October Snow (19 page)

Max sat beside her. “You got some strings, Jo.” She watched her rubbing the top of her thighs again.

“Well, he’s an old friend.” She stood up. “I’m going to go clean the apartment. Maybe bake something. The boys are coming over at six.”

“Yeah. What’s that about?”

Jo smiled, anticipating seeing her children in spite of her misgivings. “I guess they want to see their mom.”

.

chapter 9

A
T
6:10, Jo was a little annoyed. Just as she decided to call, there was a knock at the door.

She was always surprised when she saw them. They were so grown. Matt was two years younger than John, but an inch taller, with the easy elegance of Jo’s dad. He had also inherited his grandfather’s dark hair, brown eyes, and perfect smile.

John was stockier, more muscular, and had Jo’s pale green eyes and light hair, but the shape of his face was every bit Jo’s mother’s. They each had many of their grandparents’ mannerisms, as well. It was sweetly compelling to Jo, because they had never had the chance to meet.

It was both wonderful and painful to be with them sometimes, they were so much like their grandparents. She missed her mother and father, every day at some point, and she mourned the fact that they had never known their grandchildren. Keith had started moving them everywhere when she was still pregnant with John, and she had never gone home again.

Jo’s father had died when John was five, and Matt, three; her mother followed him two years later. Jo wasn’t there for their funerals. Her sister, Carolyn, was left to deal alone with the passing of both of their parents, and she had never forgiven Jo for not being there. What Carolyn didn’t know was that Keith broke a chair over Jo’s back when she asked to go to her father’s deathbed; and when their mother died, Keith had cracked her rib, given her a concussion, and then disappeared with the car for almost a week.

“Hi, Mom.” Matt gave her a peck on the cheek, and she hugged him quick. She reached for John, who–as had been the case for years–went completely stiff as she held him for a moment.

“Hey,” he said. “Good to see you.” His voice was flat, but Jo had learned to overlook it.

“Come sit down. I’ve got a lasagna coming out of the oven in a few minutes. You hungry?”

The boys glanced at each other, then Matt stared at his feet as John said, “We only have a few minutes, Mom.”

She felt her stomach grip with disappointment. “Oh. I thought…I made dinner.” She despised the plaintive tone of her own voice, how weak it sounded to her. Like an old woman, alone, calling out into a dark place.

“We just wanted to bring you this, and say hello.” They handed her an envelope with a flowery Mother’s Day card inside. They had scribbled their names at the bottom.

She stared down at it, not understanding. Or not wanting to, and her smile trembled as she looked up at them. “It’s lovely. But Mother’s Day is
next
Sunday, guys.” She tried to laugh, but a thought was forcing its way in, and she was fighting to keep it at bay.

“Yeah,” John said.

Matt reached down to pet Daisy as she came galloping out to the sound of their voices. John crouched down, hugging her, rubbing her neck. “Hey, girl. Lookin’ good.” He stood back up and said, “Dad and Shelly are getting married next Saturday, Mom.”

She nodded, surprised. “Oh. Okay. But that’s Saturday…”

“In Orlando,” Matt added. “Where her family is. They’re flying us down. We’re on our way to the airport right now.”

“I see.” She set the card on the dining table. “You’re leaving tonight?”

“Yeah. We’re all spending the week there, ‘til next Sunday night, what with rehearsal dinners and family reunions and all…” Matt’s voice trailed off, and John shifted back and forth, looking annoyed.

“Rehearsal dinners?” she asked. She made herself look at them then.

John stared back, unflinching. “They asked us to be in the wedding.”

She felt as if someone had punched her.

John extended his hand to her, then drew it back quickly. “Look, Mom, we don’t need to hear it, okay? We know how you feel about these things. Remarriage being wrong, and unbiblical, and all that stuff. But this is going to be Dad’s family…”

“And our stepfamily,” Matt added. “We think we should be there for them.”

She nodded, looking out the window, suddenly wanting them to go. And wanting them to stay, to not leave her there like that–but at the same time, she knew there would be no comfort in having them there.

