Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [5]
I exhaled. She’d remembered. That was good. I wasn’t sure whether my mom had anything more than regular forgetfulness or something worse, like early-onset Alzheimer’s, which I’d looked up a few times on the Internet, but if there was something important, something you needed my mother to remember, you had to tell her and tell her and tell her again, and even then be prepared for the possibility that it would still slip her mind.
“Nancy’s here already. We’re just going over my bank statement.”
I imagined my sister sitting at my mother’s kitchen table with her acrylic nails tapping at her calculator. “The boys and I are on our way. And I’ve got some good news.”
“Ooh, fun,” she said. “Bye-bye, now.”
I switched off The Backyardigans, wondering when it was that my mother had started sounding more like a child than my actual children, and hurried Frank Junior, five, and Spencer, who had just turned three, upstairs to the bathroom, the only one in our three-story, five-bedroom farmhouse in Phoenixville, about forty-five miles outside Philadelphia. Frank and I had bought the farmhouse at auction five years ago. It had been a bargain, a big, sprawling place originally built in 1890, on three acres of land, with what the Realtor called “outbuildings” that had once been chicken coops and stalls for horses, along with a working outhouse that stood just off the back porch with the door now stuccoed shut.
Frank and I had grown up in the Great Northeast, in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia. I’d lived in a ranch house with my sister and my parents; Frank and his mother and father had a duplex a mile away. Both of us loved the idea of a big place to spread out in and raise our own family: a garden to grow vegetables and flowers, a yard for children to run in, a big country kitchen with two ovens and a six-burner stove where our families could gather and I could cook. When the farm came up for sale, we scraped together enough money for a down payment and convinced a bank that we could afford it. I had a little money I’d inherited from my grandmother, Frank had some help from his parents, and in those days, not so long ago, the banks gave out mortgages like they hand out lollipops, to pretty much anyone who asked.
We’d been so excited about what the farmhouse had—hardwood floors, wood-burning fireplaces, that big, sunny kitchen with whitewashed walls, the thicket of raspberry bushes at the edge of the yard—that we’d barely noticed the things it was lacking: working toilets, reliable appliances, closet space. We hadn’t thought about the high cost of heating and maintaining such a big home, or the time it would take to mow the lawn in the summer and how much it would cost to get the driveway plowed in the winter. Frank had a job working security at the Philadelphia airport, but that wasn’t a permanent thing. He was going to school to be an airplane mechanic; we’d planned on his getting raises and promotions, but of course, we had no way of knowing that the economy would crash and the airlines would end up in trouble. But now, I thought, I’d found a solution, a way to get ourselves out of the hole we’d fallen into and move up a few rungs on the ladder, the way my sister had.
“Frank Junior, you go first,” I said, pointing my oldest son toward the toilet.
He frowned at me, eyebrows drawn, lower lip pouting. “Privacy,” he said. Frank Junior looked just like his father, tall for his age, lean and wiry, with nut-brown skin and tightly curled hair and full lips. Spencer looked more like me: lighter skin, straighter hair, a round face and a sweet, plump belly I’d kiss every time I changed his diaper. People who saw the three of us together, without Frank, didn’t always realize that I was their mom. I took a secret pleasure from that moment, when they’d look from the dark-skinned boys to the white lady taking