I'm Glad About You(57)

“Yeah, I’m at my mom’s.”

“I’ll give you a call there.”

“Okay, sure.”

And so he finally walked away from her, approaching the line of cash registers at the front of the store with his baby formula under his arm, the rules of suburban America respected and complete. It was just what it was, two people parting with the past left like a bland linoleum floor between them. The absurd clarity of the fluorescent lights left no shadows around him to haunt her imagination.





fourteen





HER MOTHER WAS less convinced that Alison’s chance meeting with Kyle was as insignificant as all that. “Oh, Alison,” she murmured, her hand to her breast in simple and yet utterly melodramatic acknowledgment of the heartbreak Alison must be feeling.

“Mom, it was really no big deal,” Alison informed her.

“I would love for that to be true, I really would,” Rose replied. “But might I remind you, the last time you saw him, what was it, more than three years ago? You flew out of Cincinnati like a bat out of hell.”

“I needed to get back to New York.”

“And we haven’t seen you since!”

“And I’ve been really busy.”

“That’s what you said,” Rose sighed.

“Mom—seriously. I have not been avoiding the entire city of Cincinnati just because one of my ex-boyfriends happens to live here. That would be ridiculous.” Her nerves were too frayed for her to tread into these waters. But the frayed nerves might have had more to do with the eight phone calls she had not returned to her alarmist agent who wanted to know where the hell she was.

“How did he look?”

“Who?”

“Kyle!”

“Oh. He looks good. Tired, but you know, he has two little babies and a full-time job, so of course he’s tired.”

“She doesn’t work, I heard.”

“She just had two babies!”

“A lot of women work these days. You made it very clear, you were not going to give up your career to have a family.”

“Only an idiot would ask me to give up my career to have a family.”

“Well, that was apparently important to him.”

“Mom, maybe she quit her job because she wanted to quit her job. Some women want to quit their jobs.”

“That’s what I’m saying. He wanted to marry you.”

“Mom—he didn’t marry me, and he never asked, by the way.”

“He would have.”

“Didn’t beats would have.”

“You know very well—”

“Mom, we’re not talking about whether or not I should have married Kyle! That’s a nonstarter, it’s a different life, come on.”

“You said he looked tired,” Rose noted, suddenly concerned about Kyle’s health.

“As I believe I just mentioned, he has two little babies and a full-time job.”

“But the wife stays at home.”

“Her name is Van.”

Rose ignored this. “Has he put on weight at all?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Why are you jumping all over me?”

“I’m not jumping all over you, I’m just asking why you would ask that. That is such a terrible thing to ask, like it would be so awful to put on a few pounds.” Alison sounded defensive for a reason; she had put on six pounds since arriving in Cincinnati just four days ago. How, you had to ask yourself, was it possible to put on weight that fast when it took so damn long to shed it?

“The last time I saw him I thought he looked a little heavy, that’s all.”

This was news. “When did you see him?”

“I don’t know when that was, a couple months ago. Your father and I bumped into him at a baseball game.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Alison, it is impossible to get you on the phone. And you have made it crystal clear, might I add, that you are not at all interested in hearing about Kyle Wallace. You have made that crystal clear.”

Rose had taken to repeating herself these days, whenever she landed on a phrase that seemed to do the job. If it sounded good once, it would sound even better a second time. And in this case, she also had a point. After fleeing Cincinnati those years ago, Alison had given herself permission to indulge in an unforgivably hostile surliness whenever Kyle’s name came up. Any reminder of her near miss with him was terrifying to her, in no small part because it led so swiftly and immediately to an act which, if ever discovered, would lead to legal and personal consequences too dire to contemplate. She had only ever heard vague reports from her mother that “someone” had “taken some things” from the house during Dennis’s party, some of them quite valuable, and that the police were called in. All of it repeated by her mother as suburban gossip, the underlying tone carrying a whisper of Catholic righteousness, that wouldn’t have happened if Ronnie Fitzpatrick hadn’t broken up the family and gotten above himself and married that woman who spent all his money on fancy jewelry. Alison couldn’t remember if she had actually heard her mother say those words, or if she had just heard her think them. In any case it was true that anytime that accursed Christmas party made its appearance in a chatty phone call, Alison rather immediately needed to go. Rose had put two and two together and come up with Alison’s crashing regret to have lost so definitively the love of her life.