In a vivid flash of an old memory, she recalled something she had said to Keith many years earlier, trying to get him to realize something which–she understood afterwards–he already knew: how badly she and the boys needed him to stop hurting them. To be a husband, and a father. To stop killing their little family. “Don’t you get it, Keith? It’s like we’re dying of thirst, and the well is poisoned.”

As she turned back to her sons, she realized that their expressions now were exactly as Keith’s was on that day. And she felt herself go numb inside.

“I baked you cookies. Oatmeal chocolate. Let me pack them up.” She went to the kitchen, hurriedly emptying the cookie jar into a plastic bag. “Eat them on the plane if you get hungry.” She gave them each a quick kiss–on the bridge of the nose, their tradition of so many years–and hugged them hard.

She was unnerved by her own smile, because it was genuine. “Go now. You have to get on that plane. And be safe.”

Unexpectedly, it was John who suddenly looked unsure. “Mom…”

Their eyes met.
Don’t forget me,
she thought, hoping he would hear her someplace–maybe in his heart, if there was a part of it somewhere that wasn’t hardened toward her. “You take care of yourselves.” She touched his cheek, then Matt’s.

John was still watching her. “I’ll call when we get there, okay?”

“You bet.” She picked up her card, pressing it to her heart. “Thanks for this. I’ll keep it by my bed.”

“We’ll go out to dinner right after we get back, okay?” Matt was anxious, not knowing how to handle her attitude: his father and Shelly had spent many hours over many weeks preparing them for the inevitability of her ugliness.

“That’ll be nice. Now go before you’re late.” She smiled again. “Love you.”

“Love you, Mom,” Matt said, looking at her sadly, reaching for the door.

John touched her shoulder tentatively, and her smile faded as she put her hand over his.

“I love you more,” he said. It was the old game they had played, back when the boys were little - they’d pretend to argue over who loved her more. Then, he bent to kiss her cheek. He hadn’t done so in years, and Jo couldn’t ignore the fact that she felt absolutely nothing–except that her numbness felt nice. It was peaceful. At least, it was quiet.

“Guys?”

They turned on their way out the door.

“Stay together.”

They smiled. “Okay, Mom.”

They were gone then, and Jo was glad it had ended that way.

She went to the kitchen, pulled the lasagna from the oven, and picked up her phone.

Hey bim, want some lasagna?

Max was at the door a few minutes later. She didn’t ask about the boys’ visit, figuring that if they were gone already, it didn’t go well–and that Jo would bring it up if she wanted to.

Jo seemed out of balance. She was slightly off, Max thought, as she studied her friend’s expression: it was somewhat removed, even vacant, and it alarmed her. Jo was an eclectic mixture of many things, and most of her inherent attributes were difficult to deal with; but she was never so unnatural in her affect. Her laughter was too loud, but only a bit; her voice was coming across just a little too stridently. Her movements were awkward, lacking her usual, easy gracefulness.

“You know,” she waited until Jo finally looked in her direction, “I have a bottle of amaretto downstairs. You have O.J.?”

“Yep, I sure do. Go get it.”

“Got ice?”

Jo checked her freezer. “
Damn
it!
No
. I forgot to fill the trays.” She slammed the freezer door shut, rubbing her forehead.

That confirmed it for Max, because Jo rarely used any kind of bad language unless she was very upset. There was something wrong. “I’ll bring some ice up. No problem.”

They ate mostly in silence, in spite of Max’s attempts to start a conversation a couple of times.

“Thanks for dinner.”

“My pleasure.” Jo was dropping ice cubes into two heavy crystal rocks glasses. “Let’s kill the amaretto.”

She filled each glass most of the way with the liquor, adding a splash of orange juice and handing one to Max. “No swizzle sticks. Use your pinkie.”

“You’re gonna get tanked, Bim. You barely ate anything.”

“Not hungry.” She downed half of her drink.

“Let’s go sit on the porch with these.” She hoped that being outside, down two flights of steps, would slow Jo’s drinking.

