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“What’s depressing?” you asked. “Some people would call that progress.”

I was surprised that you had responded at all. It seemed as if everything I said lately was met with a silent chin-first nod, or a simple “Yes” or “No.”

“I don’t know,” I said, having trouble articulating the source of melancholy that usually set in whenever I left the city for Pineville. “All those abandoned storefronts are depressing. All that emptiness.”

When you contemplatively dipped the Beard, I thought the conversation was over. We passed through two green lights, then stopped at a red.

“Buddhists strive for emptiness,” you said.

“Really?”

“Shunyata. It means not so much ‘empty’ as ‘open.’ Without boundaries.”

“Really?” I said again, if only because it had worked the first time in coaxing more conversation out of you. You surprised me by obliging.

“Without getting all metaphysical, sunyata means that everything in this life is interconnected. There is no me that is separate from you.”

“Or anyone else, for that matter.”

“I suppose that’s true, too.”

That was a blustery afternoon in early January. Twenty minutes later, we huddled together on the boardwalk, our own bodies providing shelter from the wind. As the gray waves churned with sturm und drang, you revealed two things I had previously known nothing about: Your dad had been diagnosed with stage III prostate cancer. And he had insisted that you make good on the binding, early-action offer from Princeton University.

fifty

“My aesthetician,” my mother said in a sharp tone meant to get my attention.

“What?”

“I have an appointment with my aesthetician.”

“The Botox doc?” I asked. “Mom!”

“What? I have to schedule my maintenance visits months in advance,” she said. “If I miss it, I won’t be able to get in until next year.”

Now that she mentioned it, the smoothing effects of the Botox must have worn off because her face was able to wrinkle itself into detectable expressions of genuine human emotion, and at that moment, it registered annoyance.

“You’re leaving Dad alone in the hospital so you can keep your appointment with the aesthetician?”

“But I’m not leaving him alone,” she said. “I’m leaving him with you. You can handle it.”

When did I become the paragon of all things adult and responsible? I sleep in a bunk bed, for Christ’s sake.

“There’s so much wrongness going on here,” I said, “I don’t even know where to start.”

“I’m sure you’ll find your way,” she said drolly.

“Okay, first of all, I just don’t understand why you do this to your face. You’re beautiful for your age without all that artificial help.”

“See? ‘For my age.’ You mean I’m beautiful for an old lady.”

“You’re not an old lady,” I said. “You’re—” I stop myself.

“Forty-eight,” she said without batting a curled eyelash.

“Moooooooooom.”

“Whaaaaaaaat?” she asked, mocking my tone as she flicked the turn signal.

For the record: I’m proud of my mom. I mean, how many women launch their own successful business in their fifties? But if she doesn’t stop shaving off the years, soon she will have to start telling everyone that Bethany is either (a) her younger sister, (b) the product of my dad’s first marriage, or (c) the first-ever baby conceived by a mother who was still in utero herself.

“Dad retired last year at fifty-five. You’re a year younger….”

She violently shushed me, lest occupants of other SUVs on Route 37 should hear.

“Are you saying you’re forty-eight because you don’t want to be fifty but you don’t want to say forty-nine either because that sounds like more of a lie than forty-eight? Which is crazy because you’re fifty-four!”

She took a sharp turn into the hospital parking lot and I was thrown into the passenger-side door.

“First of all, what I do to my face is my business, not yours. It’s not your place to criticize,” my mom huffed. “It’s an outpatient procedure that takes a minute. It’s not like I’m getting a face-lift….”

“Yet!” I blurted. “Botox is the gateway procedure….”

My mom wrinkled her forehead in disdain again,