It wasn’t until they were seated at the dining cum kitchen table and the third round of drinks had been poured, the stir-fry and rice folded into a Tupperware container and isolated in the back of the refrigerator for future reference and the pasta steaming on their plates, that her mother wondered aloud where Tim was. “Is he working late or what?” She cocked her head over the plate of spaghetti and gestured with her glass, the ice cubes softly clicking. “Everything okay between you?”
“Yes,” Alma said, feeling as if she were somehow evading the truth or the essence of it, though she wasn’t and she and Tim were, in fact, as close as they’d ever been, closer even. “Fine. He’s out on the island this week.”
Her stepfather — white-haired, bad-hipped, six years older than her mother but looking twice that — wound a skein of red-stained pasta around his fork, then set it down and asked, “How’s all that going? Good?”
She answered automatically, conscious of her mother’s eyes on her. “Yes, sure, of course. Never better.”
“Did you get the article I sent you? From the Sun?” Her mother leaned in confidentially, her food untouched still, and this was her pattern, talk, drink, talk some more, and let the food go cold. The sausage she’d arranged to conform to the inner rim of the plate had been cut neatly in six or seven slices, but none of the slices had made the journey from plate to fork to mouth.
All at once, her mind went blank. Article? What article?
“The one about the protests? The picture showed your building — and you could see the window of your office there on the second floor — with, I don’t know, picketers out there with their signs?” Her mother shot a look at Ed, then came back to her. “You were mentioned I think three times, or four — was it four, Ed?”
Ed gave a vague nod. He was somewhere else altogether, his question—How’s all that going? — nothing more than an attempt to be sociable. He’d been the P.E. teacher at her mother’s school and they hadn’t married till Alma was a grad student. He barely knew her and knew Tim even more peripherally — he’d met him once, on one of his rare trips to the coast in the company of her mother, or maybe twice. He liked sports. Liked to talk about this team or the other, so-and-so’s batting average, the Diamondbacks’ need of pitching. Of birds, ecology, the ruination of the islands, the islands themselves, he knew next to nothing and what he knew was as vague and untroubling to him as what was going on in the former Yugoslavia or among the Dayaks of Borneo. She didn’t blame him. He was like anybody else, living in the world of society, commerce, TV, oblivion.
Her mother’s tone was defensive. “I circled your name. In blue. The blue pencil I use for my crosswords, I remember it distinctly. And don’t tell me I didn’t mail it — I’m not that far gone yet.”
“You did, Mom, thanks. I’m sure it’s around somewhere, probably at the office — I try to keep a file on each project, public response and whatnot, just for future reference. Not that anybody’d be interested.”
A familiar sense of dread had come over her then, a feeling that things were out of control, that there was some specific task that wanted completing, the task that would make it all come out right, but she couldn’t pin it down or remember exactly what it was. The fact was that the AP had picked up the story of the protests out front of the Park Service offices and every animal rights group in the country had jumped on that bus. Dave LaJoy — it was two years now since his public exoneration, and he still wore the triumph of it like a chest full of medals — had led the protest, marching out front of the looping circle of thirty or forty chanting protestors, most of them students from City College and UCSB. It had gone on for a month now and she’d taken to parking the car at the other end of the marina, where the restaurants and tourist shops were, just so as to avoid the rush they made at her when she wheeled Tim’s Prius into the lot at the office.
In the morning, at breakfast, she’d be meeting in one of those very restaurants — the Docksider — with Frazier Carter, of Island Healers, Annabelle Yuell, her counterpart from the Nature Conservancy, and Freeman — expressly to avoid the protestors and discuss the continuing implementation of Phase III of the pig eradication project in peace. Over omelets. Lattes. Super-sweetened Thai spiced tea. And a view that carried beyond the masts of the ships to where the channel opened out and rolled all the way to the feet of Santa Cruz Island, where Tim wasn’t banding murrelets or doing counts or checking nests, but trapping eagles, golden eagles, for removal to the coast.
Her mother was saying something, and it was as if she’d just come awake. “I’m sorry, Mom. Thank you, I mean it. Thanks for thinking of me. It’s just that this whole thing — this project — is complicated, that’s all. And if I don’t — I know I should call more, but. .”
Now the fork bent to the plate and her mother dropped her eyes, rolling the long strands of pasta neatly round the tines with the aid of a soup spoon, then setting the whole business down again on the side of the plate. “I’m not saying that,” she said. “I just want you to know I’m thinking about you, is all.” She looked to Ed. “We’ve got a lot on our plates ourselves, you know — in a lot of ways, retirement’s more hectic than teaching was. Committees, bridge parties, parties all the time. And golf. Did I tell you Ed’s been teaching me golf?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ed put in, coming fully to life for the first time since they’d sat down, “we’ll have her on the women’s PGA tour before long. Your mother’s a real natural, did you know that?”
Her mother was smiling, her eyes warm, dimples showing. The vodka was silvery in the glass, like some rare reduced metal. She gave her husband a long buttery gaze, and they were complicit.
“No,” Alma said, shaking her head side-to-side in an exaggerated gesture, smiling herself now, the burden gone, or at least lightened, at least for the time being, “I had no idea.”
In the bathroom, in the present moment, she’s wiping the mirror clear of condensation preparatory to putting her makeup on, the sound of her mother’s voice — a sweet quavering contralto, honed through all the years of singing along with her third graders to “Lean on Me,” “The Man in the Mirror” and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”—oddly comforting. She even finds herself humming along as she dresses. This meeting, like all the meetings she arranges, is informal, and so she dresses as she would for any workday: tan Patagonia fleece vest over a Micah Stroud T-shirt, fawn-colored corduroy shorts and suede hiking boots. It’s the end of October, the sun up now, no fog, but it’s always chilly along the coast, and she wears the vest — or vests: she’s got three of them, in tan, cranberry and rust — year-round, with a tee in summer, and in winter with a long-sleeved shirt or sweater. They’re handy and practical both. Though she won’t be going out to the island this morning or any day this week for that matter, she can be ready to take off at a moment’s notice, the various flaps and pockets of the vest ideal for secreting sunblock, lip balm, her Leatherman, compass, maps, water bottle and the like. Finally, she unwraps the towel, combs out her hair and trips down the steps to the scent of bacon and the sight of her mother and Ed and a kitchen in disarray.