Bridget laughed. “Well, you can’t, which is why you’re going to have to come visit.”
“Oh promise you’ll invite me! I’m sure I must have
something
to wear to the country.”
“And speaking of which . . .” Paul’s partner Derrick slipped up behind Lindsay and kissed her on the back of the neck. “That dress is you, my dear. You’ve never looked more lovely. It breaks my heart to think of your talent and extraordinary beauty languishing in that misbegotten cultural desert.”
“And what about my beauty?” demanded Cici.
“And my talent?” insisted Bridget.
Lindsay sighed elaborately and caressed his cheek. “Why are all the good men gay?”
“Not all of them,” corrected Derrick, smiling across her shoulder at Paul. “Just most of them.”
“What I want to know,” insisted their neighbor Rosalee, joining them, “is what in the world you think you’re going to do with yourselves out there in the wilderness? Cici, this is the best party ever, and it just makes me want to weep when I think it’s the last one
ever
. How can you do this to us? Oh, give me a hug!”
“The house I can understand.” Jena, a broker at Cici’s firm, joined the conversation and the embraces. “Prices are sky-rocketing all along the I-81 corridor and getting the place at below appraisal was just brilliant. But three women living together? Are you crazy? You’ll be pulling each other’s hair out and chasing each other around the kitchen with serving spoons before a month is out.”
Derrick said, “I don’t know. Paul and I have lived together for ten years and we never chased each other with serving spoons.”
“Well, there was that one time,” corrected Paul, leaning back into his embrace.
Lindsay laughed. “Believe me, that house is so big we won’t even be able to find each other half the time. Did you see the pictures?”
And so it went, the compliments and the good-byes, the disbelief and the regrets and the eager urging for details. Promises to keep in touch. Curious inquiries about the new families moving into the neighborhood. Sentences that began with “Do you remember when . . .” It was not, of course, as though they would never see each other again. Each of their friends demanded an invitation as soon as the guest rooms were ready and groaned with envy as they described the house, the porch, the meadow, the view. It wasn’t an ending, they all tearfully insisted, it was a beginning.
Still, it was hard to say good-bye.
Cici slipped away from the crowd and approached Lori, who was happily chatting to a display of Christmas cards that framed a doorway. Snatching the earpiece from her daughter’s ear, she said, “She’ll call you back” and dropped the device into the capacious pocket of her skirt. Lori whirled. “Moth–er!” This was followed by an eye roll. “Very mature.”
Cici kissed her bangs and dropped an arm around her shoulder. “Merry Christmas to you, too, darling. Are you having a good time?”
Again a slight upward shift of the eyes. Cici wished she could remember when young girls outgrew that manner-ism. Age twenty-one? Could she hold out until then? “The crowd’s a little old for me, Mom.”
“You’ve known most of them all your life. It won’t hurt you to be nice for one evening.”
“True.” She shrugged. “It’s just hard being nice every single minute.” Then she grinned. “Tell Aunt Bridget the quiche was awesome. Of course it would have tasted even better with a margarita.”
“Don’t they teach math at UCLA?”
“Of course.”
“Then maybe you can help me figure out exactly how many months it is you have left until you are of legal drinking age?”
“Mom, you are
so
quaint.”
“Thank you, sweetheart. Long one of my goals.” She tidied the strands of shiny copper hair her initial embrace had disarranged, and her smile softened as she did so. “You look pretty tonight.”
“So do you,” Lori replied generously.
“So. How does it feel, saying good-bye to the house you grew up in? Are you going to miss the old place?”
Lori thought about this. “A little, I guess. But everything changes. And it’s not as though I hadn’t already moved out.”
Cici nodded sagely. “Very sensible. So you’re not mad at me for selling?”
Lori gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “Of course not. I know all about that midlife crisis stuff. It’s just like Dad driving around in a Porsche and dating models half his age.”
“Nothing,” replied Cici evenly, “is like your dad dating models half his age.”
She grinned. “It’s okay, Mom, even he knows it’s stupid. But it’s like my social psych prof says, it’s a life passage. And at least you didn’t marry the pool boy or run off with your Italian lover.”
Cici lifted an eyebrow. “I didn’t know those were options.”
