19

KAYE OPENS THE door to a skinny young man with a soul patch and full lips. “Yes?”

“I’m looking for Clara?” he says, tentatively. “Does she live here?”

“I’m her mother.”

He stands on the concrete landing below where Kaye has opened the porch door. They are eye level. He seems old for Clara, maybe twenty-five? And it’s two thirty in the afternoon. Clara is still at school.

“Is she home?” the young man asks.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Jared. I arranged to meet her here.”

“She’s seventeen, Jared.”

Jared’s pale face turns scarlet. He palms his shaggy blond hair and looks at his shoes. “Sorry?”

“She’s still at school right now. She’s not due to come home for another hour.” Kaye reminds herself that the legal age in Illinois is seventeen. “Did she tell you that she is a high school student?”

“Oh no.” His hands are now in his front pockets. “I’m not her boyfriend. I’m here about the room. The room for rent. Are you the one renting it out? It was listed on Craigslist? A room in northwest Evanston? Not far from the football stadium? Near a bus stop? With kitchen privileges?

“What room? I’m not renting a room.” Kaye briefly considers actually renting the room. She will be rid of Clara in a year when she goes to college. Maybe it would be better to have a lodger than a daughter who hates her?

“She put her room on Craigslist?”

“I suppose it isn’t for rent, then.”

Kaye had always thought teenagers were idiots with undeveloped brains, trying to operate as if they knew what they were doing. She isn’t changing her philosophy, but momentarily she is almost impressed at what her daughter has done to express how much she hates her. What has happened to the girl who cried when Kaye left her at preschool to fend for herself, because Kaye wanted time off from playing with Clara, from watching to make sure she didn’t do anything dangerous, from seeing that her small brain was constantly stimulated while Kaye’s own couldn’t concentrate on a book. It wasn’t her idea to have a kid, Kaye thinks, it was Eric’s.

Kaye is furious. How far did Clara think this joke would go? Should she call Eric at work? “Did you make an appointment with her over the phone?”

He looks blankly at her, as if waiting for an apology. “Email.”

“It’s strange she would give you this time.”

“I’m early. I walked all the way from campus. I didn’t know how long it would take.”

“I appreciate that,” Kaye says. “But there is no room for rent.”

Jared begins to turn around. “Thanks anyway,” he says as he walks down the path.

Kaye watches him leave. At least he was polite, she thinks. She runs to Clara’s room. It is easy to guess Clara’s computer password, for it is the name of her beloved Scottish grandmother who passed away ten years ago of lung cancer. She came to visit every summer and would sit in the screened porch puffing on the Marlboros she picked up in the airport duty-free shop. Janet. The same password Eric uses. Such a clever twosome, Clara and Eric.

Kaye is waiting in the kitchen when Clara arrives home an hour later. She has been waiting there, drinking coffee, and her stomach is feeling sour from the third cup as she hears Clara’s key in the door. “Come in here!” she says in her loudest voice.

“Hold on. I have to go to the bathroom.” Clara sounds calm to Kaye.

Kaye stands at the sink and washes the coffee pot, listening for Clara’s footsteps. She puts the pot and the mug in the drain just as Clara steps into the doorway. “Tell me about Jared. And Craigslist.”

“Shit. I forgot about that.”

“He was early. You were still at school. What were you planning? I went to your computer and found that you had taken pictures of your bedroom. You posted them on Craigslist and tried to rent it out!”

“You were on my computer?”

“It wasn’t difficult.”

“That’s private. God, you are such a bloody bitch! I can’t believe you would go on my computer.”

“His name was Jared. He came all the way out here from Northwestern to look at the room. You made an appointment with him. Were you drunk when you set this up?”

“No. I’m not like you.”

“What are you talking about?” The bottom falls from Kaye’s stomach. “I am not a drunk.”

“Believe what you want.” Clara looks at the ceiling, then at her mother.

“Don’t you talk to me that way.”

“Why? What do you ever do for me? You hang around the house hiding all the time. It’s not like you watch what I am doing. You never pay attention. You are so fucking self-absorbed.”

“I am not having this conversation with you if you talk to me like that.”

Clara turns and begins to walk away. “One more year and I am out of here,” she calls back.

Kaye leans back against the counter. She doesn’t know what to do or say. It isn’t the first time. The next thing she hears is the front door slamming shut.

