I Was Told It Would Get Easier(52)

Casper looked confused. “Yeah, I have those, too.” He unbuttoned his flannel shirt to reveal a T-shirt that read “Geologists know their schist.”

At that point I turned and went into the hotel. Emily could handle this one on her own.

I checked in and went to the room and then called my sister. She’d texted me earlier that she had news, and I wanted to hear both it and her voice. Our outsides might be very different, but our insides are as thick as thieves.

Lizzy sounded happy to hear my voice. “How’s it going? Is Emily being nice?”

“Well, she’s ignoring me.”

“Sort of the same thing.”

“Is it?” I stretched my neck and wondered if it was too late for a cup of coffee. Probably; the last thing I need is another night lying in bed rehearsing conversations I’ll never actually have. “We saw Dad last night. You’ll be impressed to hear I didn’t argue with him about anything.”

She laughed. “Was he weakened by illness? How was the old fart?”

I grinned. “Fine. The same. Did you realize Mom missed her career? I had no idea.”

“I wouldn’t say she missed it. Who said that? Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“She didn’t miss advertising. She joked about wanting to be a plumber, remember? It wasn’t a thing women did, back then, not that they do it much now. She loved fixing things, she loved doing it herself. She missed her workshop in the country, she talked about it a lot when she was sick.”

This was a thing between us, a thing we didn’t talk about because there was nothing to say. When Mom was dying, my sister went back to DC to take care of her. I came as often as I could, but Lizzy stayed. My dad was working, and someone needed to be with Mom. They’d discontinued treatment, and Mom was on a lot of pain medication, and the two of them sat together in the dining room that had become a hospital room, and talked. At the time I’d had a kid in school and was working seventy hours a week; I couldn’t have been there. But I regretted it more and more. Regret is one of those emotions that outpunches reality: Even if you 100 percent could not have done things differently, it still pops up and takes a jab.

“She always did love fixing a toilet,” I said, smiling. Then I changed the subject because this one hurt. “How was your day?” I imagined my sister sitting at her kitchen table, piles of homework being held down by one of her family’s two elderly, constantly sleeping cats. She had long, dark hair, and sometimes when she was working it would drape across a sleeping cat and you couldn’t tell where it ended and the cat began. I’d asked her once if she dyed her hair to match the cat, and she’d simply said she would no more dye her hair than she would dye the cat, and laughed at what a daft question it had been. Lizzy isn’t like me; she doesn’t care about getting older.

“It was okay. Teddy has strep, Paul had a callback, the other two did nothing shocking or remarkable, so, you know, a win.”

“And what did you do?”

“Changed all the bedsheets.”

“You know how to party.”

“You’re not wrong.”

“What’s the callback?”

“Ad for beer.”

“National?”

“Yeah.”

“Fingers crossed.”

Emily walked in and threw her bag on the floor. “Who are you talking to?”

“Aunt Lizzy. Do you want to talk to her?”

Emily sat on the edge of the bed and reached for the TV remote. “No, say hi and tell her I love her.”

“Your niece says hi and that she loves you.”

“Of course she does. I’m adorable.”

“Nicer than me, for sure.”

“Shit, hang on a minute.” The phone clattered, and there was a long gap where Lizzy went AWOL, so I put the phone on speaker and laid it on the bedside table.

Emily was flicking around the unfamiliar menu with ease and found a marathon of Friends. I think it might be a law that at least one channel needs to be playing Friends at all times. I’m showing my age; thanks to the internet, I guess everything is playing everywhere all the time. If I were the editor of TV Guide, I’d be reading up on how buggy whip manufacturers retrained for the future. I watched the show lazily and wondered how it was still funny, twenty years after I first watched it, mildly stoned and sitting on my tiny apartment sofa in New York. I’d been the same age as the characters, and in some ways it felt like an alternative version of my own life, with better lighting and wardrobe.

I watched Jennifer Aniston and tried to decide if I’d been able to warn her about the future—Hey, good news, you’re going to marry Brad Pitt, but then it’s all going to fall apart, and the world will spend the next twenty years obsessing over whether or not you’re going to have a baby and end up collectively feeling sorry for you—would it have changed anything? Does knowing something in advance make it more or less likely to happen?

I often find myself musing on useless things like that, because I can’t help thinking how weird life looks in reverse. When I was Emily’s age, I thought I was going to become a world-class athlete and a Supreme Court justice, but neither of those things panned out. A relatively happy, professionally successful single mother of an unfriendly only child . . . the seventeen-year-old me would not have been impressed. She had much higher hopes for herself. I looked over at Emily and wondered what hopes that sixteen-year-old had for herself. I hope hers work out better than mine.