I meant to talk to my mom about what was happening that night, but when I got home and tossed my greasy white work shirt in the laundry, she was in the kitchen working on dinner and singing along to the stereo. In the last year or so, she had finally managed to escape the grief that had imprisoned her after my dad was gone. And in addition to finding a new job, and singing more often, she had taken up gourmet cooking.
I realize I should not be complaining about any of this. I don’t begrudge my mom happiness, and poached rainbow trout with savoy cabbage is objectively delicious. But, there were just a couple of problems.
1) In her mission to get over the tragedy in her life, she seemed to be forgetting that it had ever happened.
2) I really missed taco night, where we loaded up store-bought taco shells with neon orange ground beef and shredded lettuce and then ate them while watching the trashiest movie we could find on TV.
Now the TV was downstairs in the basement, far far away from the kitchen table. And ground beef with seasoning packs was forever banned from Mom’s kitchen.
“Hey, hey,” said my mom, when I stepped into the kitchen. “The workingman is home.”
“I am,” I said.
“Can you set out the low bowls please and some glasses for wine?”
“Sure,” I said, and opened the door to the cabinet near the counter. I pulled out some stacked bowls and wineglasses.
The good side of my mom’s gourmand phase is that she let me drink wine with dinner sometimes. Just a glass, but still, if I drank it fast enough, I got the world’s tiniest buzz. The bad side was that I couldn’t help remembering the things Dad used to make: stuffed peppers with lots of cheese, enormous hamburgers cooked to dangerously low temperatures. Something called Zucchini Slop. The house smelled different these days. It was quieter, too. The pauses between sentences were longer, and I found myself always jumping to fill them.
Mom was dumping out pasta water when I finished with the table, and she appeared before me through a fog of briny steam. Her blond bangs were damp against her forehead. Dad always said she looked like this Italian actress, Monica Vitti, with her long nose and that little gap between her teeth. But to me, she just looked like my mom.
I could smell the clams and garlic and knew we were having spaghetti vongole, which was her specialty.
“How was the theater today?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Sweet Lou fell asleep at the organ again.”
“Of course she did.”
“Her head landed right on D-flat during the opening credits of the matinee. A woman screamed.”
Mom laughed, but not the way she used to. This was just a soft chuckle. A half laugh at best. She wasn’t a huge fan of my extra responsibilities at the Green Street. She thought I should be concentrating on retaking the SATs or looking into humanitarian work if I was planning to take a “gap year.”
That’s what she called my plan for next year. A gap year. Even though the word “gap” implied a space between things, and I had no idea what the next thing would be. Can there be a gap with nothing on the other side? A cliff year?
I had graduated early from high school thanks to a boatload of AP credits from the good old days. Mom was surprisingly cool with my early graduation, but her pride had turned quickly to anxiety when I showed no immediate interest in college.
“Can you finish chopping this basil?” she asked now, and pointed toward a cutting board. I walked over and picked up her ridiculously expensive Japanese chef’s knife. It was sharp enough to take off a digit if you didn’t concentrate.
“How about a chiffonade?” she said.
She had been trying for a year to teach me some knife skills. A chiffonade, for those of you who don’t work at a Michelin-starred restaurant, is a cut that makes perfect little herb strings. You do it by folding the herbs and making tiny slices, and it takes about a hundred forevers unless you’re a pro.
I am not a pro.
Still, I lined up the basil, folded it over, and started the intricate work of slicing through the herbs to the rib.
“Guess who I saw today at the farmer’s market?” she asked.
She was stirring her sauce into the pasta now, her newly toned arm whirling in circles.
“Roger Deakins?”
She stopped stirring.
“Who?”
“Roger Deakins. The fourteen-time Academy Award–nominated cinematographer who worked on such films as No Country for Old Men and The Shawshank Redemption.”
“No,” my mom said, “not him.”
“Oh,” I said, “who then?”
I finished one side of the basil leaves and flipped them over.
“Trinity Allen,” she said.
I stopped the knife before almost cutting off the tip of my thumb.
“As in . . .” I said.
“As in Raina’s mom,” she said.
“Mmm,” I said.
I was no longer chiffonading. I had not heard either of the names my mom had just uttered in a very long time. Well, I had read about them on websites, but I had not heard them spoken aloud. And this was because the owners of those names used to live nearby us, but now they did not. They used to be frequent topics of conversation and now they were not. And most importantly, I used to think I would marry Raina Allen, perhaps in a Scottish castle overlooking some moors, whatever those are, but now I did not.
“She’s coming home for a while,” my mom said.
“She as in . . .”
“She as in Raina. The girl you wanted to marry in a Scottish castle.”
“Who told you about that?”
“You wrote it on your wall in Magic Marker,” she said.
I poured myself a tall glass of wine.
“Hey! Easy tiger,” said Mom, pointing at my glass. “Pour some of that back.”
I sighed and dumped half my glass into hers, spilling a citrusy splash on the tablecloth. I watched it soak into the fibers.
“I thought she was shooting the sequel to that dystopic cats thing,” I said.
My mom grabbed my ill-chopped basil and garnished a few perfectly swirled pasta towers.
“She was replaced,” my mom said. “Apparently something didn’t go well. I think she’s having a tough time. Maybe you should give her a call.”
I watched the steam rise off the pasta in front of me, but I was no longer hungry. I got up and took my wine to my bedroom where I lay down on my bed and turned on a movie by one of my dad’s favorite directors. Federico Fellini. This one was called 8 1/2. From what I could tell, it was about a dashing man who wanders around, ignoring beautiful women for three hours. I tried my best to experience his sophisticated boredom, but my heart was beating so fast, I thought it might explode.