I'm Glad About You(58)

And who’s to say she was wrong? God knows it was actually easier to bury the memory of the larceny. There was something so frightening about what she had done she couldn’t afford to look at it, and not looking at it meant for the first time since she had met him that she didn’t have to look at Kyle or the memory of Kyle or the hope of Kyle. Her ability to cling to some idiotic dream of Kyle was the collateral damage of that night.

Only there he was, big as life, traipsing around Cincinnati, Ohio, buying baby formula.

“So how does he look?”

“He’s still great looking. Those gray eyes. Good God.”

“What a mistake that was.”

“Mom, stop it,” Alison ordered. “He’s married, he has two kids, I think we can safely say we’ve both moved on.”

“I’m not saying you haven’t! I’m not saying anything! I’m not saying anything.” She went back to the pot of mashed potatoes on the stove, and Alison caught, in the light over the stovetop, how gray her hair had gotten. She looked old. She was wearing a thin beige cardigan with little embroidered flowers at the collar. It had at one time been a simple pattern, etched in white and brown silks, little daisies and leaves with off-white faux pearls floating among the threads, but most of the pearls had been lost over the years, the threads torn. The pattern was more memory than anything at this point.

“You used to wear that sweater when I was in high school,” Alison remarked. Rose looked down at it, surprised.

“Did I? It was my mother’s.” Alison remembered that too, suddenly, how Rose had gone through Grandma’s things when she died and saved whatever clothes she felt that she could wear. But that was years ago, at least ten years, and here she was still wearing her dead mother’s clothing. Was she trying to keep the memory close, or was it just another expression of a nature that was pathologically thrifty? Eight kids, of course she had to make do with anything there ever was to make do with. But surely there was more money now, and God knows there was stuff out there to be had. Malls, department stores, one-click shopping, all those television commercials you had to wade through to get to three minutes of storytelling, the whole universe just seemed to be about stuff now. She remembered her own childhood differently. The specificity of items. Childish treasures carefully accumulated and arranged on a tiny pressed wood desk—a single line of Pokemon creatures, a Lego starship she had inherited from Jeff when he decided Legos were lame. A colored pen collection. And all her clothes for so many years, nothing but hand-me-downs. Boy, that was a drag, but there was no convincing Mom to buy her something new when there were clothes around that still had some wear in them. As Megan used to say, Mom could make a nickel bleed. It seemed another era, simple and humble by comparison to the thoughtless excesses of the present. Or was that yet another one of those strange dichotomies between the Midwest and the East Coast which seemed to multiply every time she turned around? Yet another way Cincinnati was different from New York: They didn’t have as much stuff here, and the stuff that was here just wasn’t as good. They don’t have as much dough. Not to put too fine a point on it.

Or maybe she had missed something. Maybe the fact was that her parents were poor. Maybe she’d grown up poor and somehow never put two and two together. That was actually possible and would explain the astonishment she had felt when she landed in New York and found herself crippled by her own financial pragmatism. In Cincinnati, if you didn’t have money, you figured out how to make that nickel bleed. In New York, you just pretended you had it, because if you didn’t have it, you didn’t count. That had never even occurred to her before, but now that she had fallen into the deep end of the pool in show business everything looked different. People looked different. Money looked different. The past looked different, and honestly it wasn’t that long ago; it was just days ago, it seemed, that she and Kyle were wrapped so entirely in each other that neither one of them could see straight. They were all getting too old too fast. Alison wished that someone had warned her about this while she was in high school. People get old really fast. Take it easy and learn to forgive. She wondered if she would have known what that meant in high school.

“Anyway, I think it’s a good thing that I saw him,” Alison announced, and she was careful to make sure it sounded like a good thing. For extra measure, she went over to Rose and hugged her, reassuring. It was easy enough to do, hug your mom, why don’t you do it all the time? Rose certainly responded, smiling up at her with such instantaneous gratitude that Alison felt her heart clutch. Why all the sniping at your mom? What was the point? “You don’t have to worry so much, Mom,” she said. “I didn’t lose the love of my life! He’s just a high school boyfriend.”

There was a finality to this that felt fine. Years of idiotic behavior were put in a box and labeled, stuck in a corner of the basement along with old art projects and worn-out Halloween costumes. “At some point, seriously, what’s past is past and you’re an idiot for hanging out in a place that doesn’t even exist anymore,” she declared, definitive. “That thing with Kyle is just done done done. We have to figure out something else to talk about.” The floating awareness that this was merely true breathed through her with something resembling hope. “You know what?” she said. “I have to go wash my hair.” And then that was what she did.