WALKING UP THE parkway to her front door, Eleanor writes an imaginary email to Phil. “Dear Phil: I’m sure we can be ‘just friends,’ except that I have this image of you naked and limp in the darkness of my garage. It’s not something I want to think a lot about. So how would this work?” She climbs the porch steps, past the place where she sat with Phil, where she kissed him.

The street is quiet and dark with the long shadows of clouds. A tall thin woman holding a cigarette between her fingers in one hand, and a leash in the other, walks her vizsla on the sidewalk. She takes a long drag near Eleanor’s front lawn as the dog sniffs for a place to relieve himself. She smiles and waves the cigarette hand at Eleanor.

Inside, Eleanor’s house is quiet. It’s late in the afternoon, and she assumes Eugene, home from school, is doing his homework. Liam appears on the stairs. “Can I go to Pete’s house?”

Immediately she wants to say no. So, she does, not because she has a reason, but because she feels tired and light-headed, and it just comes out of her mouth.

“Why not?”

“I said so.”

“Give me a reason.”

“I don’t have to. Don’t you have homework?”

He retreats, stomping up the stairs.

In her bedroom, she takes out her laptop and sits on the bed. “Dear Phil: It isn’t that I don’t want to be friends. I don’t know how. What do I do now? Mostly I find you sexually repulsive. Yet, if I’m honest, I’m also still attracted to you, perhaps the problem is that I can’t get the garage incident out of my head and I can’t stop being angry. At me. At you. Should I just ignore you?” She knows the answer to this. Delete.

PHIL WAKES UP in a strange bed, and for a split second, even with the late afternoon sun hitting him in the face from the open window next to the bed, he wonders where Sarayu is, and he almost thinks that he can smell her apartment as he did two nights ago, then realizes that he is in the guest room of his own house, the room his wife has taken. He is lying on top of her bed. He remembers that she wasn’t home and he had decided to look through her things, not for anything in particular. He discovered that she didn’t fold her underpants and bras, but just put them in the drawer. Her socks lay in an unmatched mass. She hung her T-shirts on hangers rather than place them in the dresser. And her jewelry she had tangled in multiple cotton-lined boxes piled on a shelf in her closet, instead of in the wooden jewelry box he had once given her as an anniversary present. Some of the more expensive pieces he could not find. Not that he cared. His search had been tiring and he had picked up a book, lain back on the bed, and fallen asleep.

As he surfaces into full consciousness, he senses the familiar sourness, a combination of sweat and scented hair products, the pillow she uses, and the blanket.

For a moment he stays there and feels the wind from the ceiling fan across his face. He hears the voices of his neighbors in their yards outside, but there is no one else in his house, only the overhang of disappointments. He stretches as he stands up, then straightens the blanket on the bed so that it doesn’t look like he has been there.

In the adjoining bathroom, amidst the body washes and rose-scented soap, he sees the reflection of lines that reach from the outside corners of his eyes toward the sides of his face, and grey circles beneath his white lower lashes. No matter how hard he works out, or how careful he is with what he eats, the years draw the skin on his face downward.

On the table by the bedside are two Bibles, one a new annotated version with the sticker label of her church at the bottom of the front cover, the other her confirmation King James version. There is a pencil for her to write in the margins of the Bible, and her iPad. He turns the iPad on and, using an old password that Linda had developed, the middle names of their daughters, he logs into her account and looks at her email. How odd it hadn’t occurred to her to change her password.

Phil had always felt that it would never really be important to see what Linda had in her email account or on her Facebook page. After all, he was the one committing adultery. It was always Linda accusing Phil. Phil left her alone to raise her daughters. Phil forced her to move just as she was beginning to make friends in one place, and then move again. Phil had affairs, and not just one. She had always been victimized by his actions and his life.

There are emails about clothes and dating from Linda’s divorced friends, sort of “Let me set you up” emails; notices about Bible study; love letters from Albert, the man-boy from church. “I can’t wait to see you,” he writes. “I only want to lie next to you.” He quotes songs that Phil is not familiar with. Some are in Spanish, as if that is a sexier language than English. Then he sees the “sent” files, the emails to Sarayu and Eleanor where Linda writes, “I’m praying for you.”

He walks through the hallways as he reads them. Now a few things make sense. To Sarayu there is a particular recent email. And now he knows why she called him, because she had heard from his wife.

“He is all yours,” Linda wrote. “We are finally getting a divorce. I won’t hide the fact that you were partly to blame. But it takes two.”

