“Please call me Sally. Haven’t I been telling you that since you were a boy?”
This was true—even if her version of parenting meant turning on the TV and maybe tossing us a snack before heading off to do whatever she was going to do, I’d never seen her be anything but kind to him. That, maybe more than anything else, was why his accusation stung so badly. “You sure have, Sally,” he said.
She beamed again. “That’s better. It’s been far too long since I’ve seen you, you know.”
“I do,” he said, still smiling at her benevolently as we headed into the foyer. Was he faking it, or had he softened to her?
Ben’s apartment was on the first floor. He opened the door for my mother, who sauntered in like she owned the place. He paused and looked at me. “You are aware that your mother’s dressed like a Victoria’s Secret model?” he whispered.
“Yes,” I whispered back. “I didn’t want to get into this earlier, but we think she might have dementia.”
“Damn. I’m sorry, Lainey.”
“It’s fine,” I said softly. Maybe it was the whispering, or the sincerity in his voice, but I suddenly felt woozy with déjà vu; it almost felt like we’d turned the clock back two decades and were back to being Ben and Laine again. If only that were possible, I thought.
“It’s not,” he said, then gestured for me to follow him. “But come on in.”
My mother’s apartment had barely changed in several decades, so I guess I was expecting Ben’s place to look like it had when we were kids. But the walls, which had once been blue, were now a bright white. This made the weathered marble fireplace, which I’d barely noticed as a child, the focal point of the living room. Gone were the overstuffed velour couches; instead, a pair of pale gray Scandinavian-inspired sofas flanked a glass coffee table, where a selection of books had been artfully stacked. The built-in bookshelves were still full, but now everything was just so—paperbacks with paperbacks, fiction separated from photo collections, the occasional matte white vase or paperweight between different groupings.
Should I acknowledge that it had changed? Say nothing? I didn’t want to start up a whole big conversation, but I didn’t want to be rude, either. “You’ve done a lot,” I finally said as I stood awkwardly in the middle of the living room.
“Yeah,” said Ben, glancing around. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to buy this place from my dad, but it was too . . .”
Sad. It was too sad to keep it the way it had been when his mom was there . . . and after she wasn’t.
“I get it,” I said. “It looks great.”
“Thanks.” He nodded, then looked at my mother, who was standing in the hallway. “Um, Sally, where did you say that key was?”
“The key?” She wasn’t wearing that glassy expression that she’d had when I found her upstairs, but she’d clearly forgotten why we were at Ben’s.
Buckle up, buttercup, I thought to myself. My father had always said that when we complained, meaning, You think this is bad? It’s about to get so much worse.
“The key to your apartment?” Ben said gently to my mother. “You said my dad had one here?”
“The key, yes,” she said, nodding. “In the kitchen cupboard. The one closest to the fridge.”
“Thanks,” he said.
I was dying to know how he’d updated the kitchen, but he hadn’t gestured for us to join him, so I watched him disappear behind the old oak door separating the room from the rest of the house. Then I turned back to my mother, who was sitting on a wooden accent chair with her legs twisted around each other, one foot tucked behind her ankle. On the one hand, I was more than three decades her junior and could barely cross one leg over the other. On the other, couldn’t she have thought to wear some sort of support garment?
Mostly, though, I was thinking about how I was possibly going to handle this on a regular basis. Both Hadley and Piper had been exhausted during most of their pregnancies. Was I going to have the physical energy to bound around after my mother, to say nothing of the mental fortitude that it would require?
“And there we have it,” said Ben as he walked back into the living room, dangling the key from his fingers. His eyes met mine, and I saw that despite his cool demeanor, he was as surprised as I felt.
“Thank you,” I said as he handed the key to me. “I had no idea your father gave my mother a key to our place, but Sally always has a few tricks up her sleeve. Don’t you, Sally?” I said, but when I looked at the chair where she’d been, she was gone. “Mom?” I waited, but she didn’t respond, so I called again, “Mom, where are you?”
“She just wandered into the hallway,” said Ben. He smiled at me, and for a split second, I felt myself warm.
Then I remembered why this was weird.
“Don’t do that,” I said in a low voice.
“Do what?” he asked calmly.
It was one thing for him to pretend everything was fine with my mother. But with me? That was insulting. “Act like nothing happened,” I said, staring at him. “I appreciate that you’re being nice to my mom, especially since—well, you know what we talked about. But you don’t have to be nice to me.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, but he didn’t look away, either. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry, Laine. I thought about reaching out to you a million times.”
I had, too, and had never once acted on that impulse. And still, I asked him, “Then why didn’t you?”
He shrugged. “I guess I figured you didn’t want to hear from me.”
I did, I thought. More than almost anything. I’d made friends in Ann Arbor, of course. But—and I knew this was stupid, but all the same—often I’d be having coffee with one of them, and we’d be in the middle of the conversation, and I’d think about Ben.
And how I wished whomever I was with were him.
My mother’s voice pierced the silence. “Laine! Are you coming? I’m in the foyer!”
I looked at Ben. “Well, that’s me. Thanks for the key.”
He ran a hand over his head. “Laine, I’d really like to catch up. Can we please find a time to meet while you’re in town? Even just for, like, fifteen minutes for coffee or something?”
He was a big part of the reason I’d steered clear of New York the past sixteen years and, in doing so, missed an opportunity to spend time with my mother. Seeing him would probably make me start looking for signs that she had ulterior motives, even though I was supposed to be supporting her. For that reason alone, getting together was a terrible idea.
And yet I heard myself say, “I’d like that. When?”
FIFTEEN
LAINE
After returning from Ben’s, I’d called Hadley and Piper in a mild panic—though what I didn’t tell them was that a good deal of that turmoil was owing to my conversation with Ben, and the fact that we’d agreed to meet for coffee in two days, which was the earliest his work schedule and my plans with my family weren’t in conflict. Hadley had immediately calmed me down by putting things into perspective; as far as incidents went, she said, that one wasn’t nearly as bad as when my mother did a peep show at Bashir’s.
Even so, she’d proposed having our mother over to her place for brunch the next day so we could start warming her to the idea of getting help, and Piper and I had readily agreed. Something had to change, and soon.
The rest of the day had been blessedly uneventful, and my mother had even tucked in early. She was in good spirits the following morning, too, and spent the subway ride to the Upper East Side telling me all about the grandchildren her friend Mary never got to see. How lucky she was, she said, that her own grandchildren were all in the same city as her.