“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know you were here.”
“I’m here.”
“Are you hungry? I can make breakfast. But you’re probably rushing off to the gym.”
“No,” he said, “I’m not hungry. And I’m not rushing off. I was hoping we could talk.”
“I’m making potato soup,” she said, “but I could spare some bacon. Do you feel like bacon and eggs?” She was already cracking eggs into a cast-iron pan, pouring milk and stirring. “I’ve got English muffins, too. The good kind.”
“I’m really not very hungry,” he said. She didn’t look at him. Lincoln put his hand on her arm, and she scraped her fork against the bottom of the pan. “Mom,” he said.
“It’s so strange … ,” she said. He couldn’t tell from her voice whether she was sad or angry. “I can remember a time when you needed me for everything.
“You were just this little kitten, and you cried if I set you down even for a second. I don’t know how I managed to ever take a shower or make dinner. I don’t think I did. I was afraid to hold you too close to the stove.”
Lincoln stared down at the eggs. He hated when she talked like this. It was like accidentally seeing her in her nightgown.
“Why do you think I can remember that,” she asked, “when you can’t? Why does nature do that to us? How does that serve evolution? Those were the most important years of my life, and you can’t even remember them. You can’t understand why it’s so hard for me to hand you off to someone else. You want me to act casual.”
“You’re not handing me off. There’s no one else.”
“That girl. That terrible girl.”
“There isn’t a girl. I’m not seeing Sam.”
“Lincoln, she calls here. There’s no point in lying about it.”
“I haven’t talked to her. I haven’t been here to get her calls. Look, I’m sorry I lied to you, that I didn’t tell you about the apartment. But I’m not with Sam. I’m not with anyone. I wish I was, with somebody, I should be. I’m almost twenty-nine. You should want me to be.”
She huffed.
“I want to show you the apartment,” he said.
“I don’t need to see it.”
“I want you to. I want to show you.”
“We’ll talk about it after you eat.”
“Mom, I told you, I’m not hungry …” He pulled her arm toward him, away from stove. “Please. Come with me?”
LINCOLN’S MOTHER GOT into his car reluctantly. She hated riding in the passenger seat, she said it made her nauseous. (Eve said letting anyone else control a situation for more than thirty seconds was what made her nauseous.) She was quiet while he drove to his new neighborhood, just a few miles away, and parked in front of the apartment building.
“This is it,” he said.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked.
“I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to see it.”
He got out of the car before she could argue. She followed reluctantly, stopping outside the car, in the middle of the sidewalk, and at the steps. He didn’t stop with her, so she followed. Into the building, quietly up the stairs, across the threshold. “Willkommen.” Lincoln held the door open. His mother took a few steps inside—looked around, looked up—and then a few more steps toward the windows. Sunshine was falling into the living room in thick golden stripes. She held her hand up, open, into the light.
“I’ll show you the kitchen,” Lincoln said, after a moment, closing the door. “Well, what there is of it. You can pretty much see it from here. And here’s the bedroom.” His mother followed him into the next room, glancing down at his new mattress. “And the bathroom’s right here. It’s really small.” She walked to the bedroom window, looked outside, then sat in the window seat.
“It’s nice, right?” he asked her.
She looked up at him and nodded. “It’s a beautiful space. I didn’t know you could find apartments like this around here.”
“Me neither,” he said.
“The ceilings are so high,” she said.
“Even on the third floor.”
“And the windows …Doris used to live here?”
He nodded.
“It suits you better.”
He wanted to smile and feel relieved, but there was still something about her—her voice, the way she was sitting—that told him he shouldn’t.
“I just don’t understand,” she said, leaning back against the glass, “why.”
“Why?”
“It’s nice,” she said, “it’s beautiful. But I don’t understand why you’d want to move out if you didn’t have to. If there really isn’t a girl. Why would you choose to be alone?”
He didn’t know how to answer.
