Steven Rowley - The Editor

It’s been like two minutes.”

The silence on the other end of the line is so absolute, I swear I can hear my mother’s refrigerator hum. My first instinct was to wait, to tell her about Jackie in person, but I knew in my gut this was news that wouldn’t age well. The best thing to do was to get it over with, rip off the Band-Aid and come clean. I drank half a bottle of merlot for liquid courage, then picked at the $5.99 price sticker while having a staring contest with the phone; eventually I blinked and dialed. When she picked up she said she was glad I called, having just had an uncomfortable exchange with the neighbor over a rapidly growing tree encroaching over her property line. When she finished recounting that, I asked after Domino, her overweight cocker spaniel recently diagnosed with canine diabetes (unsurprising, I suppose, given he’s named after the yellow bag of sugar). Domino’s responding to his medication, she said, but he has to go outside more often to pee. When we exhausted all possible topics of conversation, I dropped my news like I was carpet-bombing Baghdad in Desert Storm.

I check my watch. “Three minutes. It might help if you say something.”

The first time I ever mentioned the book to my mother, more than a year ago now, I had already finished a draft. I had an unexpected lull between temp assignments and I drove out to see her. Naïvely I thought she would be curious to know everything about it, so I printed her a copy at the shop near our apartment and had it spiral-bound—the presentation was a nice throwback to the stories I once typed on her typewriter. Instead, she diligently sliced a tomato as I told her about the undertaking, explained the inspiration, and described the long hours I put into the endeavor. When I finished, all she said was, “Have some tomato,” and she pushed the cutting board my way.

“I don’t want any tomato,” I replied. I wanted a reaction to the fact that I’d written a book. A book!

“Well, this is dinner,” I remember her saying, “I wasn’t expecting company.”

“Dinner is a tomato?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not dinner even if you weren’t expecting company. I thought we could celebrate.”

I’ll never forget the look on her face, pallid yet outraged. “Celebrate what?”

Celebrate what. And that sums up where we’ve been ever since.

I’m about to switch the phone to my other ear and check my watch a third time when my mother finally speaks. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” If I’m not mistaken, there’s panic in her voice, but maybe it’s just surprise.

“You should at least read it.”

Another long silence.

“You’re still not going to read it?”

“What difference does it make if I read it now?”

I’m confused. “Do you not get this? It makes a difference to me.”

“Well, I just assume not.”

“You’re being crazy.” I don’t mean to be accusatory, it just comes out.

“How wonderful for you. Now you can tell Mrs. Kennedy I’m crazy and mean it.”

“You think I told her you were crazy and didn’t mean it?” I smile because it’s a clever line, though I’m aware my mother can’t see my smile over the telephone. I swirl the remaining wine in my glass; shame sets in as I watch it slow and then fall still. I know my mother’s not in the mood for jokes.

“I have no doubt you meant it.”

“I didn’t tell her you were crazy.”

The clanging of pots and pans. She’s always doing some ridiculous task when I call. Today’s project, it seems, is emptying the cupboards. “Maybe you didn’t say it in those exact words.”

“Maybe not in any words. I don’t think that you’re crazy, so it’s not something that’s in my head to tell.” When speaking on the telephone, it’s easy to conjure the mother I know from the past, when we were close. Her voice sounds much as it always has, at least since she gave up smoking. I like to think she’s frozen in time, and that’s mostly true; she looks to me the age she was when I was maybe fourteen—not young, far from old, with a kind of natural, easy beauty. The only difference: Her hair has gotten lighter over the years, dyed, perhaps, to mask the gray. I wonder if she’s all too aware of time passing, self-conscious about aging, but I could never ask. Certainly she doesn’t see herself through the same softening filter of nostalgia. And I’m sure it’s much harder for her to look at me and imagine I’m still fourteen.

“People are going to read this now. Is that what you’re telling me?”

I clear my throat. “My novel? I hope so. Which is why it’s important you read it first.”

“They’re going to read that I stood on the table and made up words to ‘Carol of the Bells’ when I burnt the Christmas ham.”

“So you have read it.”

“Naomi told me.”

“Naomi told you,” I repeat, imagining this conversation between her and my sister. “Well, you did stand on the table and make up words to ‘Carol of the Bells’ when you burnt the Christmas ham. Or new words. ‘Carol of the Bells’ already has words.” I can tell by her silence she thinks I’ve wandered into the reeds. “And you conducted an invisible orchestra with a wooden spoon.”

“Then how is it a novel!”

I have to push past this because we can’t litigate every scene from the book she may or may not have heard of secondhand. Certainly not over the phone. “Dad had just … Forget it. You are not insane. You are a human being. It was quite beautiful, that moment, and I wrote it that way. What does it matter if strangers read that?”

“Mrs. Kennedy is not a stranger.”

I’m momentarily puzzled. “Are you friends ?”

“She read that I stood on a table and waved a wooden spoon.”

“Yes, she read that.” And then I add, although I don’t know why, as it certainly doesn’t help my cause, “Twice.”

I’m in my own kitchen now, with no recollection of getting here—when I first dialed her I was down the hall. With the cordless pinned between my shoulder and my ear, I reach for a box of croutons and pop a handful in my mouth.

“What are you eating?” she asks.

“Croutons.” When I swallow I add, “It’s nonstop glamour over here.” It is glamourous now, though, in my mind. Starving writer is far more chic than starving office temp .

“Croutons,” she repeats disapprovingly, but after the tomato incident I doubt she eats much better. We should get together more often; between us, we could almost make a salad. “I can’t believe you let her read those things,” she finally says. “About me.”

“About Ruth Mulligan, a fictional character.”

“Based on me, Aileen Smale.”

“She doesn’t know you.”

“She knows you have a mother.”

“I assume she does not think I was immaculately born!”

My mother aggressively exhales. I’ve skirted too close to blasphemy.

I hear a cabinet door close and all I can think is that she should sell the house. That I’ve moved on, and she needs to also. Naomi came closest to convincing her a couple years ago, introducing her to a Realtor friend. “It’s too big for you,” we all told her. But she got skittish and we backed off. I remember I cried at the time, because I was so ready to say good-bye. I’d been ready for a good while.

“Everyone’s going to know that it’s me.”

“Everyone who?”

“Everyone who reads it.”

“So what!” I fail to see what the big deal is; I would be honored if someone wrote a book about me. “I think people who buy books have a firm grasp on what fiction means.”

“Write what you know. Isn’t that what they say writers do? They write what they know. You know me, therefore she is me.”