A group of kids walked past me, their laughter loud in my ear.
“Where are you?” Julie asked.
“I’m in the McDonald’s parking lot.”
“Don’t tell Mom about this.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?” I couldn’t believe she thought I needed the warning.
“And I got some other good news today.” Julie’s voice was tinged with sarcasm.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Shannon wants to live with Glen for the summer.”
“Ah,” I said. Shannon had spoken with me about that possibility. She always ran things past me before she laid them on Julie. She told me things she wouldn’t breathe to another adult. I was the person who’d taken her to get birth control pills when she was fifteen; Julie would kill me if she knew. This year, with Shannon the age Isabel had been when she died, Julie seemed to snap, tightening her grip on her daughter just when she should have been loosening it. So, I’d told Shannon that while it would be hard on her mother to have her live with Glen for the summer, I thought it was a good idea. It might help Julie get used to letting her go.
My lack of surprise at Julie’s announcement made her suspicious.
“Did you know?” she asked.
“She’d told me she was considering it,” I admitted.
There was a brief silence on the line. “I wish you’d told me,” she said.
“It wasn’t a sure thing, and I thought it should come from her.” I felt guilty. “It might be good for both of you, Julie.”
Two men in their mid-thirties walked past me in the parking lot, not even glancing in my direction. I was approaching fifty, the age of invisibility for a woman, and I was more fascinated than distressed by the phenomenon. It seemed to have happened overnight. Four or five years ago, even though I’d worn my silver-streaked hair the same way I did now—in a long French braid down my back, with thick, straight bangs over my forehead—I’d still been able to turn heads. My skin was nearly as smooth and clear as it had been then, and I wore the same type of clothes, mainly long crinkly skirts and knit tank tops. Nevertheless, men my age and younger now looked right through me. Maybe I was giving off the scent of decay. I didn’t mind. I was taking a long, possibly permanent, break from dating.
“She seems…distant or something,” Julie was saying in my ear, and I turned my attention back to the phone call. “She’s changing. Have you noticed? I think she’s putting on weight and she doesn’t go out anymore. I’m worried about her.”
Julie was right. Shannon did seem more withdrawn lately, more reserved in our conversations, and she didn’t call as often. I hadn’t noticed the physical change in her until Saturday, when I saw her walk across the stage to get her diploma. There was a heaviness about her, more in her spirit than her body, but I made light of it to relieve Julie’s anxiety. “She’s just having a growth spurt,” I said. “And as for the social life, you used to worry when she did go out. You need to be more careful what you wish for.”
Julie sighed. “I know.”
We wrapped up the conversation and I slipped my phone into my shoulder bag as I walked across the parking lot and into the restaurant. It was full of kids, Garwood’s summer-school students, who were different from the kids I taught at Plainfield High School. Garwood’s students were from mostly white, middle-class families, while Plainfield’s public school population was ethnically diverse and economically challenged. I taught ESL—English as a Second Language—because I relished being surrounded by all those kids whose varied skin colors and languages were overshadowed by their universal yearning to belong.
I spotted my mother at the opposite end of the restaurant. She was standing next to a table in her red-and-white uniform, holding a couple of trays in her hands, talking with a young woman and her two little kids. So many of my friends my age had to visit their elderly parents in nursing homes. I got a kick out of the fact that I visited mine at McDonald’s. Mom was the greeter who always had a smile for everyone, who supervised kids in the play area and who straightened the place up with as much care as she did her own home. She looked smaller to me than she had just a month ago. I used to think she was so tall, but either her spine was contracting, shrinking her, or her height had been an illusion to me. Her hair was white and very pretty. She had it done every week, and it was always soft and natural looking. Her snowy hair was set off by her caramel-colored skin, inherited from her Italian mother. People always thought she’d just returned from a cruise to the Caribbean. Isabel had looked the most like her, but I got her perfect nose and full lips and Julie got her large dark eyes. We were both very lucky to get any part of our mother’s beauty at all.
I came up behind her.
“Hey, Mom,” I said.
She looked delighted to see me, as I knew she would. She wrapped one arm around my waist.
“This is the daughter I was telling you about,” she said to the young woman. “The bohemian one.”
I laughed, and the woman smiled blankly. I was certain the twenty-something-year-old woman had no idea what bohemian meant, but she smiled nevertheless.
“Your mother said you just got back from Nepal,” the woman said, holding a French fry in front of her little son’s mouth.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “It was a fantastic trip. Have you been?”
“Oh no.” The woman nodded at her children. “I haven’t been anywhere in three years, for obvious reasons.”
I hadn’t been to Nepal in three years, either, but it was the trip my mother loved to drag out to impress people. To her, it sounded exotic. I wished I could take her there, but although she was remarkably healthy for eighty-one, I was afraid the altitude and the walking would do her in.
“Do you have a minute to visit?” I asked her.
“Of course!” She excused herself from the young woman, but then noticed a mess left on one of the tables. “You take a seat and I’ll join you in a minute,” she said.
I bought an iced tea and sat down at a corner table. Mom was finding more things to do and chatting with one of her much, much younger co-workers, an Hispanic girl with a delicate tattoo on her wrist that made me want to get one myself. I did have a tattoo of a butterfly on my hip—a very foolish mistake made in my twenties when I didn’t realize exactly how gravity would affect that part of my body in middle age. For that reason, I’d tried to talk Shannon out of getting the tattoo of a cello on the small of her back, but she’d insisted and, I had to admit, it was kind of pretty when she wore her low-rise pants. The tattoo was so artfully done that even Julie only freaked out for about ten seconds when she saw it.
Waiting for Mom, I thought about Julie’s call. I couldn’t believe that she was going to have to deal with Isabel’s death again after all this time. I remembered so little of that summer that it never held the sort of pain for me that it did for my sister. I’d only been eight years old, and the images of our lives at Bay Head Shores came to me in tiny little clips, like those short videos you could make on digital cameras. The picture forming in my mind as I sipped my tea was of Julie catching a huge eel. It wasn’t uncommon to catch eels in the canal behind our bungalow, but that one had been particularly enormous.
“She reeled it in all by herself,” I remembered our grandfather boasting. Julie had been his fishing partner. The two of them would spend hours in our sandy backyard, sitting on the big blue wooden chairs, holding on to their poles and talking, although I had no idea what about. I was usually huddled somewhere in the safety of the house with a book.
Most people probably tossed eels back into the water, but my mother and grandmother thought they were a delicacy. Mom came out of the house and she and Julie killed