Robin could not argue with her, but still, all she could do was blame her father. Richard Middlestein had signed up for a life with Edie Herzen. And Edie was still alive.
And so the surgery had seemed irrelevant at the time. Robin hadn’t even bothered to ask her about her health. Her brother was taking care of all that most of the time anyway. Robin had gone to the first surgery, sat there for a few hours in the waiting room like everyone else—Boring; they all knew she was going to be fine, it was a simple procedure, and she’d be out of the hospital that night—and then had claimed she was too busy for the next one. Robin had thought she’d gotten off scot-free, even if it meant she was a horrible human being. Her reliable, solid, family-focused brother, Benny, who lived two towns away from her parents, would be there. Him, his wife with the nose job, her niece and nephew, Emily and Josh, all of them patiently waiting alongside her father for her mother to surface. How many worried children was it going to take to screw in that lightbulb anyway?
But this latest trauma was something new and unusual. This was heartbreak. And abandonment. And Benny was not even remotely prepared to deal with anything like that. Robin’s mind traveled to other people in her mother’s life who might be able to help her, like her longtime friends from the synagogue, the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens. Forty years they’d known each other. But they were all still married, and they knew nothing of this business. No, this was Robin’s territory. Always single, probably for a reason. At last she had been called up to bat.
“You are definitely not a terrible person,” said Daniel. He scratched his soft-looking blond beard. Robin had been imagining for months that it was soft. Everything about him looked soft and comforting, but also mildly weak, as well. His beard and mustache and the hair on his head and the hair on his chest and belly—she had seen him sunning himself on his back porch on a number of occasions that past summer, sprawled out on a faded hammock—were all golden and feathery. She had even tried to pat him on the head once, just to see what his hair felt like, but he had taken the flight of her hand as the beginning of a high five and had raised his own hand to meet hers, and she had no choice but to respond.
Whatever, it was just hair. She didn’t need to touch it. She had her own hair, which was plenty soft on its own, black, curly, long, springy, wiry, but still soft.
And anyway, then there was the rest of him, the belly bloated by the yellow-amber-brown stuff, slung low and wide over the belt of his pants, his own personal air bag; the droopy, faded flannel shirts, with the holes in the cuffs and the pockets; the white-blue jeans and corduroys with the frayed knees; the Converse high-tops with the tape around the bottoms to keep the soles on. The bloodshot eyes. The torn cuticles. The amount of time he spent online. (Sure, it was his job, but still it concerned her.) The only time he left the house was to go to this bar, or when Robin dragged him on walks in warmer weather.
“Your boyfriend Daniel,” is what her roommate, Felicia, called him.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she would say back.
“You sure act like it,” Felicia would say. “What do you talk about on those walks of yours?”
They talked about her mother. Just like they were doing now.
“I don’t know how to help her,” she said.
“I think you just have to be there for her,” he said.
She knew that was what she was supposed to do, but every time she took that train home, and the view slowly transformed from the high, gleaming architecture of downtown Chicago in the distance to the swirling mass of strip-and mini-and mall-malls that defined the burbs—there was more to the suburbs, she knew that, but that was all she could ever see anymore, her view obscured by a combination of prejudice and neurosis—?a deep depression began to constrict her.