Where should he go? Tooling around the neighborhood, he found himself looking for his wife’s car at the home of her various friends. Even if he found her, then what? He needed to think this through. What he really needed was a good stiff drink.
Bob found himself in a local bar where he could safely lose himself in the noisy drinking crowd glued to large, blaring TV screens. He focused on the sports, not wanting to see the overplayed aerial footage of the ALLPower domes by the river. He ordered a double scotch on the rocks.
Yeah. Let’s down a few. Was he drowning his sorrows, sulking in his cups? Or was he celebrating a new freedom? The woman was gone, out of his life, good riddance to her and her demands for a full-time husband, her nagging angst about infertility. Was it his fault they were childless? Maybe she’d have better luck with another guy.
He ordered another drink and contemplated his next move. Should he find a motel? What about his mother’s place?
Stella Stalinsky lived just twenty minutes from the plant in a two-bedroom apartment. He could probably crash there, if he could deal with the barrage of questions about his failed marriage. Bob downed his second drink, feeling a mellow buzz that made the phone call easy.
“Hello Ma? Yeah, it’s me, Bob. Did I wake you? No? Watching who? Oh yeah, the news. Listen, Ma…”
He blubbered something about an empty house, trouble with Morgan and hung up. After one more for the road, he barreled into his car and headed back across the river. Hopefully his mother wouldn’t wait up for him, but he knew better. He’d have to supply some kind of brief explanation that would satisfy her.
He could see her in front of the TV with her feet up, reading the newspaper at the same time. Stella had a big appetite for information. She was an avid news junkie and subscribed to the local paper, the New York Times, and a bunch of weekly magazines. She read the newspapers from cover to cover by lunchtime, then buzzed around in her flowered muumuu, straightening stacks of magazines with pages bent in half, marking stories she hadn’t yet finished. A shock of wavy black hair peppered with startling gray streaks and thick eyebrows set off her light-olive complexion. Her dark, piercing eyes were unforgiving, the eyes Bob would avoid as a teen when he came home stoned.
When the front door opened Stella was shocked. Laden down with a suitcase and a bunch of suits draped over his arm, and smelling of liquor, her son provided every clue for her to quickly size up the situation.
“What happened, Robbie? She leave you? Or you ended it? You look all in.”
He flinched when he heard “Robbie,” his grade school nickname.
“Not now, Ma. I need to crash. I’m beat.”
“Okay. Okay. Go get some sleep. Get your spunk back.”
Bob squeezed past her and headed for the spare bedroom where his parents’ old double bed took up most of the space. He remembered helping his father move the bed from his childhood house to the apartment, a place easier for his parents to maintain. It was a move dictated by his father’s terminal illness, a time when Bob felt the need to connect with the dying man, to engage him with lighthearted talk. He recalled helping his father angle the mattress through the bedroom door, how he fumbled to say something humorous.
“So, Dad. Is this the bed I was conceived in?”
Without looking at him, his father said, “What makes you think you were conceived in a bed?”
Oh boy.
Bob could never match the quick wit of either his father or his mother. His parents shared the same lingo, their thought patterns seemed to emanate from a similar hemisphere in their brains. They finished each other’s sentences and took the conversation to the next level. Stella’s sense of humor had a sarcastic edge that eluded Bob most of the time, and he was dumbstruck by her quick retorts to his simple questions, his father chuckling heartily in the background.
In truth, Stella was only too glad to have her son move in, even if it was temporary. Since her husband died a few years ago, the empty nest was more like a vacant lot.
As she brewed a pot of coffee for Bob the next morning she vowed to go easy on him, to relinquish her ready-made cynicism and try to be consoling. She got out the frying pan to make an omelet as Bob padded into the kitchen. He filled his cup and sat down.
“So what happened with Morgan?”
“Honestly, Ma. Not before my coffee. Please.”
“Oh. Sorry. How did you sleep?”
“So-so.”
She waited as long as she could while he sipped his coffee.
“Was it because you guys couldn’t get pregnant?”
He put down his cup and stared at it.
“Look, Ma,” he said firmly, “my marriage started out pretty good. It just took a bad turn. I don’t want to talk about Morgan. It’s over. She’s out of my life.”
“I’m sorry, Robbie. Really. Can’t you try to patch things up? She’s a good person.”
He was expressionless.
Quickly she said, “How about a yummy salsa omelet—your favorite. With cheese?”
She fluttered around the kitchen, giving him some mental space. Before Bob was born, Stella was a professional fund-raiser for a national, nonprofit medical organization specializing in cancer research. She was college educated, well-read, and the job suited her. Her gregarious nature made raising millions fun and easy. For years she consistently brought in sizable donations. But after a while, something was missing. She wanted a mate, a lover, maybe to marry and have children. When she met and married Bob’s father, she quit her job without looking back. It was time to become a full-time wife and mother.
As it happened, Stella would only have one child. After giving birth to Bob, her reproductive organs turned down a repeat performance. But Stella persevered in her maternal role, and raising Bob was her priority. The kid was bright, but didn’t inherit the gene with her sparky wit. She made up for it by always expressing herself, doling out humorous critiques about his teachers, the news, whatever was on her mind. Surely he would absorb a bit of clever lingo if he kept hearing it.
By the time Bob was in high school, he started to pull away. Home life became embattled, fraught with bickering and power plays between mother and son. His father would always withdraw mumbling something like, “Oy. Clash of the Titans.”
When she lost her husband a few years ago, Stella was in her early sixties and toyed with the idea of going back to work. But the workplace had changed, and with the new, fast-paced technology, she was unsure of her learning curve. Since her husband’s pension was enough to live on, she volunteered to fund-raise for small, local organizations. It was a way to keep her hand in, to meet people without the strain of performing on the job and learning new skills.
Now, with her adult son taking up residency, she knew only too well that it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. Their stormy past left its mark, and embattled remnants always managed to surface, especially when it came to politics and ethics. Spats ended abruptly with long, hard silences. Stella was strongly opinionated, and Bob would counter, more out of the habit of standing up to her and wanting to have the last word. He still sought his own voice, one that was different from hers.
He never allowed himself to miss a beat when proving her wrong, even if it meant playing devil’s advocate. How far would she go? Who would call truce first, if at all? Unwittingly it was great training for a job in public relations.