He’d blinked in surprise, but didn’t let my rejection stop him. “We were together for so long, baby,” he’d next cajoled. “Our history ties us and I love that tie.” It was a glimpse of the charm that hadn’t been used on me since the beginning of our long relationship.
“No,” I’d repeated. “I don’t want to see you anymore, not now or in the future. You just admitted that you never really loved me and that you cheated on me. And if I’m interpretingthis correctly, now you’re suggesting that you would cheat on Vivienne, too.”
“She’d go back to Lance if he snapped his fingers,” Grant had announced and it was just awful, all of it.
“Leave. Now,” I had said next. “I think you’re terrible, and I tried but there’s nothing that anyone could do to redeem you. I’m certainly not going to make another attempt and I don’t want to associate with you at all. I have standards.”
“What?” he’d asked. “Is this supposed to be a joke? You never did have a sense of humor.”
“Goodbye.” I had closed the front door behind me and lowered the plastic shade that covered this window as I’d heard the engine of the Porsche start up. It made a grinding noise and then Grant had sped away.
I thought about that for a while, and also about my past and my future. Then I got one of the tools I’d used for my furniture project. “You’re going to open,” I told the window, and I jammed the metal end of the implement inside the frame. Hernán, Levi, and I had tried before with no results, but maybe all our previous work had loosened it. Maybe I’d just picked the right tool, because suddenly, the sash shot up and Coral yowled when the window crashed open. A cool breeze and several birdsongs flowed into my apartment.
“I did it,” I said, and smiled at the fresh air outside. I had to have a functional window if I wanted to invite someone else in here permanently, and I had to make more room, too. So next I sent atext and received an almost immediate response. Ok, now I was going to have to follow through.
“I’m going out,” I told Coral. “I have something to do but I’ll be home well before your dinner, so don’t worry.” She looked at me and meowed, and then she deliberately walked back and forth and rubbed against my leg. “Are you going to miss me?” I asked and laughed, because it seemed like she might. I ordered up a car and got what I needed from my bedroom, and then I was on my way.
This time, I wasn’t the person waiting at the coffee shop. When I walked in, I saw that Pandora, the PhD candidate, already had a table. She waved when she saw me.
“Hi,” she said. She watched as I placed the cardboard moving box on the floor between us. “What is that? Should I feel hopeful?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered. “You could end up very disappointed but yes, I am giving you my mother’s papers.”
She turned bright red and then very pale. “Are you serious?”
“I don’t know what I have,” I cautioned further. “I didn’t look at the stuff on the old discs or the flash drives and I barely went through the papers. It’s completely disorganized, because she didn’t have any systems for keeping things straight. She saved everything, too, so half of this may be documentation of her battle with a guy who lived down the road.” They fought from the moment she’d moved into our house, even though there were miles of distance to separate them.
“She wrote about him in her article ‘Despise Your Neighbor,’” Pandora said excitedly, and I remembered proofreading it and telling my mother that she might get sued for libel, because half of her complaints against him were lies and the rest had been exaggerated.
She looked at the box reverently. “I can’t believe this! When I got your text, I thought you were going to tell me off again because…uh, about that...” Now she stared at her paper cup and picked at the lid. “I’m pretty single-minded when it comes to my research and sometimes that, uh, takes over. You know, being single-minded.”
I waited.
“I talked to my mom about our meeting, and she said that I handled it badly.”
“Is she the housewife who never did fuck-all?” I asked, and Pandora turned the same brick red as before.
“She’s not that bad. I tend to think in tropes,” she explained. “You know, like ‘the useless housewife,’ ‘the troubled intellectual.’”
Another classic was ‘the self-important PhD student,’ but I didn’t mention that. “My mother wasn’t a trope any more than yours is. She was a real person and she wasn’t a villain or a hero, either. She had lots of flaws, and the biggest was her dishonesty. I think you’ll be able to see that more when you look at this stuff.” I nudged the box with my foot. “Or maybe not. Maybe she only saved what made her look good.” I didn’t think so, though, because she hadn’t bothered to delete the “See You inHell” email folder. “I think she would be glad that someone is interested in her, even the bad parts.”
“Do you want me to send you my dissertation when it’s done, so you can read it?” she asked me, but I shook my head.
“No, thanks.” I didn’t need to see anyone else’s interpretation. I already knew the truth about my mother, or as close as I could get to it.
“Can I buy you a coffee at least? I feel like I owe you something.”
“You don’t,” I answered. “I wasn’t doing anything with her papers.” Except, sometimes, I had looked at the box and felt sad about it. I checked my phone and saw that Levi’s dot had moved. “But if you don’t mind, I could use a ride.”
“Absolutely!” Pandora answered, and it was a good thing that I went with her to her car because the box was pretty heavy and she had trouble with it—but I could deal with my mother’s stuff. I had gotten a lot stronger.
“Where do you need to go?” she asked, and I opened the map to a route that led to a beautiful park in Detroit, one with either a natural spring or a broken water pipe that no one had bothered to fix. Levi had left the house that August bought for his mom and traversed the city streets until he’d arrived there.
“Thanks,” I told Pandora when she stopped the car. “Good luck with your dissertation.” It was the second time I’d said that but now, I meant it. I hoped that she’d be able to untangle some of the mysteries of my mother for herself.
“Thank you, Emerson. Thank you so much!”
I watched her drive away and then I walked through the park. It was full of families today, with kids running and playing together. I headed to the spot that Levi had shown me months ago, except back then, I’d had a lot of trouble walking there. Now I strode across the grass and I didn’t even think about my hip, except to be glad that it felt so much better. Mostly, though, I was thinking about Levi and why he might have come here, and if August had accompanied him like when they’d been in high school. If he had, then I decided that I would give the guy a piece of my mind.