“It has to do with reinventing yourself. Men do it because they’re afraid of losing their virility. Women do it because, once their children leave the nest, they don’t know what their role in life is anymore. Some women go to spin class. You bought a hundred-year-old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It’s no surprise to me.”
“Well, as glad as I am to know you’re learning something in social psych class, let’s go back to that Italian lover I could have run off with.”
Lori laughed. “See? No surprise. You’re a nut, always have been.”
Cici hugged her. “I love you, baby.”
“Love you back.”
“I wish you were coming with me.”
Lori looked very seriously into her mother’s eyes. “Mom,” she said, “I have a life.”
Cici didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, and she struggled hard to keep from doing either. “But you’re coming this summer, right? Aren’t you dying to see the place?”
“Well, maybe not
dying
. . . it sounds like an awful lot of hard work to me. But I’ll definitely try to make it out for my birthday. There’s an airport there right?”
Cici realized she had no idea where the nearest airport was in relation to her new home. Had she ever in her life lived further than an hour away from an airport? “Oh sure,” she replied airily. “Paved roads and everything. And it’s all horse country out there. Maybe we could talk about keeping a horse for you to use when you visit.”
This time Lori’s expression was a little sad. “Mom,” she said gently, “I’m really too old to bribe with a pony.”
Cici opened her mouth to reply, snapped it shut again, and instead hugged her daughter fiercely. “I miss my baby,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes tightly shut.
“I miss you, too, Mom.” Lori leaned back and smiled through what Cici was surprised to see was a shimmer of tears. “But we’re both big girls now, huh?”
Cici sniffed and carefully blotted her mascaraed lashes with the tips of her index fingers. She tried to mimic Lori’s brave smile. “You bet.”
Lori gave her mother’s fingers a reassuring squeeze, then held out her hand, palm up. “Cell phone,” she said.
Cici hesitated, then grinned, dug into her pocket, and plopped the device into Lori’s open hand. “Let’s get back to the party,” she said.
Holding a drink, Kevin slipped his other hand around Bridget’s arm and nodded an apologetic smile to the group surrounding her. “Mom, okay if we borrow you for a minute?”
Bridget excused herself and let Kevin lead the way to Cici’s downstairs guest room, which tonight was serving as a coat closet. Kate, who had just returned from putting the girls to bed next door, had cleared off three chairs. She was sitting in one of them, her hands folded, her knees crossed, her expression reserved. Kevin quietly closed the door behind them. “Have a seat, Mom,” he said.
Bridget glanced around, smiling a little. “Why does this feel like an intervention?”
“Nothing like that,” Katie insisted quickly, patting the chair next to her. “We just wanted to talk to you for a minute. Sit down, Mom.”
Curious, Bridget did. Kevin straightened the bottom of his suit jacket before sitting on it, straight and stiff, just like he had been taught in law school—or wherever it was that he had picked up all those rigid, pompous mannerisms that always reminded Bridget of some stuffy British barrister on public television. Pompous, at his age. And what about Katie? The single mother of twin preschoolers, working sixty hours a week at a Chicago accounting firm, her lipstick was perpetually chewed, her face puffy, her eyes always strained. She was barely thirty. She should be having the time of her life. Bridget’s heart ached for her children, but in the end, what could she do?
As though in answer to her unspoken thought, Kevin said abruptly, “Mom, Kate and I have been talking it over, and we think you should go live with her.”
Bridget’s eyebrows shot up. “With Kate? In Chicago? Why in the world would I want to do that?”
Her children exchanged a glance in which Kevin was apparently elected spokesperson. The way he squared his shoulders and jutted out his chin reminded Bridget so much of his father that she felt a stab of longing in her chest. He said, “Mom, we know losing Dad has been hard on you. You’ve never been alone before. And God knows, he didn’t exactly leave you a wealthy woman . . .”
Bridget said sharply, “Your father was a college professor. He did the best he could.”
