He smells it. Her smell. He’s afraid he’s actually drooling. Does he even mumble, “Thanks,” as he lurches out of the car? She sits there, stalled, trying to turn it over for as long as it takes him to check his bag and get a boarding pass. On his way to the coffee shop, Elliot walks past the big plate-glass window, conspicuous. He wonders if he should do something to help, but he can’t for the life of him think what that might be.
IN THE THREE months since Elliot was last home, his mother has married their next-door neighbor, Mr. Rickey, and gotten knocked up. Elliot doesn’t know what to expect when the Westchester Airport Service drops him off at the house. It looks the same, at least, large and white and neatly trimmed. He glances next door. The Rickeys’ house has a FOR SALE sign perched on the lawn, and all the lights are off. They had daughters that he went to school with, Mindy and Randi Rickey. He thinks of them and their slightly bucktoothed grins, pug noses, skinny legs. They are off at schools in New England too. He wonders, horrified, if he is suddenly related to them. At least he never dated either of them. Would that be retroactive incest? Maybe he did kiss Mindy once, at a party in someone’s dark basement rec room. He did. It hits him with great clarity. She tasted like grape bubble gum and smelled like coconut hair spray. The combination nauseated him, but they definitely used their tongues.
His mother’s voice sails across the front lawn. “Elliot? Is that you lurking out there?”
“I’m not lurking,” Elliot mutters.
“Yes. You are,” she calls. “You’re lurking.”
He doesn’t know what to expect when he walks inside. After all, someone new has moved in—and not just anyone, but Mr. Rickey, whom Elliot has seen shirtless mowing his old lawn, his back covered with patches of reddish blond hair and freckles; whose daughter Elliot has French-kissed; whose wife used to overtip when Elliot was the neighborhood paperboy. And his mother is pregnant, almost out of her first trimester is how she put it, and he expects her to be glowing and round, Buddha-like.
But, to his surprise, everything is the same. The slate blue kitchen, the smell of Pine-Sol, the one chipped tile on the floor with its corner cut like someone stole a taste of pie. His mother has on faded jeans, an old pink button-down of his father’s, bare feet. She is an L. L. Bean mother, just like the ones who fill that catalogue—long and straight hipped, blunt-cut hair that’s close to blond, practical clothes, sensible face. Once, before his parents got divorced, Elliot heard his father accuse her of not being pretty enough. He was right; she was what you would call handsome, but never pretty. Still, it wasn’t something men told the women they loved. Even at ten Elliot had known that.
“Well, hello,” she says. She is planting bulbs—forcing them is what she calls it—and doesn’t stop to welcome him.
Elliot kisses her cheek and notices she has acne, that she’s covered it with a too-pink makeup.
“Good,” she says. “I worried about Georgia getting you there on time.”
He picks up an apple from the Bennington Potters bowl that sits on the counter, and takes a noisy bite. “She was early,” he lies.
“Bravo,” his mother says. “And here you are.”
From somewhere in the cavernous house he hears Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.
“As soon as I finish forcing these bulbs,” she tells him, “we’ll get on with things.”
“Things?” Elliot asks.
“You have to call your father, of course. Make plans to see him at some point. And I thought we’d all go for dinner at Duck’s tonight.”
Since their divorce, his parents haven’t spoken except to discuss when Elliot would get dropped off and picked up and where. He can’t imagine why they would all go to dinner. His father has lived on the Upper West Side with a woman, Veronica, since he left. Veronica looks exactly like the old movie star Louise Brooks. She does that on purpose, then acts surprised when people go up to her and say, “You look exactly like Louise Brooks!”
“We who?” Elliot manages to ask.
“Franklin and you and me,” his mother says.
Franklin is Mr. Rickey. Elliot knows that from delivering his newspapers. H. Franklin Rickey. He realizes that he doesn’t even know if his mother is Mrs. H. Franklin Rickey now, or if she kept her old name, Pamela Stern. He realizes that although everything looks the same and smells the same, it’s all different. When Mr. Rickey appears in the kitchen, smiling dopily, his thin hair combed over his bald spot, his glasses smudged, his feet bare too, Elliot wants to run out of there.
“Elliot,” he says. “Good to see you.”
“Done!” his mother announces. She steps back to study her planting. “In six weeks this entire pot will be filled with paper whites. Lovely little things. Just in time for Christmas.”