Margaret, and her roommate informed me that Margaret had moved out. I must have sounded like an utter fool, a mother too stupid to know what her own child was up to. “Yes. Two weeks ago,” her roommate had said in this “you poor, pathetic thing” voice. The snooty little brat.
It turns out my middle child, the one with the highest IQ but the lowest level of ambition, is living with some guy she’s never even mentioned to me.
I knew something was wrong. I knew it. I should never have let her live off campus. I should have made her stay at an in-state university. I should have realized that even at twenty-two she wasn’t responsible enough for college. Junior college maybe, but not a big liberal arts school.
I called her on her cell phone, and after three tries reached her. She was in a bad mood already, because I’d awakened her. She is so much like her father, a total grump until he’s had his coffee. But it was ten o’clock in the morning. On a weekday most people are up by then.
Except that cocktail waitresses aren’t like most people. A cocktail waitress! It turns out that she works a late shift from six until two in the morning, and sometimes even later. But she makes great tips, she told me, so she thinks it’s worth it.
Oh, and his name is Gray. “He’s a bass player, Mom, in a roots rock band.”
A roots rock band. What is that supposed to mean? And what kind of musical roots does Tempe, Arizona, have anyway?
I shouldn’t have gone to Cat’s house after that call. I should have just crawled back into my bed. After all, Jack wouldn’t be home until after eight. All I had to do was order dinner from Gourmet Wheels, put it into my own pans, and he’d never know the difference.
But I couldn’t make myself sleep during the day without taking a Xanax, and I didn’t want to do that. So I threw on a green linen jumper over a white T-shirt, stuck my feet in my favorite espadrilles, and ran to Cat and M.J.
“It’s on you, Barbara Jean,” said Cat in that schoolyard bully way she sometimes gets. “Are you in or are you out?”
If they each hadn’t been holding one of my hands, I would have said “Out.” I would have. Except that when Cat and M.J. gang up on you, there’s really no way to defeat them, at least no way for me to defeat them. But it’s not because I’m a wimp. It’s because they make me brave. They grab hold of my hands, and all of a sudden Cat’s loud bravado and M.J.’s determined optimism spread through me like the enticing aroma of fresh-baked cinnamon rolls on a Sunday morning when the girls were little and all lived at home.
“I’m…in,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t regret it.
“Yes!” M.J. cried. “Here, let’s have a toast.”
We lifted our coffee mugs and clinked them together. “To road trips,” Cat toasted.
“To losing weight,” I added. “And fast.”
“To friends,” M.J. said. “And maybe old boyfriends, too.”
The rest of the morning passed in a blur. We had plans to make, a diet and exercise regimen and a travel itinerary to arrange. Cat would have to take time off from work. We decided to drive M.J.’s Jaguar. Cat was ecstatic about that. She hates to fly, and we would need a car when we got there anyway. So we’d make it into a real road trip, and if I wanted, we could stop to see Margaret in Arizona.
I calculated that if I restricted my caloric intake to below a thousand a day I could lose eight pounds in the next three weeks. Maybe even ten.
But only a thousand calories? I’d already eaten that much for breakfast.
That night I told Jack about our plans. I had returned home midafternoon, and in a frenzied burst—of guilt, I guess—I cooked his favorite Fiesta shrimp pasta for dinner. I also prepared a pot of gumbo—his mother’s recipe, not mine—and a pork roast stuffed with garlic. Tomorrow I planned to make a pan of spinach lasagna as well as a pot of Chicken à la Bushnell. That way I could freeze more than a dozen meals for him to eat while I was gone. All he would have to do was supplement them with salads and a hot roll or two.
“Why are you driving there?” he asked. “That’s a four-or five-day trip, assuming nothing goes wrong.”
“What can go wrong? As long as we stay on I-10 heading east we can’t get lost.”
He made a sarcastic sound. “The way you three jabber, you’ll miss a turn and end up in Idaho before you notice.”
“We will not!”
He got up from the table and without responding, headed for the television in the den.
I hate when he ignores me like that. It’s like getting in the final word, without saying anything. I wanted to scream, but of course, I didn’t.
After I loaded the dishwasher, I followed him into the den. He was reading the latest issue of U.S. News & World Report with the television on.
“I’ll leave the freezer stocked so you won’t have to worry about meals.”
“That’s all right,” he said, without looking up. “I can always order out. Just leave the phone number of that place you use.”
“The place I use?” I stared stupidly at him. “What place?”
“I don’t know the name. Meals on Wheels. Something like that.”
My heart did this great big, guilty flip-flop in my chest. He knew I sometimes used Gourmet Wheels? I was ready to abandon the trip right there. The one value I still had to Jack was my cooking ability. But if he knew about Gourmet Wheels and they were good enough for him, what did he really need me for?
He tossed the magazine on a side table and glanced at me. “So, when do you leave?”
“Um…next Friday,” I mumbled. “I’ll call you every night.”
“Okay.” He reached for the remote control and flipped through the channels. “You’d better tell the girls. Oh, look. They’re rerunning that Jackie Gleason biography, the one with the guy from Raymond.”
I went into the bedroom, closed the door and burst into tears. Then I called Cat and M.J.
We stayed on the telephone for two hours. You’d think we were teenagers the way we talk. Cat can make anyone laugh, she just has that way about her. She’s sarcastic and totally irreverent. She could be a stand-up comic if she wanted to, which always makes me wonder about her upbringing. I read Roseanne Barr’s biography, and Louie Anderson’s, and I know that the best comedians usually come from awful childhoods. The fact that Cat hardly ever mentions her family actually reveals a lot about her. But all she’s ever told us is that she grew up in one of those small towns strung up and down both sides of the Mississippi. For the most part they’re just clusters of little frame houses and the occasional trailer park, the kind that always attract tornadoes. My guess is that her father worked in one of the chemical plants.
As for me, I, too, sprang from that part of the state, only my grandfather owned six hundred acres of land there, an old sugar plantation that had been in the family since the early nineteenth century. He sold it right after World War II to one of those same chemical companies, and he made a lot more money from the sale than he ever did raising sugar.
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