In the parking lot, cars milled around the bottlenecked exits. Santa, wearing limp brown cowboy boots and chewing a plastic straw, rattled a tinny bell in front of JCPenney. He aggravated my headache. Not only was I jet-lagged and jangled by the crowds, I was no longer used to West Texas sunlight. Even in late afternoon it turned the sky into white-hot flame. I had lived in the Pacific Northwest for eighteen years now. The mild days there had made me soft. My temples pounded, and I squinted against the three o’clock dazzle. As Bren maneuvered around shoppers, I lowered my gaze to focus on the snapshot of Tommy she had taped to the dash. It had curled in the heat, next to the chipped Chevy logo. Tommy wore a Shell Oil cap and appeared to be asking a question.
Bren braked hard, narrowly missing the pickup in front of us.
“You okay?” I asked.
“A bit shaken.”
To my right, a blue pantsuit pushed a shopping cart full of cat food. Bren noticed the woman, too. It wasn’t the lady who’d stopped us before, but Bren had gone pale. “Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t we wait till this rush clears? You want to step into TGI Fridays?” I pointed to the mall’s north end. “Have a drink, relax a little. We’ve still got a couple of hours until dinner.” Mom was baking a turkey at home while looking after Tommy.
Bren wheeled us, groaning with the effort, into a parking slot. We locked the bath stuff in the trunk. At Fridays, she ordered a margarita with plenty of salt and a big basket of fries. She caught me looking at her. “My blood sugar’s fine,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
I ordered a salad and a glass of red wine.
When the food came she ran a fry through a catsup pond on her plate. “It’s funny, this place. The night I decided to answer that personals ad — Chip’s, you know? — I was sitting right here.”
“I never figured you as a ‘personals’ gal. I’m still amazed by that.”
“Hey, it’s worked out.”
“Yes yes, I’m happy for you both.” We toasted. She licked the salt from her glass.
“So …” I let a few seconds pass. “How are things?”
“What did Mom tell you?”
“Nothing.”
“She told you I wasn’t carrying my weight, didn’t she? I sleep all day. Right?”
“Bren, I was only asking — ”
“It’s just that, ever since Tommy was born, I’ve had these awful back pains, and I’m so damn tired. No one takes me seriously, not even my doctor, because the oh-so-lovely thrill of motherhood is supposed to blow away my ‘minor’ complaints. Tell you the truth.” She gulped half her drink. “I’m not thrilled to be a mother. Tommy wasn’t exactly planned. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“I’ve always wondered, given your age … and your health.” I watched her face. Could we go down this road? We ought to be able to speak frankly with each other, I thought. We’re adults. But for years my every shot at candor with Bren had veered into acrimony. In the past, I’d resented her for putting me in the position of chastising her, advising more caution, lecturing her to straighten out her life. My criticism had become habitual, and now she’d stopped confiding in me. Of her last five years I knew only the broad outlines: lost jobs, diabetes, the personals. I was buried, working fourteenhour days in a film lab in Portland, and surprisingly, she seemed to have found equilibrium with Chip, though he was not the type of guy I would have picked for her.
She played with her fries. “I’m too old to be chasing a kid around the house, I’ll tell you that.”
“He’s wonderful.”
“Yes. He deserves a better mom.”
“You’re fine with him, Bren.”
“I swear, though, it takes everything — ”
“I think that’s the job. So what are you telling me, you’re not happy?” I tried a charmer’s smile.
“Do I seem happy?”
“You look run-down, to be honest.”
“Yeah, well …”
“That woman. In the store,” I said. “Who was she? Who’s Bobby?”
She ordered a second margarita. “With more salt this time — shower that sucker.” She tapped her fingers on the table. Beatle-y muzak dribbled from a speaker above a potted fern. Someone had stuffed a chili-soaked napkin into the fern’s fat leaves.
“Come on, Bren. Do you have a secret life, or what?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“I did.” She flattened her palms on the table. “Though it wasn’t secret for long. Mom and Dad didn’t tell you this?”
“What? The drugs and stuff?”
“Oh, that was eons ago.” In the early eighties, she’d spent half a semester in Austin, then come home to Midland after dropping too much acid. Since then, the jobs: waitressing, temping, clerking for oil companies. What else? She seemed to have quit the hard stuff, though I guessed she still smoked now and then. She clung to Mom and Dad, dumping her laundry there, dropping in for meals.
Me, I’d been saved by foreign films, or that’s what I told myself. College in the big city — Fort Worth, home of some of the country’s biggest stockyards (I never knew there were so many animals on the planet), skyscrapers, freeways. I got a glimpse of the world beyond Midland and never looked back.
I lived off campus near a second-run theater that sponsored Kurosawa Weekends, Fellini Fests, Bergman Marathons. I got hooked — an even bigger world, beyond the Lone Star State — and sophomore year declared myself a cinema studies major. A classmate told me the Northwest was one the country’s most “progressive film regions.” As soon as I graduated, I headed for the Cascade Mountains and drifted into lab work, a boring but well-paid routine. I developed safety films for state highway commissions, medical documentaries, trailers for zoos (it turns out, animal life is pretty damn narrow, after all).
Over the years, whenever I phoned home, Bren was usually at my parents’ house, even after she’d married.
“Didn’t you ever wonder how Chip and I got together so quickly?” she asked me now. “Why I’d even look in the personals — you’re right, I’m not the type.”
“I assumed, when your health crashed, you wanted — ”
“That was part of it, sure. But believe me, I was running from a whole lot of crap.”
“I’m listening, Bren.”
“Okay,” she said. “All right.”
I ordered another glass of merlot and polished off her fries. As she talked, I watched the restaurant crowd — families, mostly. Everyone seemed at ease. Straightforward. Simple.
I wasn’t prepared for what she had to tell me. When she finished, I asked, hushed, “So. Are you saying you don’t love Chip? It was a rebound thing?”
“I was on the rebound. But no. I do love him. I really do. I’m lucky he’s so patient with me.” I was relieved, but disappointed too. Chip was a far-right Republican, a gun nut, an abortion foe, a Bush family supporter — not the sort of guy Bren would have put up with a few years ago and not the type I could tolerate now, though he was sweet to her and appeared to be a good father. “And I love Tommy, too,” she said. “I’m just wiped out all the time. My back and the migraines really do knock me on my ass. I couldn’t manage without Mom, though I know what’s on her mind whenever I drop him off …”