Navigating the ungainly Suburban up the ramp to the interstate, Molly fiddles with the radio, but it’s all talk so she switches it off. We’ve got our iPods if we’re desperate for music.
From the grim look on Molly’s face as she cranes her neck to check the rearview mirror, it’s clear that she knows I was right about the lamp taking up too much space. I can’t help thinking what I won’t allow myself to say: I told you so.
Agitated, I put on my discount-store reading glasses—the ones that perch on my nose and make me look like a schoolmarm. Another visible rite of passage. For me, the moment occurred a few years back, when I turned thirty-nine-and-a-half. I was in a gift shop, trying to read a sale tag, and suddenly my arm wasn’t quite long enough to make out the price.
A sales clerk offered me a pair of reading glasses, and the fine print came into focus. The fact that the glasses had cute faux-Burberry frames offered scant comfort. At first, I was a bit embarrassed to put them on around Dan and Molly, but when you love needlework and crossword puzzles as much as I do, you swallow your pride.
I open the canvas quilt bag and the project spills across my lap. The oval hoop frames a section made of a calico maternity blouse I wore while carrying Molly. I stab the needle in, telling myself it’ll be finished soon enough, one stitch after another. The needle flashes in and out like a little silver dart.
“Bad intersection up here,” I say, glancing up when we reach the crossroads leading to the interstate. “Be sure you signal.”
“Hello. I’ve only been through this intersection a zillion times. And did you know that at eighteen, a person’s vision is performing at its peak?”
I adjust my glasses. “So is her smart mouth.” My needle starts writing the words “be sweet,” adding a curlicue at the end.
“I’m just saying, don’t worry about my driving. I learned from the best.”
This is true. Dan’s an excellent driver, alert and confident, traits he passed along to our daughter. Most of her friends learned through Driver’s Ed, but money was tight that year due to a layoff, and Dan did the honors. I used to wonder what they talked about during all those hours of practice, but when I asked, they both offered blank looks. “We didn’t talk about anything.”
What she means is, Dan has a way of communicating without talk. He can speak volumes with a glance, a chuckle or a shrug. The two of them are comfortable in their silence in the way Molly and I are comfortable nattering away at each other.
Sure enough, there’s a small tangle of traffic at the intersection, but I bite my tongue. Literally, I press my teeth into my tongue. I will not speak up. The time is past for correcting my daughter, giving directives. These final days together should be special, sacred almost, the last slender thread of a bond that has endured for eighteen years and is about to be willfully severed.
Molly expertly accelerates up the on-ramp and merges smoothly with the flow of traffic. She keeps her eyes on the road, her profile delicate and clean-lined, startlingly adult.
It’s a bright September morning, and the lingering heat of late summer shimmers, turning the asphalt into a river of mercury. With a flick of her little finger, Molly signals and moves into the swift current of the middle lane. She is a competent driver, skilled, even. She’s competent and skilled at many things—water polo, trigonometry, getting rid of phone solicitors, being a good friend.
Her spirit, her self-assurance and independence, are the sort of wonderful qualities a mother wants in her daughter. My goal was always to raise a child capable of making judgments on her own. Teaching her has been a joyous process, while actually seeing her go off in her own direction is intensely bittersweet. Adulthood, I suppose, is the final exam to see which lessons she absorbed.
“What do you suppose your father’s doing?” I ask, picturing Dan alone in the house. For the next several days, his diet will consist only of things that can be made from tortilla chips, cheese and cold cuts.
Molly shrugs. Her shiny dark curls spring with the motion. “He’s probably breaking out the cigars.”
I think of him standing on the driveway this morning, giving his daughter an awkward hug before stepping back, stiff-faced, his eyes shining. I wonder if she looked in the rearview mirror as we pulled away, if she saw her father bow his head, then lean down to pet the dog.
“Oh, come on,” I chide her. “Is that what you really think?”
“I don’t know. I figure he’s been looking forward to this day for a long time. Dad’s good with change.”
Meaning I’m not. And although he might be good with this particular change, there’s a part of him that has come unmoored. Dan loves Molly with both a consuming flame and a heart-pounding fear. Their complicated relationship has always been full of contradictions. Dan was in the delivery room when Molly was born on a cold February morning eighteen years ago, and the moment the baby appeared in all her pulsing, slippery, newborn glory, he wept, the tears soaking into the paper surgical mask they’d made him wear. The first time Molly was placed in his arms, he held the tiny bundle with the shocked immobility of abject terror. He hadn’t smiled down into the red, wrinkled face, not the way I did, instantly a mother, with a mother’s serene confidence and a sense of accomplishment so intense I was floating. He hadn’t cooed and swayed to that universal internal lullaby all mothers begin to hear the moment the baby is laid in their arms. He had simply stood and looked as though someone had handed him a vial of nitroglycerin.
Yet last night, I awakened to find him crying. He was absolutely silent, but the bed quivered with his fight to keep from making a sound. I said nothing, but lay perfectly still, helplessly drifting. Have I lost the ability to comfort him? Maybe I just didn’t want to intrude. We are each dealing with the departure of our only child in our own way. When you’re married, you don’t get to be let in, not to everything.
“Trust me,” I assure Molly. “He’s going to miss you like crazy.”
“He never said so.”
“He wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean he won’t be missing you every single second.”
“I guess.”
Too often, there’s a disconnect between Dan and Molly, despite the undeniable fact that they love each other. I pause, frowning at a knot that has formed in my thread. “That’s just the way he is,” I tell Molly. This is my role—the go-between, translating for the two of them.
I tease the knot loose and go back to my stitching. The border abuts a trapezoid-shaped swatch of neutral-colored lawn, snipped from the dress she wore to the eighth-grade banquet, the first grown-up dance of her life. At age thirteen she was impossible, taking drama to new heights and sullenness to new depths. I used to try to turn our dirgelike family dinners into something a little more upbeat. “What’s the highlight of your day?” I used to ask my husband and daughter. “What’s the one thing that makes it worth getting up in the morning?”
Dan had been grinding pepper on his salad in that deliberate way of his. Barely looking up, he said, “When Molly smiles at me.”
He startled both Molly and me with that remark. And our sullen, teenage daughter had smiled at him.
Now Molly’s phone rings with a familiar tone—an Eddie Vedder song called “The Face of Love.” It’s Travis’s ringtone.
A heartbreaking softness suffuses her face as she picks up. “Hi,” she says, her voice as intimate as a lover’s. “I’m driving.” She listens for a moment, then ends with a “Yeah, me, too,” and closes the phone.
More silence. The needle darts. The day slides by the car windows.