True Places(4)

The girl packed the blanket and the rope in with the rifle. She spun in a slow circle, memorizing the spot, hazy and green-smelling in the damp fresh of the morning.

“Come on, Ash.” She shouldered the pack. “We’ve got that turkey to deal with.”





CHAPTER 2

Suzanne lowered both front windows to combat the overbearing sweetness of the sixty hyacinths in the rear of the Navigator. She’d been delighted when the nursery offered potted plants as a donation for the Boosters auction, but she’d been told they would be tulips or daffodils. A single hyacinth in full bloom could send its scent to every corner of a moderate-size home; no one would be able to breathe, much less eat, with sixty blooming hyacinths in the Boar’s Head ballroom. If the flowers could be wrapped in cellophane, it might be tolerable. She couldn’t remember what they’d decided about packaging and presentation at the meeting last week. Fifty decisions at that meeting, plus a hundred more at two others—one for the faculty appreciation lunch and another for the food bank. Suzanne, as president of the Boosters, had put Greer Rensworth in charge of auction presentation. She remembered that much. Who else but a stay-at-home mom with degrees in interior design and marketing? At least that made sense, unlike the assumption that any plant-related task would be Suzanne’s responsibility because she had majored in botany. In case the hyacinths needed emergency repotting on the trip home?

Her phone chimed—a text. She stopped behind the other cars at the intersection with Route 250 and picked up the phone from the console.

BRYNN: Forgot my English paper on my bed. Need it by 4th period.

She dropped the phone into the console and shook her head. Second time this week her daughter had left something at home. The car at the front of the line swung left and the others scooted forward. Suzanne followed suit.

Fourth period. Eleven sixteen. She glanced at the dashboard clock. Ten thirty-two.

She could make it home and then to the school with perhaps six minutes to spare. She didn’t have to consult her phone to know there were countless other tasks waiting to occupy that time. That was, in fact, what time was: a narrow container for a relentless succession of tasks. The container could not be expanded, but the tasks could multiply exponentially. In fact, tasks were guaranteed to multiply. The law of entropy had undoubtedly been discovered by a mother with two teenagers.

The compressive nature of time was the most salient aspect of her existence. Time was a squeezing bitch. It never expanded, never gave up any slack, in a perverse reversal of the state of the universe itself. Her younger self would have been amused by this irony. Forty-two-year-old Suzanne had no time for irony, the snappy way it caught and twisted the truth, not even for irony about time itself.

Suzanne understood there were three options for dealing with time pressure. Option One: Perform tasks more efficiently. Move faster, triple-task, cut corners. Buy cookies instead of making them from scratch, and ignore the raised eyebrows or direct complaints from better, more efficient mothers. Drive faster and risk a speeding ticket with scheduling repercussions rippling for days afterward. Text at stoplights but not in front of the kids. Sleep less.

Option Two: Delegate more. Because she was in charge of so much (her mind flew too fast to bother to enumerate her responsibilities), she already delegated a great deal. Unfortunately, it was not as straightforward as it seemed. People were unreliable, especially the more competent ones, because of the inevitable burgeoning of their own to-do lists.

Option Three: Refuse to perform. This radical notion rarely surfaced, because Suzanne was so accustomed to being busy. Everyone she knew was busy; it was something they talked about as they caught up on emails at a swim meet or texted takeout orders to their husbands while waiting for prescriptions at CVS. Being busy was a by-product of the life she had chosen with her husband, Whit, although if she was perfectly honest, she wasn’t sure the word chosen was accurate. Once their kids had started school, it was more like jumping into a fast-flowing river. You didn’t choose. You swam to keep from drowning. Suzanne was an excellent swimmer.

In front of her Navigator, a pockmarked red pickup edged forward, engine gargling, the driver’s elbow thrust out the window, sleeve rolled up.

Her phone chimed. Suzanne retrieved it from the seat and read the text.

WHIT: Meeting Robert at 5 so can’t pick up Brynn from swim. Home by 8. Sorry!

With one hand she texted Ok, hit send, and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. Another ripple shuddered across her schedule.

Suzanne flicked her turn signal, indicating right toward Charlottesville and home. Home, where that morning Brynn had leveled her with a look so contemptuous Suzanne had been certain her daughter was possessed. How could an expression that hateful, and directed at Suzanne, appear on the face of the child who had once—no, hundreds of times—looked upon her mother with love so pure it made her life, crystallized by that moment, almost too beautiful to bear? It simply wasn’t possible. And yet Brynn’s face had not lied. Suzanne’s throat cinched shut.

The pickup turned right onto the main road. As Suzanne pulled up to follow it, her phone chimed. She snatched it off the seat.

BRYNN: ????

Suzanne dropped the phone in her lap. A gap in the traffic opened. She hovered, blinking back tears and staring at the brown, matted pasture beyond the road, bordered by a black triple-rail fence.

A honk from the car behind her.