Pages For Her. Sylvia Brownrigg

not broken-nosed and pugnacious like Tracy, certainly adores Arden the way Spencer did Kate. The intellectual sparks flew between the pair even as they served an outstanding meal of lemon sole and dauphinoise potatoes, to a group that included—

      That was enough. Flannery shut the laptop swiftly, before she could read the list of luminaries.

      Jasper Elliott, again. Flannery had first met him in New Mexico – an ignominious occasion for Flannery, when Jasper got Anne back. He and Anne had been together for years by now. The golden couple.

      The blog put an end to Flannery’s googling, at least on that subject. She kept future searches to facts she had forgotten (who starred in that cruise ship movie? What was the name of that Carson McCullers novel?), safety research on plastics or supermarket products, and reviews of schools to which she and Charles might, one liberating day, send Willa.

      25

      Willa grew. She moved more, spoke more, took up more space. It became clearer who she was: a person with a sense of humor, occasionally stubborn, impatient with kids who were fussy, as happy to play with girls as with boys. With each increment Flannery felt the joy of motherhood bite more sharply.

      She had been awash with love and astonishment from the beginning, of course, but now, as her head slowly cleared, like the drawn-out morning after a raucous party, Flannery began to see how part of the great plan was the companionship your offspring gave you down the line. Willa’s sheer puppyish cuteness transformed into something more satisfying. An acerbic elderly neighbour of theirs, Martha, who had run the pet store on Haight Street for decades and was the kind of deadpan, raspy-voiced dame Flannery might weave into a story one day, visited the house when Willa was a month old, coming in with her fancy, moist-eyed spaniel. She joked, even as she awkwardly held Willa in her arms, that dogs were better value than children, never ungrateful, more easily trained. Charles laughed at this remark – he and Martha often enjoyed a sardonic banter together; she’d known him through a wife or two, sold him chow for an earlier one’s Siamese – and Flannery smiled, understanding that offense was Martha’s conversational goal. Nonetheless, the comment haunted Flannery in the first months, when her bone-tiredness and the one-sidedness of their arrangement, made more acute by a husband who looked on rather than dove in, sometimes piled high enough to flatten her.

      From age three or so, Willa was simply very good company. She listened to her mother and responded to her, and the little girl came to read Flannery’s moods more accurately than Charles did. Mother and daughter were able to share jokes over someone they ran into or something they had read or watched together, that did not always need to be explained. They had shorthand, code.

      Once, when Charles was on a trip to Frankfurt to tinker with a mobile outdoor sculpture of his that had some technical difficulties, Flannery suddenly decided to take a road trip with Willa. She did not have to sulk indoors like some frustrated housewife. She packed up an overnight bag for them both and drove south an hour to a beach she had loved and played on as a girl. Willa dozed in her car seat on the ride.

      As Flannery parked by the rocky wall that bordered the sandy beach and turned off the engine, the scent and sound of surf came in through the open windows of the car, calming Flannery’s agitated spirit. She turned around to see her round-faced, sandy-haired girl blinking awake her hazel eyes, still half lost in dream. Flannery smiled, but didn’t speak. Willa, taking in the ocean view through the windshield, asked sleepily, ‘Are we in Hawaii?’

      Flannery laughed. ‘No, sweetie, it’s still just California. Half Moon Bay,’ and it was just like Willa not to be embarrassed, but to join her mom and start laughing, too. ‘We would have had to get on a plane, for a kind of a lot of hours, to get to Hawaii,’ Flannery explained, then added, ‘You’d know we were in Hawaii if there were palm trees everywhere, and people were doing the hula.’ She then did an extremely poor hula dance in the driver’s seat of the car, with mimed ukulele music, making her daughter’s laugh turn into deeply contagious giggles.

      After that, ‘Hawaii’ became a comic stand-in for any unexpected place they went to, whether it was the Sausalito house of a new preschool friend (‘I think this might be Hawaii,’ Flannery whispered as they went up the driveway of the luxurious coastal home) or Willa going with her parents to a grown-up event one night at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. (‘Mom,’ she whispered as they walked past Rodin’s Thinker on the way into the neoclassical building, ‘Is this Hawaii?’)

      They each had ways of dealing with Charles’s demonstrative bluster and his excesses, and Flannery sometimes picked up strategies from her daughter. (Don’t interrupt him, just let him go on with his rants and they will end sooner.) Willa detailed to Flannery what she was building with her Legos and other plastic pieces, taking imaginative turns Flannery had to be at her sharpest to follow. At such moments Flannery was vulnerable to feeling the parental vanity Charles wasn’t too shy to express – ‘Chip off the old block!’ – but, more than anything, she simply felt light-headed with good fortune that she had been permitted, frankly through carelessness and naivety, to usher this interesting person into their home. For as long as making macaroni and cheese and French toast would keep her, Flannery would enjoy this fascinating, open-faced, funny roommate, and do what she could to make her accommodations comfortable, a place of peace.