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I am sitting on the couch reading The Prince of Tides, a book Vaude loaned me when she finished it. She is an avid reader and often passes books that she enjoyed on to me. I am waiting for Mom to come out of her room. I know she’s awake because I woke her up. She has her interview this morning. The last one she had she was late for and probably didn’t get the job because of it. She is none too excited about working in housekeeping, clearly not her strong suit, but Mitch has made it pretty clear that she needs to find something, because he isn’t paying our way.
She comes out. I hear the door click, and the knob smacks into the hallway wall. “Do I look okay?” she asks, and I assure her that she does. She’s dressed in black pants and a cream-colored oxford that really accentuates her hair. Her eyes have shadow, and she has used a light coral color of lipstick.
“You look great.” I set my book aside.
She lets out a heavy sigh, and I hope she hasn’t started drinking already. I can’t smell it, but sometimes I can’t unless I’ve been away for a bit.
“Would you mind if I rode in with you? I’ve got some laundry to do. I could wait for you, and maybe we could go to lunch afterwards, to celebrate.”
“I don’t have the job yet.” She laughs. “But that would be nice.”
“Great.” I run down the hall to grab the bag I’ve already set up to take. I hate to admit that the clothes are just a ploy, a way to ensure that she doesn’t drink before the interview. She needs this job. I need her to have this job.
Out in the bright sunlight, it feels like we’ve been set to broil and it isn’t even nine o’clock. We drive with the windows down, our hair whipping around our heads. The air conditioner hasn’t worked in the car since the middle of last summer, and since air conditioning is a luxury, Mitch, who can fix almost anything, hasn’t bothered to fix it.
She pulls into the parking lot, and I tell her to go get ’em as I shoulder my pack and make the two-block walk to the laundromat. She is sweating and looks a little shaky. Maybe it would have been better if she’d had a drink.
My clothes are finishing in the wash, and I keep looking out the window, waiting for her to pull in, anxious to hear how it went, but when the clothes are finished spinning, she still isn’t back. I load the wet clothes into my backpack and make my way back down to the nursing home. Her car is gone. I’ve kept an eye out, looking for her on the short walk, but she didn’t pass me, I am sure of it. I wonder if somebody would bother to steal the car, but can’t imagine it. I open the door to the nursing home and step inside. A fan circulates in the entryway, and I stop at the front desk.
“Did Alice Hayes have an interview this morning?” I ask. The woman looks at me for a second.
“Housekeeping?” she asks, and I nod. She picks up a phone and pushes a couple of buttons. “Did Ms. Hayes already leave?” She listens; I listen, but can’t hear the voice on the other end. She hangs up the phone and gives me a smile. “She’s already gone.”
“Hm,” I say, drawing my brow together. “Did she do the interview?”
The woman nods. I want to ask her if she got the job, but I feel a little crazy, like a stalker or something. “Did she happen to say where she was going from here?” The look that crosses her face makes me add, “I thought she was going to pick me up when she was done.”
“She didn’t say. But she was pretty happy when she left.”
“Good.” That could mean one of two things: either she got the job and she was happy about it, or she decided she didn’t want the job and told them to shove it. Both would make sense coming from my mother. “Okay, well thanks.” I go back out into the heat and stand, baking on the sidewalk, looking from one direction down the road to the other. I could just start walking, I suppose. Fuck. I shoulder my pack, now soaked through and actually kind of nice and cool against my back, and head down the street to the north. If I walk one mile every sixteen minutes, it will only take me an hour and twenty minutes to get home.
I walk, and as I walk, I get more and more angry. What the hell? How could she forget to pick me up? I wonder if I will find her happily settled in when I finally get there. I’ve walked about twenty minutes or so, just over a mile, past the square and just a couple of blocks from the road that will take me to our house, when I pass by Northside Package and Ice Chest, where I see her car. I stop and just stare at it for the longest time, my head overheating with the sun beating down on me. Sweat is pooling along my waistband and under my breasts. I have a momentary vision of beating the headlights and windshield with a baseball bat. It’s kind of a lovely image, but I trail my hand over the hot metal as I make my way toward the door. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust from the sun outside to the cool dark inside. The windows are tinted so dark that the world outside looks like dusk.
When my eyes finally adjust, I see her, leaning in toward the bartender, her hand holding a glass, empty but for ice. The barkeep fills it up, and she never even sets it on the counter. She is smiling. He is smiling. They look like old friends. I sidle in and sit next to her, letting the soppy bag fall from my shoulders. I set it on the floor. She looks at me, and it actually takes a second for recognition to dawn. She jerks her head back as if I have struck her, her eyes fluttering at my sudden appearance. “Alison!” she says, smiling. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m on my way home and saw the car.”
“Oh.” Her forehead puckers, and then her eyes fly wide. “Oh shit! I was supposed to pick you up, wasn’t I?”
I nod.
“Damn. I completely forgot.” She starts to laugh, a leg-slapping, mouth-gaping laugh that echoes around me. I am pissed. Beyond pissed, and for a split second, I have another one of those visions, and in this one, I shove her off her barstool. The vision fades as soon as it appears, and I just stand, my backpack hanging from my hand, my back wet where my clothes have soaked through. She taps me on the shoulder, her bony fingers squeezing me, holding me. “I’m sorry. Don’t be mad. Come on, Alison. Don’t be mad.” She leans close to me. “I got the job.” As if this should make everything okay. It doesn’t, but it does help.
“When do you start?” I ask, trying to lay my irritation down.
“Tomorrow.”
“Great.” I say, cooling off. The bartender brings me a water with ice, and I empty the glass in short order. He refills it, and I am grateful. Someday this is going to be one of those great family stories—the day my mom forgot to pick me up at the laundromat and I found her in the bar. It will be funny someday, but right now it’s just so much of the same crap that she does every day. I hate her sometimes, and then I feel so guilty about hating her.
I sit with her for a few minutes and then get up, gathering my backpack. “Where you going?” she asks,
“Home.”
“I ain’t leaving yet.”
“I know. Dylan’s picking me up.” He isn’t, of course, but I keep hearing him tell me not to ride in cars with her, and I’m getting sick from the smoke anyway. She thanks me for coming with her, but I wave it away, no big deal, and set out to walk the next hour toward home.