HOLLISTER
Amazingly, I discovered that I did feel bad for Ben Rose after seeing him at the reunion. I wanted to show him that I’d achieved success, but that didn’t mean I wanted to see him miserable. Although his dejected face popped in and out of my mind, work took up most of my brain space that next week. I still only had four clients in my PR consulting business, but Aaron, my young tech genius, gave me enough work to fill my entire calendar. Between doing company posts on all the social media sites, managing “live” virtual events, and monitoring our online ad campaigns, my days were generally packed. Aaron had another PR consultant who did his other work—writing press releases, scheduling interviews with journalists, overseeing branding—but he didn’t trust him as much as me so I often looked over those materials for him as well. He’d been dropping hints about hiring me full-time, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to put all my eggs in one basket ever again. So I kept my other three clients and worked incessantly to meet everyone’s demands.
On Thursday evening, when I was planning to work on a fledgling swimsuit company’s Instagram posts until bedtime, I had the pleasure of a visit from my daughter, Zoe, and her ubiquitous sidekick, Laundry Basket. I called him LB for short.
“Hey, Mom!” she called out as she walked through my front door.
She still had her key and never bothered knocking, which was fine with me, since this was still her home, as far as I was concerned.
“Zoe! LB!” I took the plastic basket of dirty clothing from her and brought it over to the louvered doors behind which lived my washer and dryer. “So good to see both of you.”
The apartment she shared with her three roommates didn’t have a washing machine, and the laundry room, according to her, was nasty, so she came home every few weeks to run a few loads. I was thrilled to see her any time she wanted to drop by, of course. Friends who were parents told me I’d be ready to let her leave for college because teenagers were a pain in the ass, especially by age eighteen, but that wasn’t true for us. I’d given her much more independence and responsibility than most parents, which was more a fact of being a busy single mom than a philosophical stance, and she’d risen to the occasion.
I had Zoe at twenty-two, and in some ways we grew up together. Sometimes people thought we were sisters, which sounds like something people say when they want to be the “cool mom,” but it was true. We had a lot in common besides our DNA. We both had dads who ghosted us, and we were untraditional in our thinking and sartorial choices. We even liked each other’s music. I thought maybe I’d have an Alex P. Keaton type kid who would rebel against my liberal beliefs, but I got Zoe instead. She was kind of like a mini-me until she grew to my height and went to college to have her own life, separate from mine. I knew that I’d probably relied on her too much for companionship, so when she left for college, I tried to take a step back and not call or text too much. It was really freaking hard. And lonely.
After Zoe got her laundry started, we curled up on the couch, her at one end, me at the other, feet meeting in the middle. Other than her red hair, she looked more like the women on her dad’s side of the family. She had his high cheekbones and blue eyes, and where I was curvy in the thighs and hips, she was lean and narrow.
“You got a haircut,” I said.
I arranged a pillow behind my back and settled in to give her the mom once-over. Were there dark circles under her eyes? Enough meat on her bones? Was she clenching her jaw like she did when she was stressed out? Fortunately, my mom radar told me that she seemed all right. You tend to know a person after living with them for eighteen years. That was one reason I hated living apart from her—I couldn’t do my daily Zoe check-in. Sure, I could call or text with her, but that wasn’t the same as laying my eyes on my baby girl.
She smiled and touched the sides of her head, which were closely shaven. On the top of her head was a long swoop of hair, carefully styled into a fifties pompadour, the ends of which faded into a platinum blonde.
“I went to see Aunt Jenna earlier this week. You like it?”
“I do. You always look great, but I really like this color and cut on you.” I took my hair out of its topknot and shook it loose. “Do you like the side bangs and layers she gave me for the reunion?”
“I love it.” She pulled her sweatshirt over her head and tossed it carelessly on the back of the couch. “I need to hear about the reunion at some point.”