“As long as you’re at home, you can save your money for other things,” she said. “You have plenty of space to yourself, you can do whatever you want. I’m there if you need me …Why?
“And don’t tell me,” she said, picking up speed, “that moving away is just something that people do. Because …because who cares what people do? And besides, that’s not even true. That’s a recent development. A Western development. This dividing the family up into tiny bites.
“What if you’d had nowhere to go when you came home from California? What if I’d told you the same thing that my mother told me when I left Eve’s father? ‘You’re on your own now,’ she said. ‘You’re a grown woman.’ I was twenty years old. And alone. I bounced around from one house to the next, sleeping on couches. With that tiny, little girl. Eve was so small …She slept right here”—his mother laid her hand on her chest, just below her throat—“because I was afraid of dropping her or losing her between the cushions …
“You’ll never have to fend for yourself like that, Lincoln. You never have to be alone. Why would you want to?”
He leaned back against his bedroom wall and slunk down until he was sitting on the cast-iron radiator. “I just … ,” he said.
“Just?”
“I need to live my own life.”
“You aren’t living your own life now?” she asked. “I certainly never tell you what to do.”
“No, I know, it’s just …”
“Just?”
“It doesn’t feel like I’m living my own life.”
“What?”
“It feels like, as long as I stay home, I’m still living in your life. Like I’m still a kid.”
“That’s silly,” she said.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Your own life starts the moment you’re born. Before that, even.”
“I just, I feel like as long as I live with you, I won’t …I’m not …It’s like George Jefferson.”
“From the TV show?”
“Right. George Jefferson. As long as he was on All in the Family, he was just somebody who made Archie Bunker’s story more interesting. He didn’t have anything of his own. He didn’t have a plot or supporting characters. I don’t know if you ever even got to see his house. But after he got his own show, George had his own living room and kitchen …and bedroom, I think. He even had his own elevator. Places for him to exist in, for his story to happen. Like this apartment. This is something that’s mine.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t know,” she said. “I never watched The Jeffersons.”
“What about Rhoda?” Lincoln asked.
She frowned. “So you’re saying you want to be the star of the show now. That it’s time for me to fade into old age?”
“God, no,” he said. “It’s not like they canceled All in the Family when The Jeffersons started.”
“Stop talking about television. Stop telling me what everything is like.”
“Okay,” he said, trying to think clearly, bluntly. “I want to live my own life. And I want you to live your own life. Separately.”
“But you are my life!” she said, breaking into frustrated tears. “You became my life on the day you were born. You’re part of me, you and E
ve, the most important part of me. How can I separate from that?”
Lincoln didn’t answer. His mother walked past him out of the room. He slunk farther down, onto the floor, and held his face in his hands.
HE STAYED THAT way for twenty minutes or so, until he realized it was taking some effort to hold the position, until he felt more tired than guilty or angry.
He found his mother sitting on the living room floor, looking up at the chandelier. “You can take the couch from the sunroom,” she said when he walked in, “the brown one. There’s too much furniture in that room already. It would fit fine here. It’ll look almost purple in this light.”
He nodded.
“And I’ll find you some nice dishes at the thrift shop. Don’t buy any more plastic. It leaches into your food, you know,” she said, “and simulates estrogen. It lives in your fat cells and causes breast cancer …I don’t know what it does to men. I wish I’d known you needed dishes. I saw a complete set the other day at the Goodwill, with a butter dish and a gravy boat and everything. White with little blue daisies. Not exactly masculine, but still …”
“I’m not picky,” he said.
She nodded and kept nodding. “You can have anything you want from your bedroom, of course, or you can leave it. That will always be your room. Just like your sister’s. You can always come home if you need to, or even if you want to. That house is your home as long as it’s mine.”
“Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”
He walked over to her and held out his hands, pulling her to her feet. She held on to his hands, squeezed them, then started smoothing her long skirt.
“I suppose your sister knows all about this already,” she said.
