The guy next to me is good-looking in a way that seems to project the adjective good-looking. After stowing his overhead luggage he sat down and smiled politely, to indicate that he wouldn’t try to talk to me, then turned his attention to the Sharper Image catalogue. Now, during the lull before the final beverage service, he starts chatting to the younger stewardess, complaining humorously about the ratio of cheese to crackers on the snack trays. The blonde, on her way back from the cockpit, stops to see what the hilarity is about, and soon he’s entertaining both women with elaborations on this unpromising theme. He starts doing emphatic little gestures with the cheese; he goes to slam it down on his tray table in mock frustration, but he can’t really slam it or the table would whack him in the knees, so he does this restrained little fake slam. The flight attendants laugh anyway, leaning against nearby seat backs in on-a-break postures. I pretend to read the in-flight magazine. He’s ridiculous, this guy — everyone looks ridiculous when you watch them flirting. But there’s a chance that he’s about to sleep with two stewardesses, so who’s ridiculous now? Plus you have to admire the way he’s making use of the materials at hand — he’s done a good six or seven minutes on the cheese and crackers. (It helps that the thrust of his argument is sound: you really do need another cracker.) Now the blonde asks him what he’s doing in Denver, and I can’t tell if she’s making conversation or opening the logistical negotiations that will culminate with these three in a hotel room together. If it’s the latter, would that be the zenith of his traveling career, or is this what the world is like for men with quarterback arms and geometric chins? The lives of others are a perpetual mystery.
I wanted to rent a car at the airport, in case I need to get out of the house at some point, but my mom insisted on picking me up. The last time I came she met me at the gate, but now you can’t get through security without a boarding pass. Irrationally I look for my name on the hand-lettered signs held by the limo drivers, but no, there’s my mother, standing off to the side and waving shyly. She looks older than she did when I was twelve, a development that still surprises me. I bend down to hug her and she throws her arms around my neck.
“Well!” she says. “How was your flight? Are you thirsty? Did you drink water on the plane?” (The dehydration that results from air travel is one of my mom’s preoccupations.) She is impressed that all my stuff fits into a carry-on, although I’m only here for two nights.
She leads me through the parking lot to her SUV. I offered to buy her a car, but she refused; the house was enough, and not having to make mortgage payments enabled her to trade her hatchback for this hideous Nissan. “I’m so glad you could come!” she says once we’ve pulled onto the freeway. “You must be so busy these days!” The fact that I have millions of dollars and no job makes my mom uncomfortable: she doesn’t know what I do all day. Nor do I, really.
“I’m just sorry I missed your real birthday,” I say. (It happened three days ago; tomorrow’s the party.) The dull clouds emit biblical shafts of light, reminding me how much I hate Denver’s melodramatic weather.
“How are things with Maya?” she says. I’ve only told her a little, but apparently she can tell it’s serious.
“Everything’s great,” I tell her. It’s true, if you filter out all the stuff I don’t want to think about right now and couldn’t tell my mom even if I did. But I have the urge to say something more, to tell everyone how important Maya is. The newspapers are printing the wrong headlines, focusing on the inconclusive reports of weapons inspectors and intelligence agencies when they should be describing her sense of humor and beautiful little breasts. “I’m kind of totally in love with her,” I say, because it’s also true.
Mom glances at me nervously before her eyes flicker back to the highway. “You will make sure she signs something, right?” she says.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, although I can feel understanding blooming like a rain cloud.
“Oh, I shouldn’t say anything,” she says. “And I’m sure if you’ve picked her she must be a wonderful girl. It’s really wonderful, Eric — I’m so happy for you! I just mean, well, you’ve worked so hard, and it would be terrible to lose all that. I know something about how women can be.”
To the west the mountains look tapped out, as though the last minerals have been extracted and there’s nothing left but piles of dust. I calculate the number of hours until I get back to San Francisco and see Maya again, away from my mother and her anxiety: forty-three. No, it’s an hour later here: forty-four.
“Mom, I’ve been seeing her for six weeks,” I say. “We’re not getting married for a while.”
Mom turns off the highway and heads toward the subdivision in which she chose her new home, a freestanding manse surrounded by identical siblings, all painted the same lilac with purple trim, out in the windy grassless plains to the south of the city. I haven’t been here since the closing, when my mom wept and one thin strand of my life’s accumulated fear and guilt was severed. I asked her if she wouldn’t prefer something closer to town, something cozier, something that’s not identical to every other visible structure. She talked about the absence of noise and crime and dirt, but I suspect the property’s true appeal was less tangible. My mother fears hotel beds and used clothes and public swimming pools, objects with a history of occupancy by strangers. Moving into a new-construction home, as the developer’s literature put it, was like an exorcism.
I follow her inside and swing the surprisingly light front door shut behind me. The hall, with its elevated ceiling and pretentiously sweeping staircase, looks almost exactly as it did when we came here with the talkative woman from the sales office. My mother spent her life in houses that were too small, and the idea that she might finally have enough room made her giddy and scattered.
She heads straight into the kitchen without offering me a tour, and, unprompted, begins to make grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, a meal I have always loved. I want to sit at the kitchen table, from which I have watched her cook thousands of meals, but there isn’t one: the table is in the dining room now. Does she usually eat there, or does she take her food into the living room and watch TV? The stainless steel refrigerator is decorated with magnets in the shape of pumpkins, but there’s nothing for the magnets to pin up. As she greases and flips the sandwiches, we talk about her work, about that jerk Wade, about the party tomorrow. Neither of us wants to talk about Maya anymore, which means there’s not much to say about my life.
When she’s made two grilled cheeses for me and a half sandwich for herself, we carry the plates and soup bowls into the dining room. I return for paper towels and silverware and we sit down on opposite sides of the table, smiling at the familiar situation and the unfamiliar setting. She blows on a spoonful of soup and says, “Well, your dad called.”
“You talked to him?” As far as I know, my parents hadn’t spoken in seven years. “How was that?”
“Honestly, it was hard,” she says. She sets the spoon back in her bowl without tasting the soup. “He had his friendly manner, and he asked how I was doing, and I didn’t know what to tell him. And then he asked if I’d been in touch with you! As though you were a friend from school or something like that.”
“Did he say anything about having dinner with me?”
“He said that he had offered you this job—pitched you, was the way he said it — and that you had turned it down, and that you were making a big mistake and I should talk to you about it. He said here was your big opportunity for lightning to strike twice, and you were about to miss it.”