Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [103]
“It’s not a good situation. He’s nearly twenty now. Into all sorts of things that are of no benefit to anyone. But I guess every family has one of them.” When she lifted her hands, the wax gathered to a point at her fingertips. “Not my business.”
“That’s why there are so many problems with the youth today,” Sandy said to me. Her expression was one of desperate concern. She was wearing cucumber slices on her eyes; the round whiteness of the cucumbers made her appear all the more alarmed.
“These young children don’t have the Lord in their hearts,” Mrs.
Jenkins said. “We need to make a great effort to teach them while they’re young.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Grandma. “We do right by some. What’s Lisa up to now? She was always a bright girl.”
“Still in Europe,” Sandy said. “You know Lisa. Impossible to keep track of. One minute she’s here, the next she’s flying to Paris. That girl wears herself out.”
“When is she set to come home next?” Grandma asked.
She was being overly polite. Behind Mom’s back she referred to Sandy and Mrs. Jenkins as “Those Cats.”
“Christmas, or so she says now,” Sandy said. “Give it two weeks and she’ll have changed her mind.”
“I thought she’d already been to Paris,” Mrs. Jenkins said.
“Well, she went once with the class trip. This is her second go, only now she’s working there the whole time, teaching English.”
“Meeting any Parisian men?” Grandma winked at me.
Sandy said, “That would mean some profit for all this running around. Now, I’m not one to pressure a girl, but land sakes, she’ll be thirty-one this July!”
She sounded shocked, as if her daughter had not been progressing steadily toward her next birthday month by month like everyone else.
“A woman can’t just live life as if age doesn’t matter.”
Mom stood abruptly and snatched the bowl of wax from beneath Mrs. Jenkins’s still suspended hands. In the kitchen, she refilled the bowl, her back to us.
Mrs. Jenkins raised her eyebrows. “She won’t be young forever. I hope she realizes that.”
“These girls are so different now. They’re so—so entitled,” Sandy said.
The cucumber on her right eye fell in her lap. She picked it up and, after a momentary hesitation, sniffed it. I hoped she would take a bite.
“They’re admirably ambitious,” Grandma said.
“I had two babies and a third on the way when I was her age,” said Mrs. Jenkins.
“I had two children, a mortgage, and an ex-husband,” said my mother. She shut the microwave door with more force than was necessary.
This was the first time Mom had spoken in half an hour, which in and of itself was strange. Moreover, it was the first time I’d heard her admit to the divorce in front of Mrs. Jenkins. Ever.
Sandy and Mrs. Jenkins had always accepted my mother as a friend, but their silence surrounding my parents’ separation kept any real intimacy at bay. My mother acted as though she were indebted to them for their resolution to ignore what they perceived as her greatest failing as a Christian and as a woman. Most peculiar of all, they now seemed as blind to her new boyfriend as they had been to her failed marriage. When Richard had come by an hour earlier to drop off some dry cleaning, Mrs. Jenkins blatantly ignored his presence.
I waited in suspense for Mrs. Jenkins to acknowledge my mother’s statement.
Instead, Sandy made some oblique comment about the difficulties of raising very young children.
“It is not easy,” Mrs. Jenkins agreed.
Sandy reached for the lotion. She did not eat the cucumber after all.
In the late afternoon Grandma went home to nap before the rehearsal. The rest of us drove with Mom to the chapel. Mrs. Jenkins had agreed to play piano for the ceremony at no cost; Sandy was present for moral support. The ladies’ shins bumped up against cardboard boxes of votive candles and plastic ivy. I sat shotgun next to my mother, uncomfortable in pantyhose and a dress, my cheeks exfoliated, red and tight as the skin of a newly blown-up party balloon.
“Weather’s looking dreary,” said Mrs. Jenkins, eyeing the dark clouds