Lily reached over and tugged a bit on the sleeve of Jordan’s suit coat, covering his wrist. She’d have to do something about that scar if she was going to show him off to her mother. “I need to find that last letter Mom wrote to us,” Lily said.
Mabel just looked at Lily over the top of the Manhattan she only barely sipped. “Why?” she finally said.
“I need the return address.” Lily was tempted to invite Mabel along on her journey, but she knew better. Mabel, her mother, everyone, needed to understand that Lily needed no mothering. They would all see that, in spite of everything, Lily had turned out a good, capable person.
“I was just reading in the paper,” Mabel said, “of a woman in Mexico bitten by a brown recluse spider. They had to cut off her arms and her legs and part of her nose.”
Lily straightened up in her chair, ready to tell Mabel of her plans. “Mabel . . .” she started, pushing her glasses down on her nose so that everything blurred. She nervously pulled at a loose string at the hem of her dress. “Mabel.”
“I already know that you’re going to see her,” Mabel said. “If that’s what you’re about to tell me. Jordan told me already. About the two of you going to find Mom.”
Lily pushed her glasses back up to see Mabel scowling and concentrating on picking her chokecherry from where it had sunk to the bottom of her Manhattan. Lily looked over at Jordan who couldn’t even meet her eyes; he fussed with the end of his necktie. The cool demeanor Lily had practiced all afternoon turned into a migraine headache and tiny bolts of colored light in the corners of her vision. Was everything intimate just gossip to him? He wanted Mabel’s attention too much of the time, and it was beginning to make Lily too sick of it all. “Fuck you,” Lily said, lifting her feet to kick Jordan’s knee. “I could fucking beat the crap out of you,” giving him a whack at the side of his head with her open palm.
“Could you not,” Jordan said, drowsy-sounding, cringing, “not, you know, slug me?”
“Jordan,” Mabel said. “Maybe you should leave us alone for a few minutes.”
“Fuck off, Mabel,” Lily said. “He’s my boyfriend, I’ll tell him when he stays and when he goes, all right?”
Jordan started, “I should just tell you . . .”
“Oh, just get the fuck out of here, Jordan,” Lily said. “I mean, I have so fucking had it with you right now.” She immediately regretted having said it, and she stumbled over the last few words of her outburst. Tranquility, Lily thought, hearing the useless recitation she had found in some self-help paperback someone had left behind in the bakery. Peacefulness. Serenity.
As Jordan stood, shaky as if on new legs, Lily wanted to grab the lapel of his pathetic suit and demand that he ignore her and her fits.
“If you’ll excuse me, Birthday Girl,” Jordan said, brushing his fingers against the cheek of the always-quiet, always-collected Mabel. The whole bus creaked as Jordan headed toward the door, the slow tap of the high heels of his fake-alligator cowboy boots echoing. Lily lowered her head, again disgusted by her own tears, which always welled up when she most wanted composure. She lifted her glasses from her cheeks to wipe at her eyes.
“Lily,” Mabel said softly, reaching across the table to touch at her elbow. Lily wished she didn’t always bring out the sugary sweet pushiness in her sister. Lily had planned for it to be the other way around that night, for Mabel to be angry over Lily’s decision to go find their ungrateful mother and for Lily to remain distant and consoling. Mabel, Lily would have said, gently taking her hand.
Lily thought of again reminding Mabel of that day their mother left them. Mabel had screamed and bawled, stumbling along the front walk of the antique shop, grasping at her mother’s quick scissor-stepping legs. “Don’t,” their mother said, pushing at Mabel’s head. Mabel grabbed the back strap of her mother’s sandal, and she slapped Mabel’s hand away. “Goddamn it, don’t. I’m going to trip.”
Lily had stayed on the front porch, not fully understanding. Her mother had not announced her departure, had only suddenly appeared in makeup and brushed hair, freshly ironed skirt and blouse, a small suitcase packed. As her mother rushed through the shop, her eyes to the ground, Lily sneezed from the breeze of heavy perfume. Mabel looked up from her comic book.
Mabel had known right away and had fallen suddenly into a fierce fit of crying. When their mother finally reached her car, she tossed her suitcase into the backseat, and Mabel reached in and tried to grab it back out. Their mother wrestled it from Mabel and tossed it back in. Mabel tried to get it back, but their mother held on to Mabel’s sleeve in order to close the door.
“Give me a break, Mabel,” her mother shouted at her. When the door slammed was when everything stopped. Mabel’s screaming stopped; their mother’s leaving stopped. They both stood still there next to the car, looking at each other with fear. Lily hadn’t realized it just then, but the tip of Mabel’s finger had caught in the door, and she’d pulled it out to hold her hand shaking before her. Her mouth was open wide, her jaw shivering, readying for the worst shriek of pain Lily would ever hear.
Though their mother lifted Mabel into her arms and seated the violently kicking girl in the front seat of the car, though she sped her to the emergency room for a few minutes of wrapping and splinting then brought her back to the shop to put her to bed and to lie beside her, nothing had changed her intentions. She slipped away for good after Mabel cried herself to sleep.
“You’ve been a mess yourself from time to time,” Lily said, leaning back from the table. She took the lacy handkerchief that Mabel offered. Lily dried her cheeks, then held the hanky in her lap, running her finger along the cursive of the name of its original owner, “Penelope,” embroidered at the edge.
“Lily,” Mabel said, “why do you even want to see her? She doesn’t care about us. She hasn’t even called us in years. Did she even send me a birthday card? Does she even remember that it’s my birthday?”
“So you mean to tell me,” Lily said, “that you don’t have the least bit of interest in seeing her again? Ever? There’s nothing you want to know about her? Nothing you want to ask her?”
Mabel picked off a little corner of the birthday cake and ate it. “You’re not going to learn anything. She’s not going to tell you anything useful.”
Lily tore off a bit of cake for herself. “You don’t have to hate her so much. Our lives aren’t ruined or anything. There’s nothing wrong with us.”
“There’s nothing wrong, I know,” Mabel repeated, almost beneath her breath.
“I think she meant to come back, don’t you?” Lily didn’t wait to let Mabel disagree. “I just think time may have passed differently for her. What seemed like forever to us, probably went very quickly for her. And, you know,” Lily said, tearing off another edge of the cake, excited to be at her mother’s defense, “it could be that she’s been waiting for us to come find her.”
“What the fuck were we supposed to do?” Mabel said, raising her voice. “Crawl across the desert with our little plastic suitcases? With our grade-school watercolors . . . or our, you know, our fucking macaroni pictures for her to put on her fucking refrigerator? We were babies.”
Lily was so relieved to hear Mabel’s voice shake, to hear her sigh and cuss and to see her twisting her hair. Lily cocked her head with Mabel’s gesture of concern and reached across the table to touch at her elbow.
“Shouldn’t I at least go with you?” Mabel said, but she didn’t wait for Lily to reject the offer. “Shouldn’t we at least call her first?”
“We don’t have her phone number.”
“We could find it,” Mabel said, “or we could send a telegram. But you don’t want to do that, do you? You don’t want to give her any warning.”
Lily