In Sight of Stars(31)

I should have told her my mother can be kind of judgmental.

“Don’t give me that look, Klee. Your father likes it when I pull myself together…” My mother’s frustrated voice echoes from the depths of some distant memory chamber. She holds a scarf to her chest, shakes her head, tosses it back into her drawer, and chooses another. She wraps that one around her shoulders and neck, and turns to me. I must have some look on my face because she says, “So sue me for wanting to please him.”

My mother, the victim. My mother just trying to make everyone else happy.

“Klee, you have company,” my mother says, bringing me back to our living room. “Might you go put a shirt on?”

I stare down at my unwashed, unbrushed self, in just ratty gym shorts, nothing else, which would be worse only if I were also sporting a pee boner, and wonder if I missed some text from Sarah warning me she was coming over.

I didn’t even know she knew our house number.

“Um, yeah.”

It’s not that I’m not happy to see her, because I am. More than anything. I just could have used some warning. I’m embarrassed about myself, about my mother, about our too-perfect home, the premium model off the pages of some glossy architectural magazine.

“Good! I’ll entertain your lovely friend here while you wash up and put clothes on.” The disapproval in my mother’s voice stings, but there’s no way I want to leave Sarah alone with her. God knows what she’ll say. Do. Maybe offer her some tea to go with a polite-yet-frank chat about my father’s suicide, about me being fragile because of it, and how she, Sarah, needs to be careful with me. I wouldn’t put it past her. And I need to be the one to tell Sarah about my father.

On the other hand, I can’t do much in this condition.

“I’ll be right back” I say, adding hopefully, “Or Sarah could come wait in my room.”

“I think not,” my mother says.

“I’m fine here,” Sarah adds quickly.

Her hair is still wet from the shower, so she must have gotten up recently, too. When she reaches to pull it back into a ponytail, her shirt rides up higher, nearly exposing the soft, gentle shadow of her chest. My mother clears her throat, so the best thing I can do now is get washed up and get us both out of here.

“Back in five,” I say, racing down the hall, then yank on jeans and a clean T-shirt and head to the bathroom.

I brush my teeth, feeling stupid that I haven’t told my mother about Sarah. Or more accurately, told her only the most minimal things. She knows we went to the city. But through my mother’s eyes, now, I can see how it looks like more, and, well, it feels like more, and so maybe I should have prepared her. For Sarah’s sake, if not hers.

I’m back in the living room fast. Sarah sits across from my mother on one of the Queen Anne chairs. She’s saying, “… at North Side General. In the neonatal unit,” so I figure she’s talking about her mother.

“Hey! Okay. Ready! So, you want to go for a ride or something? I ask too anxiously, then to my mother, “Okay if I take the car? Not far. Just down to the river or something.”

“Of course,” my mother says, but her eyes dart nervously from Sarah to me, as if she has something to say. I give a look to Sarah and she stands.

“Let’s go,” I say, ushering her to the front door.

Outside, I steer Sarah down the front steps and to the far side of the driveway, letting her into the passenger side before I realize, though the car is unlocked, the keys are still in the house. “Be right back!” I call and rush back to the house to retrieve them.

“Here you go,” my mother says, standing at the front door, the keys dangling from a finger. When I grab at them, she holds them back, and gives me a long, intense look. “You like her a lot?”

I roll my eyes. “You can relax, Mom. I barely know her,” I say, even though I’m not sure I believe this myself. Still, I need to shut her down. I don’t have time for this right now. Besides, I’m not the one who wanted to come live here, so she doesn’t get to dislike the one thing that might actually make it bearable.

“It’s just … She seems like a lot of girl to handle. And sometimes, well, Klee, sometimes we choose people for the wrong reasons, for what we want to see in them, rather than who they are.”

“Great. Noted,” I say. I mean, last I looked, my father killed himself, so maybe you’re not an expert on relationships, I don’t add. “Can I go now?”

“Yes, sure. You know I just worry about you…”

“Well, don’t,” I say, turning away before her hand reaches my cheek. “It’s a little late for that, anyway.”

*

There is so much stuff in my mother’s arms and at her feet she looks as if she’s arriving for a stay at a resort. A Louis Vuitton carry-on. Some weird sort of duffel or laundry bag that has no strings that I don’t recognize. An easel, for God’s sake, but the fat-legged, plastic kind they use in preschools that she must have gone out and bought because that’s what they allow in here, or something.

I see now, too, that her clothing is wet, her nice sage green suit jacket and beige slacks streaked dark in places from the rain. She looks expectantly at me from the door.

“You carried all that?”

“A nice young orderly helped me,” she says. “But you can help me from here.”