The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [30]
At dinner, Courtney grumps and glowers as she usually does while waiting for the results of her medical screenings, but so unrelentingly tonight that John loses patience. “If you’re finished eating, go do your homework until it’s time to clear the dishes.” Courtney stomps out. John shrugs apologetically. “She’s hard to endure for a whole meal.”
“She’s a teenager,” Andrea defends lamely, aware that John’s tough-love approach in the face of the medical ordeal is probably the only thing that keeps the family out of therapy. Not that they couldn’t use therapy.
She waits for the miasma of Courtney’s sulking to lift. John remains restless. He hasn’t changed his clothes after work. He taps his plate with the tines of his fork.
“What?” she finally asks.
“You know that company in California where I’ve been doing those seminars?”
“Yes, of course.” John is a lawyer who reviews contracts for museums and historic homes and other semipublic organizations that sponsor events with an element of danger—children’s overnighters, glass-blowing demonstrations, hayrides. He has a reputation for being good at reducing an organization’s liability. Sometimes other firms hire him to teach their lawyers his methods.
“Do they want you to go out there again?” Andrea knows he likes the traveling. It keeps him from getting bored. He’s stayed with the same company his whole career because of its health insurance. When you have a child with cancer, that’s what you do.
John puts down his fork. “They want to offer me a job.”
Andrea opens her mouth. Nothing comes out.
John smiles. “It turns out, according to them, that I’m an expert in a ‘tricky, specialized, growing field.’ ”
“Tricky, specialized, growing?” Now Andrea is smiling, too. It seems like a joke.
“So they say. The new position would mean going to meetings all over the country, doing training seminars, supervising a staff. It would mean more prestige. More money, too.”
“Enough to live in Southern California?” Andrea hears her question, quite logical, but she can’t quite imagine any reality in it. She can’t quite take this in.
“I think it would take a while to negotiate the money.”
“I’m sort of . . . stunned.”
“Me, too.”
“Did you see this coming?”
John shrugs, enigmatic. “Yes and no.”
It’s a dream, of course. A scene viewed through shifting waves of heat, an oasis turning into a mirage. Is John really considering this? Andrea has lived here all her life. She went to high school not ten miles away, attended college down in the city, drank too much, experimented with every drug anyone offered her, and suffered no consequences whatever. After graduation, she had a couple of interesting jobs, met John at a party, married him in the white dress she’d been dreaming about since she was ten, and two years later gave birth to their daughter after an easy four-hour labor. Until Courtney was three, Andrea’s days had draped around her like a filmy layer of chiffon, pleasant and amorphous and soft to the touch. When Courtney grew limp and sickly and peed blood, Andrea’s life grew as focused as light through a magnifying glass. But it was still a life lived here. On the East Coast. In Brightwood Trace. With Paisley.
And yet . . . Sometimes she thinks the hot light that came with Courtney’s illness is still shining on her, following her around this house, this neighborhood, still trying to burn into her . . . what?
If they left, would that hot point of magnified light stay right here, behind them, where it belongs?
As if at a signal, both she and John rise from the table to clear the dishes. Neither suggests they call Courtney