wouldn’t be able to use the new girl past this week. ‘Send me someone new. More capable, but equally pretty.’
‘You’re not allowed to say that,’ the agency rep objected.
‘Sue me,’ Gloria said.
‘Why aren’t you staying with me?’ her mother asked, and not for the first time. ‘That was the original plan.’
‘Yes, when I was going to be in Baltimore a week. But for ten, twelve weeks? I would drive you crazy.’ And you me.
‘But a hotel room, for all that time—you won’t be able to cook for yourself—’
‘It’s an apartment, the kind set up for short-term corporate renters.’ Cassandra anticipated her mother’s next protest: ‘It’s not that expensive.’
‘Did you sublet your place back in New York?’
‘No.’
‘So you’re carrying two rents for three months. And you’ll need a car here.’
‘Mom, I have my own car. I drove down. I drove here, it’s parked in your driveway.’
‘I don’t know what the point is of having a car if you live in New York.’
‘I like to be able to get away—visit friends upstate or at the…beach.’ She used the generic, beach, instead of the specific, Hamptons, out of fear that the latter would provoke another spasm of worry.
The reviews of the last book had been hard on her mother. Her mother’s e-mails had been hard on Cassandra. Until this winter, she hadn’t even known that her mother could initiate e-mail. She seemed to use the laptop that Cassandra had given her for nothing more than playing hearts and solitaire while depending on the reply-to function to answer Cassandra’s sporadic notes. Even then, she was extremely terse. ‘Thank you.’ Or ‘That’s nice, dear.’ Lennie Fallows seemed to think e-mail was the equivalent of a telegram or a long-distance call back in the seventies. It was a mode of communication to be limited to dire emergencies or special occasions, and even then brevity was required.
Then, back in January, the e-mails had started, with no ‘RE:’ in the subject headers, with no subject headers at all, which made them all the more terrifying, as Cassandra had no idea what conversation her mother was about to start.
‘I wouldn’t worry about the Kirkus.’ ‘The PW is good, if you omit the dependent clause.’ ‘Sorry about the New York Times.’
Except she hadn’t written ‘the New York Times’ or even ‘NYT’, come to think of it, but the critic’s surname, as if the woman were a neighbor, an intimate. This detail saddened Cassandra most of all. All she had ever wanted was to give her mother a sense of ownership in Cassandra’s success. She had felt that way even as a teenager, back when Lennie was, in fact, a profound embarrassment, running around town in—oh, God, the memory still grated—painter’s pants or overalls, that horrible cap on her head, tools sticking out of her pockets. Yet Lennie insisted on crediting Cassandra’s achievements to her ex-husband’s side of the DNA ledger. Even the book that had forged Cassandra’s reputation had been problematic for her mother, arriving with that title that slanted everything toward him.
But the life that book brought Cassandra—ah, that her mother had loved and gloried in, and not because of the small material benefits that came her way. She adored turning on the radio and hearing Cassandra’s voice, basked in being in a store and having a neighbor comment on one of Cassandra’s television appearances. Once, in the Giant, Cassandra had seen how it worked: Her mother furrowed her brow at the mention of Cassandra’s most recent interview, as if it were impossible to keep track of her daughter’s media profile. Was it Today? Charlie Rose? That weird show on cable where everyone shouted?
You must be very proud of her, the neighbor persisted.
And Lennie Fallows—it had never occurred to her to drop the surname of the man she detested—said with steely joy, ‘I was always proud of her.’ In her mother’s coded lexicon, this was the rough equivalent of Go fuck yourself.
Cassandra opened the refrigerator to browse its contents, a daughter’s prerogative. It was huge, the kind of double-wide Sub-Zero one might find in a small restaurant. The kitchen had been Lennie’s latest project, and superficially, it looked great. But Cassandra knew where to find the corners her mother never stopped cutting, a legacy of the lean years that had left her so fearful. The refrigerator and the stove would be scratch-and-dent specials, with tiny flaws that prevented them from being sold at full list. The new porcelain sink would have been purchased at Lennie’s ‘professional’ discount—and, most likely, installed by her, along with the faucet and garbage disposal. She had kept the palette relatively plain. ‘Better for resale,’ she said, as if she had any intention of putting the house on the market. Like Penelope stalling her suitors, Lennie continually undid her own work. By Cassandra’s reckoning, this was the kitchen’s third renovation. Lennie was desperate not to leave the house, which had been big for a family of three, almost ruinous for a single mother and daughter, simply ridiculous for a woman now in her seventies.
But this conversation was already too fraught to take on the subject of the house, which her mother had come to love and defend against all comers. Instead, Cassandra asked her mother, ‘Do you remember Calliope?’
‘An organ? You mean at the Presbyterian church? And I think it’s pronounced differently, dear.’ Her father would have made the correction first.
‘No, in my class. Callie Jenkins. At Dickey Hill, starting in fourth grade. She’s in one of the photographs. She wore her hair in three fat braids, with those little pompon things on the ends.’
Cassandra bunched up a fistful of her own hair to jog her mother’s memory.
‘Three—oh, she must have been black.’
‘Mother.’
‘What? There’s nothing bigoted in saying that. Unless you’re me, I guess. I’m not allowed to notice the color of anyone’s skin.’
Cassandra had no desire to lecture her mother. Besides, she had a point.
‘At any rate, I was watching CNN and there was a story about this case in New Orleans—a woman’s child is missing and she took the Fifth, refused to say where the child is. Someone said it was similar to a case here years ago, involving Calliope Jenkins. It has to be the same person, don’t you think? The age is about right, and how many Calliope Jenkinses could there be in Baltimore?’
‘More than you might think.’
Cassandra couldn’t tell if her mother was being literal or trying to make some larger point about infanticide or her hometown. ‘Don’t you think that would make a good book?’
Her mother pondered. That was the precise word—she puckered her forehead and considered the question at hand as if she were Cassandra’s literary agent or editor, as if Cassandra could not go forward without her mother’s blessing.
‘True crime? That would be different for you.’
‘Not
