The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [29]
“How can you read such things?” I asked Sarah over the phone, brandishing, as if she could see me, the consumed-in-one-night book.
“It’s real,” Sarah had said. “There’s no bullshit.”
Hamish returned, smelling of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men, which it embarrassed me to know. He ducked in the backseat and held out a small blue hand towel. I looked at it in horror, but I did not reach for it.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m good.”
Again a quizzical look came across his face, but instead of asking me a question, he broke into a smile.
“You like having it on you,” he said.
“Hamish,” I said, sitting up and scrambling out of the car to find my pants and underwear, “your job is not to make me throw up.”
“Harsh,” he said.
“What I mean is that I’m still your mother’s friend, and your seduction lines are calibrated for women half my age.”
“If that,” he said.
“Touché,” I said, and zipped up my pants while slipping on my flats.
“You’ve got to admit this isn’t our usual way of relating.”
“We’ll take my car,” I said. “I’ll drive. You go around the side.”
“Sweet. Mom always makes me drive.”
I sat down behind the wheel and whisked my purse off the passenger seat, tucking it by my side. I pictured an eight-year-old Hamish running to my car with a wild smile on his face. He had been smitten with Emily from the first time they’d met when they were two. I looked out the window at the full-grown man whom I had almost just fucked and who was now walking around to the passenger door. I didn’t know who I was anymore or what I was capable of.
He swooped in and kissed me on the cheek.
“Buckle up,” I said, my spine stiff against the soft and mealy seat.
I backed out of the driveway, the gravel crunching under my tires. It was Leo’s baby carrier that had torn the hole in the back of the passenger seat. I had struggled to get it inside the car on the day my mother dropped him, trying to show Emily I could take care of it while she stood on the sidewalk, clasping Leo to her chest and shouting, “It doesn’t matter, Mother! Leave it! Leave it!” until I shoved the carrier in and slammed the door. Inside the car, I turned and saw a spot of blood seep through Leo’s blue baby bonnet. When I’d called to tell my parents I was pregnant for the second time, my mother had yawned extravagantly and said, “Aren’t you bored yet?”
“Who is Natalie out with?” I asked as I swung the car onto the road and started off.
“Shit,” Hamish said. “Don’t make me tell you.”
But I didn’t want to talk about what had happened between us. “Okay, can we talk about your father instead? Are you ever happy that he died?”
“Man, what’s with you? I’m sorry about back there, but chill out, okay? I want to make you happy.”
“Sorry, I just came from my mother’s house.”
“Oh.”
It was roundly known that my mother and I had problems with each other, that I attended her by duty, but now I had done something stupid, I knew. I had given Hamish knowledge of my previous whereabouts. I was a lousy criminal, and he was a lousy lay. We were perfect together.
“It’s good with my mom,” Hamish said. “We get along, and living together works for us. It was harder with Dad.”
“You don’t have to,” I said, feeling guilty now.
“I’ll tell you if you want.”
I remembered Hamish as a toddler then, how he would allow Emily to boss him around and how, over time, she took advantage of this in a way I didn’t like. He was that same boy now. He would tell me what I wanted to know in the same way he would endlessly give his toys to my small daughter or bring her, on demand, bucket after bucket of sand for building Barbie castles. Natalie and I had pretended only briefly that the two of them would grow up to be married. At a certain point we both realized that neither of us knew the first thing about what made a good marriage.
“You know your father and I didn’t get along,” I said.
We had driven out of the McMansions-set-in-birches section and were passing through the long no-man’s-land of one-story warehouses and shabby