“After we watch our show.” It’s not that I didn’t want to gossip about the reunion, but I liked our little rituals. Snacks and TV first, then chatting. I picked up the remote and turned on the next episode of Ms. Match, a series about a dating service for millionaires. The matchmaker in charge of the operation was a boss bitch named Tori Cozzi, and if I were into women, she would have been it for me. The way she read people was borderline witchcraft, and she always got to the bottom of her client’s issues.
Zoe grabbed a handful of the kettle corn from one of the bowls I’d set out on the table as hors d’oeuvres, along with chocolate-covered peanuts and Swedish fish. Don’t let anyone say I’m not classy.
“Why are we even watching this?” she asked. “Most of these millionaires are awful.” She cracked open her grape Fanta, a drink I only kept stocked for her visits. “That guy last week who rode the Segway around his twenty thousand square foot mansion because he didn’t like to let his feet touch the floor? He needed a psychiatrist, not a wife.”
Zoe wasn’t shaming anyone for seeing a shrink. She’d been in therapy since she was thirteen to cope with her father’s dickery. I found life easier without that idiot in it, but it was hard for Zoe to cope with feeling like her dad ditched her. I worried a lot about what that did to her view of relationships, but I always hoped that it was better than seeing parents in a terrible marriage like I did until they divorced.
I coaxed my cat, Iggy Pop, onto my lap. “Yeah, that’s what Tori finally decided too, right? He needed to work on himself before he was ready for love. Maybe that’s my issue.”
“You’re fine, and you’re ready for a relationship,” Zoe said with undertones of exasperation. “You just need to find a nice guy.”
“Much easier to do at your age,” I argued. “By forty-three, most of the good ones are taken, and it’s all weirdos with mother issues or My Little Pony fetishes.” I gestured toward the TV. “These guys may be millionaires, but they’re representative of the middle-aged male dating pool at large.”
“It’s too bad you’re straight. It would widen the field if you were open to other possibilities.”
I found my daughter’s sexuality fascinating. At seventeen she explained to me that she was open to dating anyone, that it was the individual not their gender that attracted her. As someone who had her first crush on a boy in kindergarten and never deviated from that path, I couldn’t totally understand what it felt like to be Zoe, but I was happy for her. She knew who she was and didn’t seem to have many hang-ups about it. I liked to think my parenting had some small part in her self-confidence, but in truth she came out of the womb knowing her own mind.
When the show ended, I made us enchiladas with a side of beans and rice. By “made” I mean I put two freezer meals in the microwave and pushed the right buttons. The enchiladas were organic though, so that meant I’d prepared a healthy meal for my child. We sat at the kitchen bar to eat, which was a step up from where I ate my dinner the previous night, hunched over the sink like some kind of kitchen troll.
“So tell me,” she said, “how was the reunion?”
“It was a blast. The limo was swanky, and we drank champagne on the way there. Then we danced all night to eighties and nineties music and saw some old friends. Most people stayed until the bitter end, so I think it was a success. Oh, and only two people called Jenna ‘Rita’ so she was pumped about that.”
Jenna changed her name at eighteen from her given name Margherita. I couldn’t blame her. She was neither a Marg or a Rita, although we were both fond of the drink of the same name.
“Any interesting men there?”
I wrinkled my nose as I chewed. “No one single and straight.” For some ungodly reason Ben Rose flashed through my mind, and I swatted the thought away like a gnat. Technically, he did fit the description of single and straight, but he did not count.
“I don’t see why they need to be hetero. You could try dating bisexual men.”
I sighed and poked my food with my fork. “I seriously don’t think the problem is that I’m being too picky. If there are great guys out there of any persuasion, I have no idea where to meet them.”
“Online, of course. Next time I come over we’re making a dating profile for you,” she said. “I can’t trust you to do that on your own.”
“Seriously? I’m in PR. I think I could manage it.”
