I'd Give Anything(13)

“Hey! Ouch. And anyway, you like Harris.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. But Harrises do serve a purpose.”

“Harrises? Like he came off an assembly line? Like my husband is a Barbie?”

“They are functional without mess and drama. Until they aren’t, apparently.”

“He’s always been a kind man. Honest and hardworking. A good father.”

My mother lifted an eyebrow.

“Okay. Until he wasn’t,” I said. I wanted to rub my eyes, which felt tired, but few things aggravated my mother more than smudged mascara. I settled for rubbing the crescent of skin just beneath each eye.

“The eye area is like tissue paper,” said my mother, “except that the crinkles stay.”

“Thank you,” I said. “What was I saying?”

“That, in a shocking display of sound judgment, you haven’t told that ridiculous Kristin about Harris’s lapse.”

“Right. Finally you can stop playing house with Harris. Finally you can end this charade. Finally you can find a man who doesn’t bore your best friend to tears. Those are the finallys Kirsten will mean.”

“Is the Kristin portion of this conversation over?”

“Can you help?”

I knew the answer before I asked. My mother had run multiple successful political campaigns in our city, including her own. She’d turned bad guys into everymen, everymen into heroes. She’d recast drunk driving records, embezzlement, and assault as virtual virtues. In her day—a day that almost certainly hadn’t ended yet, despite the physical ravages of age and illness—Adela Beale had spun this town like a top.

“This Harris nonsense is nothing,” said my mother. “Nothing. Child’s play.”

She laughed and said, “I should probably avoid that phrase, though. In this particular instance.”

I snatched up a lemon snap and bit it.

“Thanks for your compassion, Mom.”

Another finger-flick jettisoned compassion and motherly concern into the stratosphere. Adela’s eyes met mine, and even though I had known her forever, I had to hold back a full-body shiver.

“Are you sure you want my help?” she asked.

I hesitated.

“There is a teenaged girl involved,” I reminded her.

At this, Adela lifted one penciled eyebrow.

“I know. She’s my granddaughter.”

In that second, when my mother said those words, I recognized where I was: standing on the vertiginous edge of solid moral ground, with the dark pit of my mother’s ruthlessness gaping below me. I could leap or not. Before I could even quite consider this choice, a memory of Avery from just that morning flashed into my mind. Avery reading the sports page, furrowing her pretty brows at the plight of her beloved Sixers, her skinny fingers holding a piece of toast made the way she liked it, toasted just to goldenness with the thinnest varnish of peanut butter. And I didn’t leap. It was more like what happens to those tourists who stand at the lip of the Grand Canyon for a photo, the sky wild with sunset behind them, and the ground just crumbles out from under their feet. I thought of Avery and her paper and her toast and I was falling.

“All I want is for Avery to get through her days without hearing murmurings that her father is a creep who got obsessed with a child and then resorted to bribery to cover it up,” I said. “I want his name to be cleared, to have him be perceived as bumbling but well intentioned, maybe, which is exactly what he’s been for almost the entire balance of his life. That’s it. Nothing else. So, within those parameters, yes. I want your help.”

I saw it, the spark in her eyes, the color in her hollow cheeks, the purse of her lips. I really didn’t think my mother was happy that her son-in-law, husband of her only daughter, had lost his mind and his job and his moral compass because of a teenaged girl. I mean I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think so. Certainly, she was anything but happy about the pain it might cause Avery. Oh, but the woman loved a challenge. I watched it enliven her, like green and yellow springtime creeping over a barren winter landscape in a nature show. Who knew? Maybe it would even keep her alive for a while, despite her doctors’ grim predictions. For a bizarre few seconds, I felt noble, like a thoughtful child who had given her poor sick mother a gift.

As I looked at her I noticed again what I’d seen the last two times we’d been together, something new about her face. Deep lines hooked around the corners of her mouth. A high clench to her shoulders. Shaky hands. It struck me that what I was seeing was pain.

“So how are you, Mom?”

“Dying,” said my mother. Her lips twisted. “But I’m still having a better day than you are, I daresay.”

I laughed.

“I daresay you’re right,” I told her.

As I prepared to get up and leave she said, “This is what happens when you marry a man you think will never surprise you.”

Because this was true but was something I had never articulated to my mother or to anyone else and had barely admitted to myself, I froze for a moment, halfway out of my chair. Then, I finished standing up.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said.

As soon as I said this, my mother’s face committed the rare and remarkable act of softening. She shut her eyes almost as if she were blinking back tears, and I wanted to shout: “Stop!” But when she opened them again, her eyes were dry.