Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [21]
It’s Sunday and an overcast one by the look of it, my favorite kind. I know few people who love rain like I do. Usually, rain makes me want to make soup and bake bread, to settle in and snuggle up. Maybe it’s an adaptive response to having grown up in Pittsburgh, not a particularly sunny city. I settle back into the pillows and listen to Chloe’s sweet voice and the pleasant patter of rain on the bedroom window. But there’s a knot in the pit of my stomach, which at first I attribute to the hangover. It takes me a couple of minutes to realize that today is Sunday, and this afternoon Jake is coming by to see Chloe. Suddenly alert, I sit up in bed where I can see the message light on the bedside phone blinking at me. Gabriella said there had been a couple of calls, which she let the machine pick up while she was putting Chloe to sleep. I hit the Play button.
“Hi, Mira. It’s Jake. Just calling to confirm my visit with Chloe.” Pause. “Remember we talked about my coming over tomorrow afternoon?” There’s another awkward pause as if Jake is expecting me to answer him. I can only hope he was wondering where I would be at ten thirty on a Saturday night. “Well, I was thinking about three o’clock. I have a couple of things to do earlier in the day, but I thought after her . . . Well, I don’t know if she takes a nap or anything, but, if that time isn’t good, just, I don’t know, call me.”
I’m still ruminating over Jake’s message—of course she takes a nap and three is prime napping time—when I realize another message is still playing.
“. . . never call me. Where are you? Have you been carted off to jail again—which is, by the way, about the only decent excuse you’d have for not getting back to me. Your father hasn’t even heard from you. You should call him, too, you know. Anyway, what are you doing for Thanksgiving? Feel like some company?? The Steelers are playing the Jets in New York next Sunday. I can get a flight out on Wednesday, and, if you can get me a ticket to the game, I’ll love you forever. Call me, you little shit, okay?” The message ends with an abrupt click. Richard, I think, with a smile. In fact, the last time I’d talked to him had been practically from jail—it was the day of the court hearing, and I ended up crying into the phone, spilling the whole sordid story, sparing nothing. That had been over two months ago. No wonder he was miffed.
I’ve known Richard Kistler more than half my life; in fact, he likes to tell people we grew up together, although he’s sixteen years my senior. I met him at an AA meeting I attended when I was fifteen years old. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, several stints in treatment hadn’t been able to cure my mother of a serious drinking problem, and her condition had escalated to the point of medical emergency. The transition from the sophisticated world of Parisian haute cuisine to Pittsburgh, land of pierogies, Jello molds, and Miracle Whip dips, had been an especially difficult one for my mother—one apparently made much more so by one significant complication: me. Motherhood, she often reflected in her more lucid moments, had been her downfall, sending her careening down the road to ruin, a fifth of Seagram’s neatly concealed in the diaper bag.
Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Favish, who, along with her posse of neighborhood Jewish grandmothers, was closely monitoring the goings-on in my family, had been the one to suggest Al-Anon to me. She’d told me in her