I'm Glad About You(5)

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Kyle told her, sounding sorry.

“My daughter Megan—do you remember Megan?—she’s due with twins in two months and she’s been looking into different pediatricians and I thought I’d just stop by here. I told her that there’s a big pediatrics office right down the hall from your father’s urologist, you should look into that too because that’s so close! I didn’t know you were here, I’ll tell her I saw you.”

“Please do.” Kyle both wanted to flee and couldn’t bring himself to move. Just standing there and listening to Mrs. Moore’s chatter brought back for him a rush of affection for this woman, who had fed him dinner, served him tea, listened to his dreams, and kicked him out of her house more than once during four long, tumultuous years of his youth. “It must be so nice for your parents to have you right in the neighborhood!” Mrs. Moore continued. “Your sister is still here as well, isn’t she? I think I heard from Louise Breslin that she saw your sister, she’s living in Clifton!”

“Susan is a nurse, she’s over at Good Sam,” he reported.

“Your parents must be so proud,” Mrs. Moore noted. Then, quickly, a shadow of some grief passed over her face; she was not the kind of woman who knew how to hide feelings; she never had been. “You know, until Megan moved back, not one of my children stayed in Cincinnati. Not one! Last year, I was so mad at all of them!” She laughed self-consciously, as if to let him know that this wasn’t the life-crushing disappointment she had just admitted it was. “The Dilmeyers, did you go to school with any of them? Ten children and all of them stayed here! Margaret Dilmeyer can’t stop bragging about it, she has twelve grandchildren already, I hear about it all the time. I don’t mean to complain; I’m not complaining! Well, I’m glad that Megan’s here, at any rate. She just moved back! So that’s nice. Your parents must be so happy, to have you both living in the same city.”

“I think they enjoy it, yes,” Kyle acknowledged. He was touched by her confession and leaned back on his left foot, acknowledging with that simple gesture that he didn’t really have to run off; he had a few minutes to chat. “But everyone’s well?” He wanted to suck the words back into his soul as soon as he had uttered them.

“Oh, they’re all great. Just great!” she bubbled, a conscious brittleness entering her tone. “Jeff is in Germany, of all places, on a Fulbright. He’s got all this research with DNA. Nobody knows what he’s talking about half the time but he’s successful. He’s always being published in big science magazines. Nature. He’s got an article in that one, coming out, he’s really proud.”

“Well, I don’t actually know a lot about research publications but I know that a Fulbright is a big deal,” Kyle said, grateful that she had had the good grace to pretend that he actually cared about Jeff, her patently favorite son. Both of them knew there was really only one of her eight children in whom he had any interest at all. But he really had to get out of these waters before they got any more perilous. The nurse at the desk had raised her eyes impatiently more than once, and he could tell from her familiar tics that she was about to butt in and embarrass him for taking five minutes off to chat with an old friend, when the waiting room was turning into a veritable petri dish of infected toddlers. “It’s great to see you,” he told her. “Please tell Mr. Moore I hope he feels better. Kidney stones are no fun.”

“Alison’s still in New York!” she announced. He wished he could have kept his heart from hammering in his chest, but barring that, he could at least control any sign of interest in this line of discussion. He had known as soon as he saw Alison’s mother that he would not get out of this conversation without hearing about her, but that didn’t make it any easier when it finally happened. He forced a nod which he hoped carried with it an air of professional disinterest.

“Yes, I had heard that,” he said politely.

“She’s still crazy about this acting thing, but she hasn’t had much luck yet,” Mrs. Moore continued. “A couple of auditions. It’s a big deal, apparently, even getting into the hallway outside the auditions. She has lots of stories, it’s a big adventure, I understand that, but I finally said to her, don’t you have to actually get in something, a television show, or something that pays you something, isn’t that the point? Well, that wasn’t the right thing to say, obviously. But I’m worried. You can’t blame me for worrying. She has no money. She was working in an office for a while but she didn’t like that, I guess there were a lot of people there who were really unethical and they expected her to do things that just bothered her too much. She wouldn’t tell me anything specific. Anyway, she finally quit that and now she’s waitressing for some company that does private events. So she makes a lot of money when they call her but they only call her once in a while and I think she should get a real job, something with health insurance, but she says she went to New York to act. But she’s not doing that either! At least in Seattle, she wasn’t making any money but she was acting, which I thought you won’t get anywhere by acting in Seattle, but in New York she’s not even doing that much.” All of this information was excruciating to Kyle. He stared at the floor and nodded diligently, hoping that she would somehow understand that she was making him miserable, and do the decent thing and shut up. She did not. “She hasn’t asked for money,” the woman continued, again offering up the most private details imaginable, at the top of her lungs, in the middle of a waiting room full of strangers. “She’s too proud for that! She was always too proud, no one could tell her anything. Her father says she’s going to have to come to us sooner or later. I wanted her to fly home for the weekend a couple months ago, just to get out of that city, and she said she couldn’t afford the plane fare! And fares are low now. But she doesn’t have any extra money at all. She just can’t keep going on with nothing! Her father is really disappointed. She did so well in school, he really thought she might go on and do something with herself. He said to me, it just seems like a waste, a total waste of her time and her twenties. I don’t know, maybe she’ll get tired of it and come home.”