*
Her evening at home passed pleasantly enough, rolling along the usual track. First stop, dinner (Greek salad, hummus, pita), followed by way too much Facebook (a problem she was going to have to deal with), a couple of glasses of wine, and three episodes of Friends on Netflix (another problem, though she figured it would eventually fix itself, once she made it through all ten seasons). She kept meaning to start The Wire or Breaking Bad, but the time never seemed right to plunge into something so dark and serious. It was the same with books, always easier to pick up something breezy and upbeat than to crack open the copy of Middlemarch that had been squatting on her nightstand for the past nine months, a Christmas gift from her English professor cousin, Donna, who’d insisted that it was deceptively readable, whatever that meant.
Aside from the shock of Brendan’s absence—still fresh and omnipresent—the only real shadow on her mood was a faint but lingering sense of regret that she hadn’t accepted Amanda’s invitation. A drink and some conversation would have been nice, a little way station between work and home. It was true that she had an unwritten policy of not socializing with her staff, but that was more a preference than a hard-and-fast rule, based as much on a lack of chemistry with her colleagues (most of whom were married, and even more of whom were dull) as it was on some nebulous sense of propriety. In any case, it was a policy she probably needed to rethink, now that she was retired from parenting and had more than enough time to herself. At this point in her life, she couldn’t afford to be ruling out potential new friends on a technicality.
*
The phone rang while she was brushing her teeth, and the sound made her heart leap with pleasure—It’s Brendan! But when she hurried into the bedroom, wearing only pajama bottoms—because she couldn’t find the top, and what difference did it make?—she saw that it wasn’t her son at all.
“Ted?”
“Hey, I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“I’m awake. Is everything okay?”
“Just thought I’d check in. See how you’re holding up. Hard to believe our little boy’s in college, huh?”
Whose little boy? she thought, a reflex from angrier days. But it was true. Their little boy was all grown up.
“He seems happy there,” she said. “I think he really likes his roommate.”
“Yeah, Zack.” Ted chuckled like he was in on the joke. “I just talked to him. Seems like a good kid.”
“You talked to Zack?”
“Just for a minute. Little while ago. I called Brendan, and he passed the phone to Zack.”
That was Ted all over. Mr. Glad-to-Meet-You. Always looking for the next stranger to charm.
“How’s he doing?”
“Zack?”
“No, Brendan.”
“Pretty good.” Ted paused, recalibrating his response. “Pretty wasted, actually. But I guess that’s a given your first weekend at college.”
“I hope it’s not gonna be a problem.”
“College kids drink a lot. I know I did.” He sounded proud of himself. “I can barely remember sophomore year.”
“What a great role model.”
“Don’t worry about Brendan. He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”
“I hope so.” She wanted to tell him about the awful thing he’d said to Becca the other day, but she heard a child screaming on Ted’s end, and a woman’s soothing voice, and it didn’t seem like the right time to get into it. “I really miss him.”
“He misses you, too. You know that, right?”
“It’s hard to tell sometimes.”
“Eve,” he said. “Brendan really loves you. He just doesn’t always know how to communicate.”
She wanted to believe this, and she was grateful to Ted for saying it out loud. His guilty conscience had made him a lot nicer than he used to be.
“What about you?” she asked. The crying had subsided for the moment. “Everything okay?”
“Up and down. Jon-Jon likes his new school. And the gluten-free diet seems to be helping a little.”
Jon-Jon was Ted’s four-year-old autistic son, an adorable child with severe behavioral problems. When Eve first heard about the diagnosis, she’d reacted uncharitably, considering it a form of karmic justice for Ted and his bad-girl wife, Bethany. How ironic and gratifying it had seemed at the time to see their Casual Encounter disrupted by reality. But they hadn’t cracked under pressure the way she’d expected. Instead the ordeal had brought out the best in them. They were devoted to their son, totally immersed in the minutiae of his care. Ted had become an amateur expert on cutting-edge autism therapies. Bethany had quit her job and gone back to school for a master’s in Special Ed. All this rising to the occasion had made it hard for Eve to sustain the hatred and contempt she’d felt for them in the immediate aftermath of her divorce.
“That’s good,” she said, glancing down at her bare chest. The room was chillier than she’d realized, and her nipples were hard, which made her remember how much Ted had appreciated her breasts. They’re perfect, he used to tell her, not that it mattered much in the end. Absolutely perfect. “Maybe we should all stop eating gluten. Everybody who gives it up goes around telling everybody else how great they feel.”
“That’s because eating it made them sick.”
“I guess.”
The screaming started up again, louder than before, and Eve found herself wincing in sympathetic distress. Brendan had told her that Jon-Jon’s tantrums could be pretty terrifying.
“All right,” he sighed. “I better go deal with this. Have a good night, okay?”
“You too.” She almost said honey, a reflex from a different era of her past. “Thanks for calling.”
*
Eve was exhausted, but she stayed up well past midnight, playing Words with Friends against a random opponent, though that was just an excuse to keep her eyes open. What she was really doing was waiting for a message from Brendan. Over the summer he’d promised to keep in touch by sending her at least one text every single day. He was free to send more if he felt like it, or to call her, or even to arrange a Skype session if he was especially homesick. But one text per day was the agreed-upon minimum.