JOANIE

My mother and father argue about directions. They have fights over what’s faster, this or that road. Which has more traffic. My mother’ll say, Why you going this way? You coulda gone that way. As a kid, I sat in the back and had to listen. Even then I knew they were arguing about this decision instead of the other ones. How they ended up here, how they got here. Instead of where they ended up in general. I mean with their lives.

My mother’s turning into one of those old people who think the rules are going to hell everywhere, the kind who hang around the pool at condos watching for rule violations. Reporting the kids without towels, the kids who do cannonballs.

But then I’ll see, like this morning, that she left some stuffed shells for us, wrapped in that careful, housewifey way, and my heart’ll go out to her.

I don’t want to hurt her about Bruno. When I was with him, it was like my head was saying no but my mouth was saying okay. Which is about the way the two normally operate.

A month or so after Gary left, Todd and I were sitting on the floor in the living room one night, listening to the radio. We were in a kind of stupor. The TV was broken. It was hot, and Todd kept rubbing his forehead with a wristband he was wearing. It reminded me of the summer he was always drying his sweat with a hand towel he carried around. We were listening to an oldies station. They played Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” Todd hummed along. He sang the last part to himself at the end, and I remember thinking that maybe we’d be all right, maybe we were going to make it.

All these days since the car thing have been the same, like ugly cabins along a swampy lake.

I never tried to be Queen of Heaven, but I did want to be a good woman, a good mother. It turns out I didn’t know how.

I wake up every morning with my heart racing, like every day will be the day that things work out, or at least get resolved.

The sisters used to say, You don’t get exactly what you pray for, you get what God thinks is best. So I used to figure I might as well just wait for that, anyway.

My mother said to me once, just in passing, impatient about something or other, “Well, when were you ever happy?” It stuck with me. I should have said, Easter Mass, when I was little. With my white dress and white gloves. My candy to look forward to, the sun on the lawn in front of the church, the air fresh in my nose, the trees with the birds I didn’t know, talking, calling things like Red key, Red key, or else So Soon, So Soon.

What would she have said? She probably would have said, Oh, you weren’t even happy then. But I was, I think.

I just want it all to stop. This morning, after Todd went out, I sat on the sofa with his peeled-off sweat shirt, like it was the last warm thing of his I’d touch.