I started at the knock on the car window. Someone was speaking my name. “Ruth, right? Ruth?”
There was fog on the glass, and I wiped it away to see Tina, waving and smiling and talking, though I couldn’t hear most of what she was saying through the pane. I rolled down the window.
“I ran out of windshield wiper fluid!” She smacked her forehead with the heel of her hand. “I’m always running out of windshield wiper fluid here! I’m from Texas,” she said, as though that might explain it, “trying to get used to all this rain.”
At this I brightened. “Actually,” I informed her, “it rains more in New Hampshire and Florida than it does in Washington State.”
Tina put her hand on her hip with an I’ll-be-damned laugh. “Is that true?”
I nodded earnestly. “We have a reputation for rain, but actually what we don’t have is good water pressure. Think of it like a shower. The rain mists out, so it feels like it’s raining all the time. With the exception of June through August, of course, when it’s the most beautiful place you’ll ever visit.”
“Fascinating,” Tina agreed, and we smiled at one another.
My mother exited the gas station. She had her head down, counting out her change, and when she looked up to see me smiling at a woman she didn’t know, she picked up her pace. “Ruth?” she ventured shakily, once she was within earshot.
Tina turned around. “Oh, hi. I’m Martina Cannon. Tina, if you want. I’m in the grief group with Ruth.”
My mother raised her chin imperiously and accepted Tina’s outstretched hand as if it were Tina’s great honor to meet her. “I’m Shirley Wachowsky. Ruth’s mother.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Tina said, and my mother braved her condolences with a fatigued exhale.
“Thank you. I keep telling my daughter that I’m the one who needs this group, but with two grandchildren, who has the time?” Her laugh was absurdly modest. There was nothing at all taxing about having two grandchildren.
“Oh!” Tina said. “I didn’t realize you had a difficult relationship with your husband.”
Well, no shit. I clapped my hand over my mouth, trapping my surprised laugh in my throat. No one had ever leveled my mother so breezily before.
My mother gathered herself to her full height, not very tall. “I’m not sure what that means, exactly, but we need to get going.” She stepped around Tina and hoisted her purse higher up on her shoulder, holding it tight to her person as though Tina were a hoodlum who may try and swipe it.
Tina gave me a little wave over her shoulder. “See you in a few,” she said, and then she winked at me.
My mother shot me a scathing, wordless warning through the windshield, but I did it anyway. “Actually,” I called after Tina, “would you mind giving me a ride?”
* * *
Tina drove a beige Cadillac that stunk of cigarettes. She moved aside a stack of textbooks in the front seat, and I sat clutching the bowl of meatballs in my lap as she took the turns on Squak Mountain too fast in the rain, marveling at whatever forces were at play in the world that she and I could be headed to the same place, only with her in the driver’s seat. Tina had clearly suffered a great tragedy in her life, but here she was with her car, her books, her freedom. Sometimes it all seemed so simple—I had moved home after my divorce to get back on my feet and to help my mother get back on hers after my father died. But it had been eight months now, and I knew I should go back to school, get a good job, and move out. I was a grown woman, and so was my mother. She would get on fine without me and I without her. But if it was that simple, why couldn’t I bring myself to do it?
“Your mother is exactly what I pictured,” Tina said.
There was a sensation I preferred not to identify, low in my stomach. Tina had been thinking about me. “You pictured her?”
“You make me sound like a creep.” I caught one side of Tina’s grin. No matter how the light struck her, she didn’t have to worry about how she looked. People with good skin have no idea the agony the rest of us live with. I was grateful for the long shadows of the evergreens as we wound our way to the house, but it was no way to live, seeking out the darkest corner in a room, counting down the minutes until the daylight traded shifts with the friendless night. “It’s just, you talked all about your ex with that prompt, and you never mentioned your own family. I knew right then and there your mother must be a witch like mine. We haven’t spoken in two years.”
I couldn’t conceive of not speaking to my mother for two years. It would destroy her. “Oh,” I said, backtracking a little. “It’s not like that.”
“Not like what?”
“We argue sometimes, but we love each other.”
Tina’s silence seemed dubious.
“It’s not like she’s abusive to me or anything.”
“Ha!” Tina barked. “That is exactly what I said at one point too. You and I are so much alike.”
I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to argue. We hardly knew each other. “What about when your husband passed away? Didn’t you speak then?”
“That was why we stopped speaking.” Tina rolled through the stop sign at the turn for Frances’s street. “It’s a long story. I’m sure I’ll tell it to you sometime. I tell everyone.” She laughed at herself. “I’m not ashamed of it anymore, thanks to Frances.”
“What about your dad?”
“Oh, he talks to me,” Tina said, “but he has to hide it from my mother, or he’ll be sorry. So it’s sporadic. He’s not really someone I can call at three in the morning when I feel like I’m so sad I might—”
Tina slammed on the brakes as a fox dashed across the road. I chose to save the meatballs, and my purse tipped over, its contents spilling all over the textbooks at my feet.
“Are you okay?” Tina gasped, setting her hand on my wrist. I adjusted the bowl of meatballs in such a way that I shook her off without having to actually shake her off.
“Fine.”
“Sorry,” Tina said, whether for slamming on the brakes or for touching me, I couldn’t be sure.
We parked at the curb to Frances’s house and Tina shut off the engine, staring as the others hurried from their cars to the front door, jackets drawn over their heads against that infinite mist. “Thank God for Frances and Irene. They’re really all I have.”
“Irene?” I repeated, confused. “Who is Irene?”
Instead of answering, Tina turned to survey me as she unfastened her seat belt. Whatever test was administered, I failed, because Tina’s tone suddenly turned vague. “Just another friend of mine.”
* * *
That night, the chalkboard read I wish someone would say…
Tina added an amendment before anyone could answer. “Remember too that you can also say what you wish people would stop saying.”
Frances smiled in a way that suggested she and Tina had argued about how to phrase the prompt. “The prompts are meant to get you thinking about your loved one and your grief in a dynamic way,” Frances said, “but they aren’t ever meant to be prescriptive.” She turned to a woman in an old UCLA sweatshirt who was on her third meatball. They’d been a huge hit. “Sharon, would you like to start us off tonight?”