Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [76]
I’m about to answer when Gene buzzes me again.
“You’re late for the copy meeting,” he says flatly, then clicks off.
“Oh crap, I have to run.” I stand and grab random documents strewn across my desk and in a pile on the floor.
“No problem,” Henry says. “Hey, whatever happens, let me know, will you?” He pulls a card from his wallet and is about to place it on my desk but thinks otherwise, smartly recognizing that it might never be seen again. So he hands it to me directly. “Oh, and have a good Thanksgiving,” he says on his way to the door.
“You, too.” I smile, then realize that technically, this should be our first Thanksgiving together and that I should be headed to his childhood home to meet Phil and Susan, his physics-professor mom.
“Going home?” he asks.
“To Jack’s,” I say with a shrug. “You?”
“To Celeste’s,” he says, mirroring my posture, then forcing a grin. “You gotta do what you gotta do.” So I guess that wasn’t a euphemism for they broke up, after all. I’m punctured.
“Have a good one,” he says again, lingering, in no hurry to move on. “And don’t forget the formula: risk or gain. Which one is more likely?”
“I won’t forget,” I say, looking at him one last time just before I turn down the hall toward the conference room. “In fact, I’m thinking it over as we speak.”
HENRY
Henry first nudged me about my mother when Katie was seven and a half months. I remember it clearly because it was just after she started crawling, which changed the literal trajectory of my day. No more plopping her down while I ran into the kitchen for an iced tea. The first (and last) time I did that, I returned to the living room and she’d vanished. Panic spread through my veins, and I raced around shouting her name with hysteria for the longest minute of my lifetime, as if she could say, “Yes, Mama, I’m right here,” until I found her tucked under the piano bench, cooing softly and pawing the gold pedals.
I don’t know why Henry started in with it—probably because he suspected that I might find motherhood more fulfilling if I came to peace with my own disrupted youth. He’d bring it up in small ways: Maybe he saw an older woman on the street whom he thought looked so much like me, maybe he’d mention an article he’d read in the New York Times about child rearing and how we pass along our own sins to our offspring, try as we might not to. Maybe he’d just casually mention her when I’d be smack in the middle of preparing dinner, asking, ever so nonchalantly, if my mom was a good cook or if I knew if she had an aversion to basil, if it made her gag reflux kick in, as it did mine.
At first, I didn’t mind so much. At first, it just seemed like he was trying to peel off a layer and dig a little deeper into discovering more about his wife, and just about all of my magazines told me that this was a good thing for a marriage. Oh, to have a relationship in which your husband still finds you mysterious, they would sing! So he’d make his passing comment, and I’d try not to let the edges of my mouth curl under, and I’d instead smile pleasantly enough and shrug off his inquiries.
But soon, it became clear that Henry’s comments were part of a larger plan, a bigger objective, the goal of which was to forge some sort of reconciliation between me and the woman who left me behind.
“You never pushed me to do this before,” I said one night, my voice frigid with unexpressed anger because I just wanted him to shut his piehole about this fucking subject, a feeling I hoped was made clear by my refusal to turn around and face him while I was washing the dishes.
“I just think it’s important,” he replied. “I think it’s important for Katie to know her grandmother, but I mostly think it’s important for you to get answers to all of your questions.”
“I don’t have any questions,” I said flatly, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing this goddamn spot of grease that refused to relinquish its grip on my pot.
“You have plenty of questions,” he said, not unkindly, though I didn’t see it this way at the time. “And they’re valid questions that deserve answers. I