‘Well, that’s right,’ my mother said, ‘I’m not. It’d be nice if somebody was in the wrong for a change. It’d make everybody feel better.’
‘I wouldn’t feel better,’ I said.
‘Okay. Then not you,’ my mother said, and nodded. ‘Joe chooses for his only choice in the world to do the absolutely correct best thing. Good luck to him.’ She looked around at me and the expression on her face was an expression of dislike, one I hadn’t seen before but knew right away. Later I would see it turned toward other people. But the first time was looking at me and was because she believed she’d done all she could that was correct and the best thing, and it had only gotten her left with me. And I couldn’t do anything that mattered. Though if I could I would’ve had my father be there, or Warren Miller, or somebody who had the right words that would take the place of hers, anybody she could speak to without just hearing her own voice in a room and having to go to the trouble of pretending she did not feel absolutely alone.
At seven o’clock that night my mother and I drove across the river to Warren Miller’s house to eat dinner with him. My mother wore a bright green dress and high heels that were the same color, and she had taken her hair down out of the French bun and put on perfume.
‘This is my desperation dress,’ she said to me when I was waiting for her in the living room, and where I could see her through the bathroom door in front of the mirror. ‘Your father should see me wearing this,’ she said, brushing her hair back with her fingers. ‘He’d approve of it. Inasmuch as he paid for it.’
‘He’d like it,’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’m sure he would too.’ She drank the last of her cup of whiskey and left it in the sink as we went out the back door.
In the car she was in a good humor, and I was, too, because of it. We drove through the middle of Great Falls, past the Masonic Temple where no lights were on, and past the Pheasant Lounge across Central, where the neon sign hung out dimly in the night. It was cold now, and my mother had not worn a coat and was cold herself, though she said she wanted to feel the air to get her bearings.
She drove us down to Gibson Park and along the river so that we passed the Helen Apartments, which was a long four-story redbrick building I had never seen before but where several windows were lighted and in one or two I could see someone sitting by a lamp reading a newspaper.
‘How do you feel,’ my mother asked, looking over at me. ‘Out of reach? I wouldn’t be surprised.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I feel fine.’ I was looking out at the Helen Apartments as we drove past them. They did not seem like bad places to me. Maybe our life would be better there.
‘Sometimes’—my mother straightened her bare arms toward the steering wheel and looked ahead toward Black Eagle, across the river—‘if you can just get a little distance on your fate, things seem okay. I like that. It’s a relief to me.’
‘I know it,’ I said, because I felt relieved just at that moment.
‘Keep your distance,’ she said. ‘Then everybody — girls included — will think you’re smart. And maybe you will be.’ She reached down to turn on the radio. ‘Let’s have some mood music,’ she said. I remember very distinctly there was a man’s voice speaking in a foreign language, which I guessed was French. He was speaking very fast, and seemed very far away. ‘Canada,’ my mother said. ‘We live near Canada now. My God.’ She clicked the radio off. ‘I can’t stand Canada tonight,’ she said. ‘Sorry. We’ll have Canada later.’ And we turned and drove on across the Fifteenth Street Bridge and up into Black Eagle.
Warren Miller’s house was the only one on his street with a porch light shining. And once we had stopped across the street from it, I could see that all the lights inside were burning, and the house — set up above the street — looked warm inside like a place where a party was going on or was ready to begin. Warren Miller’s pink Oldsmobile was parked halfway up the driveway, and farther down the street I could see the blue light of the Italian steakhouse. In front of Warren’s car, in the shadows beside the house, I saw there was a motorboat on a trailer, the smooth white hull pointed up.
‘It’s all lit up in there, isn’t it?’ my mother said. She seemed pleased by the lights. She turned the rearview mirror toward her and opened her eyes very wide, closed them and opened them again as if she’d been asleep. I wondered what she would say if I told her I didn’t want to go in Warren Miller’s house, and that I wanted to walk back home over the bridge. I thought she would make me go anyway, and this was something I had no choice in. ‘Well,’ she said, turning the mirror back in the dark. ‘Handsome is as handsome looks, too. Are you going inside with me? You don’t have to. You can go home.’
‘No.’ And I was surprised by that. ‘I’m hungry,’ I said.
‘Great,’ my mother said. She opened the car door onto the cold night’s air, and together we got out to go inside the house.
Warren Miller opened the front door before we were all the way up the front steps. He had a white dish towel tucked inside his belt front like an apron. He was wearing a white shirt, suit pants and cowboy boots, and he was smiling, not so much in a happy way as in a serious one. He seemed older to me and bigger than he had the day before, and his limp seemed worse. His eyeglasses were shining and his thin black hair was slicked back and gleaming. He was not handsome at all, and did not look like a man who read poetry or played golf or who had a lot of money or holdings. But I knew those things were all true.
‘You look like a beauty pageant queen, Jeanette,’ he said to my mother on the steps. He talked loudly, much louder than he had the day before. He was framed in the lighted doorway, and inside the house on a table by the door, I could see a glass he had been drinking out of.
‘I was — on one occasion,’ my mother answered. And she walked right by him through the door. ‘Where’s the heater in here? I’m frozen,’ I heard her say, then she disappeared inside.
‘You have to say the nice things to women,’ Warren Miller said to me, and he put his large hand on my shoulder again. We were in the doorway, and I could smell whatever he was drinking on his breath. ‘Do you always say them to your mother?’
‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘I try to.’
‘Are you looking after her welfare?’ I could hear him breathe down in his chest. His eyes were watery blue behind his glasses.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do that.’
‘You can’t trust anybody.’ He gripped my shoulder hard. ‘You can’t even trust yourself. You’re no damn good, are you? I can tell. I’m part Indian.’ He laughed when he said that.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I guess I’m not.’ And I laughed, too. Then, holding my shoulder, he pushed me through the door and into the house.
Inside, the air was very warm and thick with cooking smells. Every light I could see was turned on, and the doors to all the rooms were open so that from the middle of the living room you could see into two bedrooms where there were double beds and, farther on, into a bathroom that had white tiles. Everything in the house was neat and clean, and everything seemed old-fashioned to me. The wallpaper had pale orange flowers in it. All the tables had white lace doilies under the lamps, and the pictures were all framed in heavy, dark-looking wood. It was nice furniture — I knew that — but it was old and curved, with fat legs. It seemed unusual for a man to live here. It was nothing like we had. Our furniture was not all the same. And the walls in our house were painted and did not have wallpaper.
Warren Miller limped through the living room back into the kitchen where he was cooking, but right away brought my mother a big drink of what he was drinking, which must’ve been gin. My mother stood over the floor furnace for a minute or two, holding her drink, then she smiled at me and began to walk around the house looking at pictures on top of the piano, and picking up and examining whatever was on the tables, while I sat on the stiff, wool-covered couch and did nothing but wait. Warren Miller had told us he was cooking Italian chicken, and I was ready to eat it.