He stares at her jerky image, seven thousand miles away. He had to answer sometime. “I never said I was coming down, Mom,” he says. “I was just wondering.”
“That’s what he told me, that you’d never had a plan in your life.”
“I had a plan. It just didn’t turn out exactly like I’d planned.”
Yeah, Marn says, on the other side of the table from the computer. Sorry about that one.
“So, you don’t think you’re ever coming down?”
He looks away, to Marnie. She raises her hands, like, Don’t look at me. He closes his eyes.
“I can’t, Mom. You know what he’s like.”
She starts and he says, “Not to you, Mom. Just with me.”
She goes back to her defense of him, same as ever, and he says, “So, what about you? You ever think about coming back here?”
“You know he’d never—”
“You, Mom. I’m asking you.”
He watches her, sees the way she grabs one hand with the other. “It’s awfully hard,” she says. She’s not looking at him exactly. “You know, the airfare.”
“I’ll send you a ticket.”
She jumps like she’s been stung.
Taz looks around his kitchen. Three in the morning. Midge’s been getting way better, but got up tonight, had to be fed. He wasn’t sleeping anyway. He holds her in his lap, just under the lip of the table.
He doesn’t want to. He holds her up. Turns her to the screen.
His mom starts to cry.
“She’s your granddaughter,” he says.
And suddenly his father is there, in his boxers, gut still tight and hard, chest hair as gray and wild as the hair on his head. He reaches toward the screen, says, “We’ll call you back at a better time. When we can actually talk. Not the middle of the night.”
“Dad,” Taz starts, but his father lifts his arm, thrusts his finger at him, the shut-your-mouth point.
“Say good-bye, Serena,” he says, and the screen goes blank.