Why did Linda contact Sarayu? To get them back together? It reminds him of twelve-step programs that force you to apologize to everyone you have hurt while you were an addict, and she is apologizing for him. But Linda does not feel she has hurt anyone. She only says she will pray for them. Is praying for someone the same as interrupting her life with information she might not want? Did she think Phil would find out and then hate her? Would it make her superior to Phil, by praying for those he has sinned with?

He sends a text to Sarayu. He sits and waits for an answer. She doesn’t answer and he calls, only to find that her telephone is turned off. He wants to reassure her that he is sincere in wanting to be with her.

Phil feels he has to get to Sarayu. He grabs his wallet and keys and gets in his car. He has not thought to let out the dog or fill her water bowl. She doesn’t exist right now. At a stop sign before entering the ramp to the expressway, he sends Sarayu another text. Still she doesn’t answer. He calls and leaves another message. Her phone is still off.

KAYE DOESN’T THINK it is unusual that Clara has walked out. Clara walks out all the time. Eric believes that Clara should have the freedom to leave the house to be with her friends after school, to calm down after the frequent arguments she has with her mother. Clara communicates with him. Often Kaye doesn’t know where Clara is eating, or where she is getting her homework done. Eric, who grew up in a different place, says, “She comes home at night, what more do you want?” as if he knows something that he and Clara don’t want to reveal to Kaye.

“How the hell do you raise kids in Scotland?” she asked her husband.

“We don’t chain them to their bedrooms, if that is what you are wondering.”

Eric does not make things easier.

Kaye does what she always does in the late afternoon of a weekday, before Eric comes home. She empties the dishwasher, marinates the chicken, washes the lettuce for a dinner salad, and indulges in a finger of fifteen-year-old whisky. An advantage to being married to a Scot is that there is always fifteen-year-old whisky in the pantry.

Then the clouds come over the sky, shadowing the ground, and from the kitchen window she can see the tree swing moving maniacally and the huge branches from the cottonwood sway. The siren goes off. Kaye sends a text message to Clara. Then she calls her. Clara rarely answers when her mother calls. The rain begins to pelt the windows, sharply at first, then in waves in an uneven rhythm that coincides with gusts of wind. What little she feels she has of maternal instinct she rallies. She takes her rain jacket and keys and runs toward the car parked in front of the house.

By the time she has crossed the parkway and reaches her car, she is drenched. Would Clara seek cover? Was she at someone’s house? Would she find the house of a friend? Clara has been known to walk for hours when she is angry. Kaye sends another text before starting the engine. “Clara, where are you?” She receives no answer.

With the neighborhood siren sounding from the nearby schoolyard, Kaye goes after her daughter. The wind rocks the car and the rain pushes against the windshield. She drives slowly along the street, clutching the steering wheel, trying to see ahead through the watery windshield glass. Up a street, down another, no one is outside. A squirrel runs in front of the car, but she doesn’t brake and she doesn’t hit it.

She finds Clara soaked and hovering on the grass, not far from the house. She pulls the car up to the curb and reaches to open the passenger side door. “Get in!”

But Clara shakes her head. “Why?” she says.

“It’s dangerous! The sirens are going off!” Kaye screams to her daughter. Realizing that she will have to get out of the car and force Clara to get in, she pushes her door open, and, through the shower, she walks over the grass and takes Clara by the shoulders. The girl resists. “Just leave me alone, you fucking cunt!”

Kaye remains standing in the rain and wind. She recalls the time she couldn’t get Clara to latch on as a baby and she was trying to nurse. Through the pain of being rejected and her tears, she argued with the lactation nurse to allow her to use formula rather than breastfeed. But the lactation nurse was adamant, and she pinched and pumped milk until the stubborn baby Clara drank from her breast and Kaye contracted a painful infection. Even before that, there had been the pain of contractions, of childbirth, things she had forgotten. Kaye hadn’t known what pain was then.

With all the things that Clara has called her she has never used the word “cunt” before, a hard-sounding word, shot out in the hope of injuring her. But words don’t matter right now. “Just get in the car and I’ll worry about what you think of me later.”

“No! I am staying here.”

“You’ll get hurt. Come!”

Clara tries to wriggle out of her mother’s clutches, but without enough energy to be successful. Soaked and tired, Kaye leads her into the car. She pushes the door shut and goes to the driver’s side. She cannot hear the sound of the engine, only the pounding of the rain on the car and the blood in her head.

Clara runs through the unlocked front door ahead of her mother when they arrive home. Kaye stands in the doorway listening to Clara slam her bedroom door shut. Then she can no longer hold her tears. They come out harshly, along with seventeen years of failed motherhood.