Other People's Houses(23)

Ava took the tea and resettled herself on the bed, putting her laptop to one side, keeping one of her earbuds in, just in case she needed to do that “Oh, I’ve just been distracted by a notification, I’m going to let my gaze drift to the screen to underscore how unimportant this conversation is” move. Again, nice try.

“Both earbuds out and close the screen, OK? I want to talk to you, and I want to hear what you have to say.” Frances suddenly wondered if she should wait for Michael to come home, but it was a bit late to change tack now.

Ava rolled her eyes, but complied. Honestly, the eye-rolling thing just had to be developmental. There was no other explanation for its simultaneous appearance in pretty much one hundred percent of tweens and teens, all over the world. Three wisps of underarm hair, the first actual pimple, and eye rolling, all at once. Frances got a brief mental montage of teenage eyes rolling in the spotty faces of multitudinous nationalities, then returned her focus to the kid in front of her.

“I went to talk to Jennifer today, because your dad and I were worried that you didn’t seem to be bringing the same attention to school as you used to. It’s as simple as that.” She smoothed the coverlet, flicking a crumb to the floor.

“As simple as ‘My kid is failing, what are you going to do about it’?” Ava pulled her legs up under her, just in case her mother’s smoothing hand got too close.

“No, you’re not failing. You’re just not succeeding.”

Ava snorted. “Isn’t that the same thing?”

Frances shook her head. “No, and you understand what I’m saying and what I mean, and there’s no point pretending you don’t. Look, lovely.” She put her hand on Ava’s knee, but her daughter twitched it away, frowning. “We love you, and want to help you, that’s all. It’s our job.”

“Well, how about I fire you?”

Frances smiled. “You can’t. It’s a lifetime appointment. We have tenure.”

Ava wasn’t smiling. “I never hired you.”

“We were appointed at birth. Your birth.”

“How come Milo gets a pass?”

“He doesn’t, but our expectations for him are different from our expectations for you. He’s ten. We expect him to lower the toilet seat after peeing, eat his vegetables, and that’s about it.”

“You weren’t that easy on me.” Ava’s eyes were glittering, but Frances couldn’t tell if it was tears or rage.

“Yes, we were. Easier, maybe, because you were the first and therefore we didn’t know how mean we could be. Poor Lally’s going to be sweeping chimneys by the time she’s eight.”

Again, no smile. Usually humor would breach her dam of irritation, her hormonal wall of ice. Frances waited.

“Lally gets away with everything.” This was clutching at straws. Ava doted on Lally, and the feeling was mutual. When Lally had been a baby Ava had been ten, and for a brief period it was only Ava who could stop her from fussing. It had been instant glory, witnessed multiple times by various members of the family, and the connection was still there.

“She’s four. Are you suggesting we send her to college? Should Milo be looking for work in the financial sector?” Frances tried to touch Ava again, but she still held herself too far away. “Darling, we want all of you to be happy, and that means different things at four than it does at fourteen.”

“What is it supposed to mean for me, then?” Frances could hear an actual question in Ava’s voice, rippling across the surface belligerence. She really wondered what happy should mean for her, and Frances remembered that feeling well. She smiled and tried to soften her tone.

“We expect you to work hard at school, get enough to eat, get more sleep than you seem to want, and to have a social life. Not a continuous round of parties and sleepovers because that would mess with the first three, but fun is allowed and indeed encouraged.” Frances looked at the face she knew better than her own, watching for clues as to what Ava was thinking. She would get a tiny indentation at the corner of her mouth when she was trying not to cry. She fisted up her hands when she was getting frustrated. She stopped blinking so much when she was about to throw a total shitter. So far her blink rate appeared normal, but Frances was ready to duck. “And we also want you to tell us what’s going on with you, to keep communicating with us.”

“How is that supposed to make me happy? Aren’t I allowed a private life?”

“Of course you are. Everyone is. But we’re here to help you, to support you, like a pit crew, but without the jumpsuits and awesome whirry wheel-changing tools. We can’t do that if you don’t tell us what you need.”

“What if I don’t need anything?”

“We all need something. No one gets out of here alone, babe.” Why was this so hard, why was her child resisting her so much, so furiously? When she was small Frances had been her everything, and now she seemed to resent her mother’s very existence.

“But what if what I need is to be left alone?” Ava’s tiny indentation was there now, at the corner of her mouth, but so was the reduced blinking. The teenager was fighting herself for control.

Frances tried something else. “Have some tea.”

“I don’t want any fucking tea.”

Pause. Crap, now Frances needed to make one of those snap parenting decisions that she so frequently got wrong. She should have waited for Michael. Should she get angry at the cursing? Should she not? Two milliseconds, three milliseconds, four milliseconds . . .