“What we’re trying to say,” Kate intervened quickly, “is that we know this whole plan of moving to the country is just your way of trying to build a new life for yourself. But it’s just not necessary, Mom. I mean, moving in with two strangers—”
“Sinking all your assets into a broken-down old house and leaving the only life you’ve ever known—”
“It’s not as though you don’t have a family, or anyplace to go. You don’t have to do this,” Kate repeated. She took a breath, tightened her fingers in her lap, and declared, “We’ll take care of you.”
Bridget’s first reaction was astonishment. What did she mean, they would take care of her? What was she, a hundred and eight years old? And her second reaction was a flare of anger at the grim determination on Katie’s face as she made the announcement, as though having considered all the options and weighed all the evidence they had come to the reluctant conclusion that yes, they had no choice but to step up and take care of their mother, no matter how inconvenient, how great the sacrifice.
She wanted to say,
Damn right you’ll take care of me, Missy. When I’m old and sick and too tired to feed myself and too weak to dress myself, you’ll do it for me just like I did for you. You’ll tie my shoes and wipe the drool off my chin and change my diapers just like I did for you about a hundred and thirty-seven times a day for the best years of my life. You’ll put a roof over my head when I can’t afford to do it myself and you’ll put groceries in my cupboard when my only other choice is to eat cat food and you’ll take me where I want to go when the state takes my driver’s license just like I did for you for the first twenty years of your lives and by God you’ll do it with a smile on your face.
But then she saw the strain behind the bravado in Kate’s eyes, and the fear disguised as determination in Kevin’s, and her heart softened. They had lost their father at the same time she had lost her husband. They, too, were trying to find their place in a world without him. And the sudden realization that the one person they had always depended upon—their mother—might need them to take care of her was more than an inconvenience. It was terrifying.
She said, “Thank both of you for worrying about me. But it’s not necessary, really. I’m fine.”
Kevin said, “It’s not Cici and Lindsay, you know that. We love them like family, always have. I’ve looked at the contracts and they seem fine, but I don’t think you realize what a potentially devastating risk this is. I know they’re your best friends, but owning property together—”
“You could lose everything,” Katie said, “including their friendship. It’s just crazy, Mom. Come to Chicago. There’s a three-bedroom apartment becoming available in a few months in my building, and with your help we could afford to move. Meanwhile, there’s room for a rollaway in the girls’ room. It would mean so much to me, Mom, not only financially—I mean, you know how we’ve struggled since the divorce—but to have you there to help out, now and then, you know, and on weekends, maybe I could finally have a life again. And it would be great for the girls to have their grandma with them. It would be great for everyone.”
“You haven’t signed the closing documents yet,” Kevin reminded her. “It’s not too late. So let’s do it, okay? Let’s tell Cici and Lindsay you’ve changed your mind and you’re going to Chicago instead.”
Bridget spent a long moment looking from one to the other of her children, so filled with conflicting emotions that she didn’t know where to start. Were these really her children? How had they grown into these strangers whose thought processes Bridget could barely begin to fathom? Kate had not bothered to ask her mother’s advice when she decided to marry a man she’d dated less than three months, nor when she decided they “had nothing in common” on her twin girls’ second birthday. But now she wanted her mother to fix everything. And Kevin, whose perpetual bachelorhood was merely an excuse for the kind of selfishness that included scuba diving in Belize and a designer apartment with a view of the Washington Monument, thought he could settle the problem of his inconvenient mother with the same brusque efficiency with which he settled a court case. Who
were
these people?
The answer of course was simple: They were her children, whom she loved with all her heart.
She said gently, “Katie, I love my grandbabies, but I told you when they were born that I did not want to raise them. And I’m sorry you can’t afford the three-bedroom apartment. Maybe prices would be cheaper if you moved out of the city.”
Before Kate could draw a breath to reply, Bridget turned to Kevin. “Kevin, honey, you are a dear, dear boy. But you don’t have to be the daddy now. You don’t have to take care of things, and you don’t have to fix things, and for heaven sakes you do not have to be responsible for me. All you have to do, both of you, is to live your best lives, right now, just like I am. Someday I am going to need you, and when that day comes I want you”—she pointed a finger at Kate in mock sternness—“to have a house in the suburbs with a mother-in-law suite, a maid, and a pool. And you”—she turned the finger on Kevin—“to have a wife who loves you as much as I loved your father.