Page 52 - WTP Vol. XI #2

Mother, Other (continued from preceding page)
“Sorry,” she mutters, letting the cart pass. The con- ductor, a balding man in his fifties, shoots her a sour look. No wedding ring on his finger, just a thick forest of hair.
She’s still standing in the snack aisle. She tosses a family pack of Nilla wafers into her cart; it dents the plastic dome protecting the chicken. The things left on her list all have to do with Rose: binder, notebooks, pens, mascara—she holds her thumb down on the backspace button and deletes mascara. Her daughter can buy her own mascara.
~
It had been a one-semester thing. Fred graduated a year early. By the end, both of them were ready to be done. He didn’t like onions, she did; she found the STEM building sterile, he spent most days there; he wanted to go see Texas Chainsaw Massacre, she wanted to see Love Actually. Around it went.
During truces, he took her to hole-in-the-wall spots and showed her shortcuts on campus. They went for milkshakes at midnight across town. And he loved her, of course: “I love you, of course.”
She’s long forgotten what excuse she gave her mother so that she could stay to watch Fred graduate. When his mother—a stout woman in her forties with a rest- ing gap-toothed smile—offered her a seat with the rest of the Olinbachs, she politely declined.
“This is it, then?” His sweat had soaked stripes into his shirt.
“This is it.” She’d missed a chunk of hair when pin- ning it into a bun, and she could feel the blunt ends poking into the nape of her neck. Fred reached for it; she leaned back on her heels.
“I can come back for Homecoming. Alumni weeks. Things like that.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t be a stranger.”
She looked down at her flats. “I’ll try.”
He wrote down his phone number on a CLASS OF 2003 napkin. He knew she already had it.
She watched him rejoin the pack of Olinbachs, leaving her adrift in the monotone tapping of plastic cham- pagne flutes. Her bus was in two hours. She stayed very still. It was a new year starting now. She would
be on her second roommate, her second year, start- ing now.
“I hate these events.”
A shadow cooled her cheeks, and she looked up at the interloper, a boy hunching in a wrinkled dress shirt and blazer. There was a stain on his lapel. “Do you know someone who’s graduating?”
“My sister. Summa cum laude in film. Don’t think it’s going to help her much, though.”
“It’s a risky major.”
“It’s a dumb choice. I’m going to be the one who sup- ports our parents when they get old. But what can
I say—she’s my sister. None of us tell her the truth.” He looked at her. “Hey, you were in my anthro class, right? With Collins? What did you think of the final?”
“Tough.”
“I’d say evil.”
She laughed.
“I’m Paul,” he offered. “And you?”
~
It’s still there, that crumbling pile of neon binders. She can’t look away, even as she wedges her fingers around four marble notebooks. A twenty-pack of
Bic pens will have to do, and Rose can forget about getting Ticonderoga pencils because no matter what the goddamn College Board says, all types of graphite work on scantrons.
The cashier is hunched over the register, movements lethargic and unsure. She tries not to let her impa- tience show on her face, but Alicia ends soccer in
an hour and the car ride to practice is half an hour, and then she has to go pick Rose up from her library study group and then make dinner before Paul gets home—she’s already forgotten that Paul’s not com- ing home tonight.
Fred was on TV the other day. He’s just gotten an award, some fancy medal from an international math organization. He looked the same—unruly curly
hair, thick glasses, fingers dancing over the surface
of whatever he’s holding. But someone had taken a giant licked thumb to him—his hair was a little more trimmed, his glasses a little more suited to his square face, his fingers a little stiller.
45
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