“How long is a while?” Jason said.
“I don’t know. Weeks maybe. Longer than I have days off for. I have a feeling my mom’s going to be difficult. I may have to quit my job.”
“Can I come down and see you?”
“No, I’ll come up. It’s a five-hundred-square-foot cabin. Plus I’m worried you’ll run for your life when you meet my mom. You’ll think I’ve been concealing the fact that I’m like her.”
“Everybody’s embarrassed by their parents.”
“But I have actual reason to be.”
Pip was Jason’s newest enthusiasm but thankfully not his only one; she could get him off the subject of her virtues by mentioning math, tennis, TV shows, video games, writers. His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike himself in this regard. If she wanted something more, like visiting Ramón with her, he agreed to it enthusiastically. He had a way of making whatever they were doing the thing he most wanted to do. She’d watched him rapidly eat four generic vanilla-cream cookies and then stop and marvel at a fifth, holding it in front of his eyes and saying, “These are fantastic.”
If she became a rich person — and she could already feel herself becoming one; was sensing the mentally deformative weight of the word heir—Jason would be the last boy who’d liked her when she was still nobody. He did admit that her interning with Andreas Wolf had “confirmed” his assessment of her intelligence, but he swore it hadn’t had anything to do with his breakup. “It was just you,” he said. “You behind the counter at Peet’s.” She trusted Jason in a way that might well prove to be unique, but she didn’t want him to know this. She was aware of how easily she could blow things with him, and she was even more aware, thanks to Tom’s memoir, of the hazards of love. She felt herself wanting to bury herself in Jason, to pour her trust into him, even though she had evidence that self-burial and crazy trust levels could result in toxicity. She was therefore allowing herself to be heedless in sex only. This was probably hazardous, too, but she couldn’t help it.
They had more sex as soon as they got back to Jason’s apartment. Starting to fall in love with a person made it bigger, almost metaphysical; a John Donne poem she’d studied in college and failed to appreciate, a poem about the Extasie and how it doth unperplex, was making sense to her now. But in the wake of the Extasie she became anxious again.
“I think I’d better call my mom,” she said. “I can’t postpone it any longer.”
“Do it.”
“Can you just keep lying there like that while I do? With your arm there? I need you to hold me in case I feel like I’m getting sucked in.”
“I’m picturing somebody getting sucked out of a blown-open airplane,” Jason said. “They say it’s surprisingly hard to hold on to a person when that happens. Or maybe not so surprising when you consider the air-pressure differentials that keep a hundred-ton plane aloft.”
“Do your best,” she said, reaching for her phone.
She loved having a body now that Jason loved her having it. She was clutching his arm when her mother answered.
“Hi, Mom.” She braced herself for a Pussycat!
“Yes,” her mother said.
“So, I’m sorry I haven’t called in so long, but I’m thinking I might come down and see you.”
“All right.”
“Mom?”
“You come and go as you please. If you want to come, come. Obviously I can’t stop you. Obviously I’ll be here.”
“Mom, I’m really sorry.”
There was a click, a cessation.
“Holy shit,” Pip said. “She hung up on me.”
“Uh oh.”
It hadn’t occurred to her that her mother might be angry at her; that even their extreme case of moral hazard might have limits. But now that she thought about it, her mother’s entire story, in Tom’s memoir, was one of serial abandonment and betrayal, followed by scorching moral judgment. Pip had always been safe from this judgment, but she could tell, from the fact that Tom still seemed afraid of it, even after twenty-five years, that it was awful to experience. She felt afraid of it herself now, and closer to Tom.
The next day, she gave notice at Peet’s and called Mr. Navarre to tell him she was going to have the conversation with her mother, and to ask him for five thousand dollars. Mr. Navarre could have been judgmental or teasing about the money, but apparently he was impressed that she’d waited four and a half months to ask for any. She enjoyed the feeling that she’d passed some test, exceeded some norm.
Microclimates of the San Lorenzo: the pavement at the Santa Cruz bus station was nearly dry, but just two miles away, at the top of Graham Hill Road, the driver had to put his wipers on. Winter night had fallen. Pip’s mother’s lane was spongy with redwood needles dislodged and sodden with the rain, the sound of which surrounded her polyrhythmically, a steady background patter, heavier drippings, hiccuping gurgles. The musty wood-soak smell of Valley wetness overwhelmed her with sense-memory.
The cabin was dark. Inside it was the sound of her childhood, the patter of rain on a roof that consisted only of shingle and bare boards, no insulation or ceiling. She associated the sound with her mother’s love, which had been as reliable as the rain in its season. Waking up in the night and hearing the rain still pattering the same way it had when she’d fallen asleep, hearing it night after night, had felt so much like being loved that the rain might have been love itself. Rain pattering at dinner. Rain pattering while she did her homework. Rain pattering while her mother knitted. Rain pattering on Christmas with the sad little tree that you could get for free on Christmas Eve. Rain pattering while she opened presents that her mother had put aside money for all fall.
She sat in the cold and dark for a while, at the kitchen table, listening to the rain and feeling sentimental. Then she turned on a light and opened a bottle and made a fire in the woodstove. The rain fell and fell.
The person who was both her mother and Anabel Laird came home at nine fifteen with a canvas bag of groceries. She stood in the front doorway and looked at Pip without speaking. Underneath her rain parka she was wearing an old dress that Pip loved and, indeed, coveted. It was a snug and faded brown cotton dress with long sleeves and many buttons, a kind of Soviet worker-woman’s dress. Back in the day, her mother would probably have given her the dress if she’d asked for it, but her mother had so few covetable possessions that depriving her of even one of them was unthinkable.
“So I came home,” Pip said.
“I see that.”
“I know you don’t like to drink, but this might be a good night for an exception.”
“No, thank you.”
The person who was both her mother and Anabel left the parka and groceries by the door and went to the back of the cabin. Pip heard the bathroom door close. It was ten minutes before she realized that her mother was hiding in the bathroom, not intending to come out.
She went and knocked on the door, which was just boards held together with crossboards. “Mom?”
There was no answer, but her mother hadn’t used the hook that served as a lock. Pip went in and found her mother sitting on the concrete floor of the tiny shower, staring straight ahead, her knees drawn up to her chin.
“Don’t be sitting there,” Pip said.
She crouched down and touched her mother’s arm. Her mother jerked her arm away.
“You know what?” Pip said. “I’m mad at you, too. So don’t be thinking being mad at me is going to get you out of this.”