there’s nothing in the fridge, we can order.” I didn’t want to look at her thinking about how old and tired she seemed, so I turned and went to the door. “I think you should take a shower and get dressed.”
Because on Bad Days, I sounded like the mom.
“You’re right, honey,” she said. I heard her pull a tissue from the box on her bedside table and blow her nose. “Kathy called before.”
I turned around. “Really? That’s great. What’d she say?” Aunt Kathy was my mom’s younger sister, and one of my favorite people in the world. She and her husband lived outside Portland, Oregon, and I guess they were what you’d call hippies. They didn’t grow pot or homeschool their kids or anything, but they didn’t care about stuff like money or fancy cars. Kathy taught preschool and her husband was a doctor on an Indian reservation. My mom and my grandparents had all gone to Harvard (well, my grandmother had gone to Radcliffe), but my aunt had gone to Oregon State. I sometimes wondered if she felt bad about that—whenever we were at my grandparents’, there was always a lot of Harvard talk—but I’d never asked her.
“Well …” My mom furrowed her brow, then quoted her sister: “She said, ‘I don’t like the way you sound. I’m coming out to New York next week.’”
“Seriously? She’s coming to visit?” I felt a sense of relief so intense it startled me. “That’s awesome.”
My mom laughed, then made a funny choking sound. She buried her nose in her tissue, but not before I saw her face crumple.
“Mom, it’s gonna be okay,” I promised her. I could hear the irritation in my voice, and I wondered if she heard it too.
“I know,” she squeaked. “I know, honey.” She took some tissues out of the dispenser, one after the other in rapid succession, then blew her nose. “I’ll be okay. Just let me shower and I’ll come down.”
“I’ll see what we have to eat,” I said. I waited to close the door behind me until she flipped the covers off her legs and got out of bed.
There was a blank rectangle on the wall immediately to the right of my parents’ bedroom door; I didn’t need to see the photo that had hung there to remember it. It was of my father, taken the day he and Oliver came home from their first father-son camping trip. My dad had a three-day growth of beard, and he was standing by the door of our old Subaru, a backpack in one hand, a fishing rod in the other. He looked like a man who could handle anything. He looked like a man who could fix anything.
I want my dad, I thought to myself. I want my dad to fix this.
But I knew he wasn’t going to be able to. After all, his leaving was the reason everything was broken in the first place.
“Not like the religion,” Sofia said, slapping my foot with the flash card she was holding. “Catholic lowercase c. We’ve done this one already.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” I said, biting my lip. Sofia was lying on her bed and I was lying on the floor with my legs hooked over the bed and basically draped across Sofia’s lap. Sofia’s room was tiny, which meant that when we were in it, we were always more or less on top of each other.
“You keep saying okay, but you’re not saying what the definition is,” Sofia said. She leaned on her elbow and looked down at me, her black curly hair tumbling over the edge of the bed. I’d always envied Sofia her hair, but she said it was more trouble than it was worth; all during swim season (and most of the off-season), she just shoved it into a ponytail.
“Patience is a virtue,” I reminded her.
She rolled away onto her back. “You know what I think of when I hear stalling like that? I think of all the people who are applying to Harvard early action.”
“Do I do this to you about Stanford?” Sofia was obsessed with going to California, which she believed was her spiritual home. Her mom’s family was from there, so if she got in, her mom was going to move west with her, which Sofia was actually happy about. I couldn’t imagine my mom moving to Cambridge with me if I got into Harvard. Of course, I couldn’t imagine what was going to happen to her when I left, either.
It was one of the many, many things I tried not to think about lately.
“You are competing with hundreds of girls who want to go to Harvard,” Sofia reminded me.
“Thank you so much, Sofia Taylor.”
“Thousands of them!”
“What is your point?” I swung my feet off the bed and sat up, irritated.
Sofia sat up also and pointed at me with the index card. “My point is they can probably all define catholic. So why can’t you?”
Like a bolt of lightning, the definition came to me. “Including a wide variety.”
Sofia held up her palm. “High five, baby. That’s the last of them.”
I slapped her hand lightly, then lay back down. Sofia was also retaking the SAT, but she only wanted to get her score up by a little bit. Even though we were supposedly both studying, our study sessions had turned into her spending hours trying to drill vocabulary words into me.
“Do you want to stay for dinner?” she asked. “My mom says she misses you.” Sofia’s mom was a nurse on a maternity ward. She’d started working the night shift when we were sophomores because she said she got to see Sofia more if she worked from midnight to eight a.m. Usually they had dinner together before her mom went to work.
“Let me call my mom,” I said. My mother and Jason’s mother said they liked Sofia’s mother, but sometimes I got the sense they didn’t totally approve of her. She’d had Sofia on her own, and they lived in a pretty small apartment, and she worked, while both of our moms stayed home. Whenever Sofia and I had a sleepover, we almost always stayed at my house. My mom had never said I couldn’t sleep at Sofia’s. Instead, she’d say, “I think I’d prefer if you two slept here.” Now she could use as an excuse the fact that Sofia’s mother worked at night, but she’d “preferred” our sleeping at my house even when Sofia’s mother was home.
I was a little nervous about leaving my mom alone, but staying at Sofia’s for dinner wasn’t exactly the same as going to France for two weeks with Jason’s family. I dialed, but it went right to voice mail, and there was no answer on the home number.
When I’d left the house in the morning, my mom had been about to go play tennis with her friend Laura. She’d been wearing her whites and she’d seemed to be fine. But between then and now, had a Good Day become a Bad Day?
Suddenly I was mad. Why shouldn’t I have a fun dinner with Sofia and her mom? Why should I have to worry about the quality of my mom’s day?
I texted her. having dinner @ sofia’s. home later. I hesitated, then added call if u need me before hitting send.
“Oh my God, Beth, this is amazing.” In front
