Purple Hearts(26)

More silence. She started fixing up the rolled sleeves of her polo. My gut burned.

“Wow, Cassie.” She gave me a closed-lip smile, and turned away. “Wow. Every day you surprise me.”

“Sorry I didn’t invite you. It was yesterday, kind of quick.”

She tossed her gloves in the trash, and slammed the lid closed. I jumped. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I’m doing this for you, so you don’t have to help me.”

“What you could do for me is get a stable job.”

“It’s health care and extra money every month. And it’s happening right now. Do you know how long it took me to get that paralegal job in the first place? And then it took three months for my crappy benefits to kick in.”

“But, Cassie, you’re lying to the army!”

“Couples do it all the time. We’ve got a story . . .”

She laughed, bitter. “What did you do, find him on the street?”

“He’s Frankie’s friend.”

Mom stepped toward me again, saying through clenched teeth, “Frankie Cucciolo?” I nodded. “Do George and Louise know?”

Mom still got together with Frankie’s parents for dinner every once in a while. I was tempted to tell her yes. Maybe if Louise approved, she would go easier on me. But I couldn’t lie.

“Why would I tell George and Louise?”

“Thank God.”

I started speaking to her like the doctor had spoken to me when I was diagnosed. Like someone being talked down from a ledge. “It’s very temporary. We have a schedule. We have a shared account. We’re going to get divorced when he comes back from overseas.”

Except now I felt like I was the one on the ledge, trying to convince my mother it was a good idea to jump. She’d never reacted this way before. Not when I told her I was going to college in California, not when I told her how much I was going to take in loans, not when I told her I was moving back in with her with nothing to contribute but a manic postgrad bitterness and a critical theory degree.

Mom sat down at the kitchen table. “This is insane.”

“Well, so is drowning in debt,” I said, shrugging her off. “Even when I was a paralegal. Even when I wasn’t sick. You can’t blame me for trying something different.”

Mom shook her head, breathing deeply, like she was trying to cleanse herself of what she just heard. “Not if it lands you in jail.”

“It’s not going to.” I tossed the polishing rag on the table, realizing I had been twisting it into a rope. “I just need a little help right now. I won’t waste this time, Mom. I will make it. I just need a little support to get there.”

“I will absolutely not support this.” She buried her face in her hands, and then looked up at me. “You’re crazy. You need to get real.”

I set my jaw. “Well, I did it.”

She rolled her eyes and stood. “Then you’ll have to fail on your own.”

“I’m not going to fail,” I said, swallowing. Hoping I believed it. “That’s so dramatic,” I added, but didn’t know if she could hear me.

She opened the sliding glass doors that led to the backyard, stepped through, and closed them again. I watched her spray and wipe in wide loops.

I cupped my hands around my mouth, pressing them to the pane. “How can I prove to you that I’m not crazy?”

Mom narrowed her eyes, her reply muffled. “Who knows.”

I watched her work, remembering the looking-for-a-man days she had talked about. I was a toddler. I remembered the cat-piss smell of our neighbor Mrs. Klein’s house. Of weeping and weeping until I fell asleep, waking up in the middle of the night and crying again until a grumpy, exhausted Mrs. Klein handed me a dusty juice box and a handful of stale crackers from her bathrobe pocket.

I remembered the relief when Mom was the one to wake me up in those days. Mom with her dimples and big, soft chest and constant, quiet tongue clicks, like a train slowing down. She wore Lanc?me perfume, from a beautiful bottle with gold-plated lettering spelling La vie est belle. I used to sit in her room, tracing the letters with my finger.

Mom tapped on the glass. Look, she mouthed, pointing to the tall wooden fence that surrounded the Floriens’ pool.

On the far corner sat a big bird with a green head and a white breast.

Mom slid open the door, letting in the warm, humid air. “It’s a green heron!” she said, her voice clear and bright, anger lingering at the edges. “The only advantage of working for people with pools.”

All this talk of dreams and passion. I didn’t know exactly what I meant, either. It was like foraging for notes in the forest. Always not that, not that. Not Mom’s life. Not law school. But it was as if I could never say that, that’s it. I had it briefly at the Skylark, after we’d played, that I knew.

I would find it again.

I pointed to the heron, nudging Mom’s shoulder. “Maybe it’s a good sign.”

“Don’t be stupid, Cass,” she said, wiping her forehead with a blue-rubbered hand as she looked on. “That’s just a bird.”





Luke


“Chili’s. Ugh,” Cassie said as we approached the decorative door flanked by cacti. “We’re in one of the culinary capitals of the United States,” she continued. “Why did your friends choose Chili’s?”