“Nah. It’s chilly out there tonight.” She put a CD in the stereo. “Let’s do some music.”

“No disco. Okay?”

“Huh! Snob.”

“Disco’s dead, Jo. Didn’t you get enough of that in high school?”

“I was in college when you were in high school.”

“Oh yeah.”

She sat on the floor beside the stereo. “Finish telling me about your mom.”

“Okay.” She took a long drink, settling in with her ankles crossed on the table. “Right after you tell me what happened tonight.”

“I asked you first.”

Max said nothing.

Jo laid flat on the floor, balancing the glass on her stomach, her arm over her eyes. “Make you a deal.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s just enjoy for now. Please. And the next time we have a misery moment, or delve into the meaning of life or whatever, I’ll go first.” She moved her arm up over her head, grinning at her hopefully.

It had been an interminably long week, Max thought. As she sat there, watching the lights blinking on the stereo, she became aware of her own fatigue. Jo, she decided, might be snapping a bit, too.

“That’s a good idea. Agreed.”

Jo lifted her glass off of her stomach, straight up to her, and they clinked the rims. “We can’t be up too late anyway. Court at ten a.m.” She raised up, draining her glass, then held it up. “Get me another?”

Max emptied her own before she stood up. “Tell me something,” she called from the kitchen, “is it just me, or was life a lot simpler a week ago?”

“Don’t think so. We just didn’t see the options.”

“Seems like everything’s changed.”

“At least it’s not boring.”

She came out a minute later, setting Jo’s drink on the floor beside her. “Neither is an earthquake.”

Jo sat up, wrinkling her nose. “What?”

“Earthquakes aren’t boring, either. Doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.”

She took a sip, making a face at Max. “It tastes like almond-flavored orange juice.”

“That’s ‘cause I did more than just salute the carton.”

“Fine. Buzzkill.”

“Bimbo.”

“Interesting metaphor, by the way. Earthquake, huh?”

Max shrugged. “It seems to fit. From where I am, anyway.”

Jo drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. “You’re having second thoughts?”

“Oh
hell,
no!” she laughed. “I’m just looking back at the last few days. Thinking about where we were a week ago. Everything’s shifting. Changing. Like it was all so stable, and steady…”

“And meaningless.”

Max nodded acknowledgement. “…and then, everything got shook up. All at once.”

“That’s the way things really change. It isn’t gradual. It’s instant.” She gulped down the rest of her drink. “Even what looks like ‘gradual’ change comes from a continuum of moments.”

“Mmm. Slow down, Jo. I can’t drink that fast.” She chugged her full glass, then blinked hard. “Wow.” Clearing her throat, she added, “Like eventually, a bunch of red dots will form a solid red mass, right?”

“Until the earthquake hits it, I suppose.”

“Hey, I thought we weren’t going philosophical tonight.”

“You’re just too fascinating for me to resist.”

She kicked her lightly. “So you agree with the metaphor, then?”

“You do love these discussions, don’t you? I guess. Yeah, I agree,” she said, grabbing Max’s glass on the way to the kitchen. “Except that earthquakes happen
to
you. We
chose
to shake everything up.”

Max laughed, already a little tipsy. “Maybe you did–I got kicked out of the nest.”

From the kitchen, Jo called out, “Makes a mess out of everything, but all the weaker things just fall away. So I guess it’s a good thing. Cleans things out.”

“You’re approaching Darwinism now.” Max thought of what Jo had said, a few nights earlier.

I’m not strong
.

She had a sense of foreboding around Jo sometimes, especially in recent weeks; actually, she had been worried about all of them for a while, Sam included. She was glad that Sam had quit, and
very
happy that it looked for all the world as though she’d reached her limit with Jack. But Jo…She was just brittle. Back and forth, seeming fine one moment, and then lost the next.

And Max knew that she herself was at the point of needing to take care of some unresolved issues, the things that had haunted her for years–decades, actually–and she knew that a lazy summer at a secluded lake was going to be good for them. She couldn’t wait to get there.