whole world, Kitty.”

“No,” I say slowly. “No, even if one is married . . . there ought to be more. Not just your husband, not even just your children.” I blink a few times. “Family is important, it’s the most important thing. But it can’t be everything. If it is . . .” I look away, toward the front window. “If it is, when your family life doesn’t go as you expected it to . . . why then, you’re in for a huge disappointment. If that’s all you have.”

“Exactly.” My mother gently folds her handiwork and places it in her bag. “Why do you think I work with all those poor ailing children at the hospital?” she asks me. “Why do you think I’ve spent so much time there? Do you think I would have done that if things had gone differently? If you had not been an only child?”

I have never considered this before. She is of a generation in which married women in the workforce were a rarity—not that there are loads of mothers working outside their homes nowadays, but certainly more than when I was a child. That lifestyle was out of the question for my mother—indeed, for most women of that time. But as a mother of just one child—and a mother who had hoped for many more—what was she to do with all her time, once I was past infancy, once I was in school? She had more than enough time to spend on me; she lavished time on me. And yet I was a good kid, an easy kid. She always said so, they both said so. With just one easy kid, she would have had buckets of spare time. So she spent that time on other children, on babies who took the place of the babies she did not get to raise.

“In either case,” my mother says briskly, rising from her chair, “now that I know you’re perfectly all right, I’m going to call your father. He ought to be home by now, and he can come back down here and pick me up.”


After my mother leaves, I call Frieda to say I’m sorry. “It’s all right,” she says. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“I’m coming in,” I tell her.

“You don’t have to, Kitty. It’s slow.”

When isn’t it slow, these days? “All the same,” I insist. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

I’m still thinking about the conversation with my mother as I walk to the shop. It makes me wonder about my other life, about what I have there and what is missing. Leaving Frieda, leaving the shop and that entire lifestyle behind to devote myself to the children—it had been the right thing to do, the only thing to do. I can see that now, having spent time there, having seen what I’ve seen and remembered what I remember. I can see that there was no other choice.

Nonetheless, in that life I’ve undoubtedly dug myself into a hole. And that hole includes guilt over Michael’s condition, shock that Frieda really seems to be gone from my life for good—and, of course, the desolation of losing my parents. That heartbreaking triumvirate overshadows everything good there.

I shake my head. Even from here, from a whole other world, it’s painfully clear that I cannot get past that triumvirate. It eclipses everything else.


That evening, after we close the shop, Frieda and I go out for a drink. It’s Saturday night, but neither of us feels like venturing far from our neighborhood, so we just go to the Stadium Inn, a tavern on Evans, near the university. When Frieda and I were in college, this joint was always filled to the brim on Saturdays, after DU football games. You couldn’t get a table—you could barely even move. But the university disbanded the football program last year, much to the dismay of many in the DU community—neighborhood watering hole proprietors included, no doubt.