I’d dated a little over the years, but never gotten serious about anyone. Sam, the one guy I thought might turn into something long-term, was transferred to another state after we’d been dating for about a year. There were a few other men for several months here or there, but nothing stuck. I was busy being a mom and building my career, so it never bothered me much, but since Zoe went to college she’d been bugging me to get out there again. Maybe she did know I was lonely even though I’d tried to hide it from her.
“There is one interesting guy I met. I didn’t tell you about the owner of the skydiving school.” I needed to distract her from talking about online dating. “He’s very attractive, and I think he’s been flirting with me, although it’s hard to tell. I’m so out of practice at this point.”
“What’s his name?” She picked up her phone from the countertop. “I’ll Google stalk him for you and make sure he’s not a creeper.”
“Steve Lansky. I already did some recon, and I know he’s in good standing with the Better Business Bureau, and he runs marathons. Nothing ‘creeperish’ came up.”
She typed his name into her phone anyway, clearly not respecting my research abilities. “I don’t see anything except the skydiving school and his marathon stuff. Go ahead and ask him out. Don’t wait. His picture is here, and he’s a cutie. Give him your digits, woman.”
“Fine, fine!” I snatched her phone out of her hand. “Now tell me about school.”
She twisted back and forth on her stool, which she always did when she was feeling anxious about something. “I’m getting an internship lined up for the summer. There are some nearby that are in my field and others that are farther away…”
Sensing her hesitation, I assumed it was about money. “Like in the city? I can help you with train fare.”
I never wanted Zoe to miss an opportunity because we lacked the funds. There were times over the years that I couldn’t swing things for her that she wanted, like private tutoring for the SATs and guitar lessons, and it killed me not to be able to give her opportunities that her friends took for granted. Then again, she’d learned the value of hard work and knew how to stretch a dollar, so that had to be worth something.
“There are some in the city,” she said. “But Professor Graf knows about two others she wants me to apply for. She said they’d look amazing on my résumé and give me really great experience in a lab. One is in London and the other is in a German university town called Jena.”
The first feeling that hit me was wonder. My kid was up for biomedical engineering internships in Europe. I shouldn’t have been surprised. She was brilliant and hardworking, and she was going to set the world on fire. Still, it was a wake-up call that having her leave for college was nothing compared to what was about to come. Her college was only forty minutes away. Germany or London would be several time zones with an ocean between us. I tried to project my own anxiety as excitement.
“That’s amazing! Do they pay you? Don’t worry if they don’t. We’ll figure out something. This is a chance you cannot pass up.”
A relieved smile spread across her face. “They do pay a stipend, which she said should cover my housing, but I’d probably need some help with plane fare and stuff. I have some money saved from my job.”
I waved a hand at her. “We can handle that, no problem. I have all those free miles on my credit card.”
She frowned with concern. “But you need those to go to Australia.”
I laughed as I got up to wash our silverware. “I’d need to spend thousands more on my credit card to earn a ticket somewhere that far away. The Australia dream is on hold for now. You use the miles for Europe. My business is doing well, so I can help you out with spending money or whatever you need. This opportunity is too exciting to miss out on.”
Hell, I’d sell my platelets if I had to. She was going.
“Thanks, Mom.” Her beaming smile was thanks enough. I would have done pretty much anything to make this young woman’s dreams come true. “I don’t even have one of the internships yet, but Professor Graf said she’d recommend me. She seems to think there’s a good chance I’ll get one.”
My heart filled with emotion which threatened to turn into Mom tears. “I’m so proud of you. Let’s celebrate with some ice cream.”
As I dished up our chocolate caramel crunch, I imagined what it would be like in a year or so when she graduated from college. The summer was one thing, but a permanent move was another. I couldn’t imagine only seeing Zoe on holidays. Was I becoming one of those women who clung to their children because they didn’t have their own lives? I certainly never thought of myself that way. That’s the thing about motherhood. Everyone talks about the challenges of babies who won’t sleep and salty teenagers who rebel, but they never tell you that the hardest part is letting them go.