Yurts in the woods? Paul’s beloved boat? These are the things we’re thinking about after what just happened?
I’m seized by the urge to smoke. “Hey,” I ask Sean. “You got anything?” I put fingers to my lips and draw air.
“Weed?”
“Just a cigarette.”
“I don’t smoke, Ma. You know that.”
I consider it. “How about the other thing?”
“Just sit down. I’ll get you some wine.”
I let Sean lead me to the table and sit. He gets the white wine from the kitchen, pulls a fresh glass from the cabinet. He pours me a half glass. I shouldn’t, but I take a sip anyway. Then I manage to look at my son. How did this happen? He’s barely twenty-five and Joni is twenty-two. But while she still feels like a child to me, he seems mature. Sure, he can be hard to get a hold of, unpredictable, but he’s figuring things out.
He takes my hand. “It’s gonna be okay,” he says again.
“Yeah.”
“We’ve been here before, right?”
“What do you mean? With Joni?”
He shrugs: Yes.
“I don’t know. I think this is different. I think I really screwed up.”
I tell him about it as best as I can, keeping details private. Sean listens, his brow furrowing with empathy, nodding his understanding. But instead of feeling unburdened, a new spirit of frustration rises up in me. How can this be happening? How can someone who seems so much like my former patient . . . how can I be wrong about this person?
He has a credible alternate life from the one I expect him to have. Even if he admits to a hazy memory — surely something would spark in him at my prompting.
Or maybe it has, and he’s suppressing . . .
Or — wait — maybe he’s told Joni the real story, not knowing she was my daughter? Is that possible? But then why would she act so bewildered by my suggestion of his mother?
“There I go again,” I say.
Sean frowns. “What?”
“Nothing.” We change topics. I ask him about his life. He tells me about surfing in the Pacific Ocean.
“You were in California?”
“Just for a couple of weeks.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I posted a couple of pics. Nothing big.” He tells me he was out there looking for work — the fruit-picking kind. But when he got the sense that nearly every farm sought migrant labor, which was cheaper, he moved on. He’d met a girl, though, a young woman, in Venice Beach. She was the one who suggested Colorado. “You wouldn’t associate Colorado with organic produce, but it’s huge out there.”
“Tell me about the girl.” I’m happy to be distracted by Sean’s life. It’s so free and romping, it’s like a romance novel. Her name was Chloe, and she was a Colorado girl who made trips to the Pacific Coast in the winter to warm up and stay with friends. “Once we got back to Denver, though, she left my ass,” Sean says.
I give his hand a squeeze and stick out my lower lip. “She doesn’t deserve you.”
“It’s all good. We had some fun. I’m not ready to settle down right now anyway.”
The notion sends my thoughts back around to Joni. I was never one to pressure my kids to get hitched and give me grandbabies. Of course, grandkids would be great. Someday. For Paul and me, it’s important that our children have a chance to live life. To sow some oats. We’re believers that this promotes a healthy, lasting union once one is established. There’s no I wish I would have done . . . before putting down roots and growing a family. I had my time as a young single woman, experiencing the world. Paul had his gadabout days. Other than the one trouble spot many years ago, it’s been mostly smooth sailing for us.
Hasn’t it?
“I’m happy for you, Sean,” I tell my son. “Living life on your own terms. It’s important.”
I’m about to say something else when I hear a sound: a car. Getting up from the table, I glance at the clock on the kitchen stove — Sean and I have been talking for nearly an hour. There are voices outside, faint but getting louder. Footsteps on the gravel. I walk to the entrance and stand at the screen door. The night air is perfumed with pine and alders. With the sun gone a couple of hours, the breeze is cool on my skin.
Paul is definitely in the garage; the open bay throws out a bleaching white light. Emerging from the darkness into that brightness are my daughter and her fiancé.
I don’t know who else I expected, but seeing them suddenly makes me nervous, like a schoolgirl whose prom date arrived. It’s because I have some apologizing to do, some divisions to mend.
I watch a moment as Paul comes out and talks to them. He draws Michael into the garage to look at the boat. Joni stays in the driveway. She turns to look at me and I freeze.
Then she raises her hand in a wave.
I wave back. Right after, I hug myself, suddenly chilled by a cool breeze. My emotions are jumbling together — gratitude, suspicion, anticipation. It’s all I can do to stay there, not go barging into the garage and demand to know why they’re back so soon.
“Hey, look who it is,” Sean says. He’s moved beside me, sipping his wine.
Paul can be heard boasting about his boat. Michael mumbles his admiration. Then Michael retreats, and Joni takes his arm, and Paul says, “See you inside,” from somewhere within the garage.
I move back from the door and enter the kitchen, unsure what to do with myself. Sean returns to the table and sits down.
The dishes are done but for my wine glass, so I scoop it off the table and wash it. By the time I’m placing it in the drying rack, Joni and Michael have come in.
It’s a little hard for me to make eye contact. It was such a difficult scene in the driveway. I’m still processing it. Yet the two of them seemed to have come to some sort of consensus about things. It’s in their movements, the deliberateness of their demeanor. They both say “Hi” to me, and their voices are whispery, light. Michael pulls out Joni’s chair and she sits. Then he takes his seat — where he was at dinner, facing the kitchen, his back to the windows and the dark lake beyond them.
I finally manage to find my voice. “Back so soon? Everything okay?”
Joni answers. “We didn’t feel like going out. We were supposed to have drinks with them later. When things . . . when you and Michael were outside, I called them, asked them if they could come a little sooner. That’s when they picked up Michael.”
“Okay,” I say. I lean on the sink, feeling somewhat back in familiar territory: listening to my daughter explain her actions, justify things.
But there’s more. And it’s written all over Michael’s face.
“Dr. Lindman,” he begins.
“Emily.”
He clears his throat. His eyes dart between me, Joni, and Sean. Finally, they stay on me, beaming sincerity. “I’m sorry about what happened earlier.”
“It’s okay. Listen, guys—”
Joni holds up her hand. “Mom. Just hear him out. Okay?”