“No,” Lincoln said.
“Oh.” That was good news. “Maybe I’ll call her. Maybe I’ll see if she wants to help me go shopping for your kitchen.”
“Sure,” he said. He hugged her then, tight, and wished that he’d thought to do it sooner.
“It really is a beautiful apartment,” she said.
EVE CALLED LINCOLN at work the next day. All she could say was, “Good for you” and “I’m so proud of you.” She offered Jake Sr.’s help if Lincoln needed to move anything. “Just a couch,” he said. “Anything,” Eve said. There really wasn’t much else to move besides clothes and his computer.
He went home, to his mom’s house, for lunch every day of the next week. She sent him off with boxes full of cereal bowls and drinking glasses. A bookcase. A coffee table that just barely fit into his backseat. Hand-embroidered kitchen towels.
“All this stuff is so old,” Eve said, when she came to see his apartment. “It’s like somebody’s grandmother died, and you moved in.”
“I like it,” he said.
“I’m buying you something made of stainless steel,” she said, “something bachelor-y.”
CHAPTER 79
From: Beth Fremont
To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
Sent: Tues, 02/29/2000 3:48 PM
Subject: I told Derek about Chris …
And now the entire eastern third of the newsroom knows that I’m single. Melissa came over and patted my hand for, I swear, 20 minutes. She said she’s going to take me to this totally hot club—“wall-to-wall boys”—where you can get half-price appletinis after 10 o’clock on weeknights.
I told Derek that if I get cornered into drinking appletinis on a weeknight, I’m dragging his big mouth with me.
> What do you have against appletinis?
> I just don’t understand why everything has to be a martini. I don’t like drinking out of martini glasses, you have to pucker your mouth all weird to keep from spilling.
> How are you ever going to meet another man if you’re not going to drink martinis?
> I’m not, apparently. The last time I went on a first date, I wasn’t old enough to drink.
> Are you even interested in dating yet?
> I don’t know. In a way, I don’t really feel single. My life hasn’t changed substantially since Chris left, which shows, I guess, how little I’d been seeing him. I could almost go on pretending that I’m still in a serious relationship. Derek thinks I should take down all the photos of Chris in my cubicle. (Or in his words, “Jesus Christ, Beth, even I’m tired of looking at that asshole.”) What do you think?
> I think it’s up to you. Does it make you sad to look at them?
> Yeah, it does. I should take them down.
> Your Cute Guy is never going to ask you out if your cubicle is full of photos of another man.
Seriously …there’s nothing keeping you from making contact with YCG now.
> I can’t have a real relationship with him. I’ve already been pretend-dating him for months. If we started dating, I’d have to eventually tell him about the time I followed him home from the movie theater. That doesn’t seem healthy.
> But he’s so nice.
> Are you saying that because he gave you French fries?
> I’m saying it because he seemed really, really nice.
> I need to date a guy I haven’t already contaminated with a nickname.
CHAPTER 80
EMILIE STOPPED INTO the IT office Thursday night between editions. She did that now, a few times a week, just to say hi. Well, not just to say hi, Lincoln knew she was interested in him. But he hadn’t decided yet what do with that knowledge.
He was interested in feeling the way he felt around Emilie. Like the brightest, shiniest thing in the room. Tall. And smart. And funny. When Emilie was around, he never fumbled his Christopher Walken impression. But he couldn’t see anything in her eyes past his own reflection. And now that Beth was back, he couldn’t make himself want to.
Emilie was twirling her ponytail around her fingers. “So, a few of us are going to do karaoke tomorrow night, there’s a cheesy bar in Bellevue, you should totally come, it’s going to be fun …”
“It sounds fun,” Lincoln said. “But I play Dungeons & Dragons on Saturday nights. Usually.” He’d missed some more games lately, he’d wanted to have the weekends to himself in his new apartment. “It’s been a few weeks, so I really can’t miss tomorrow night.”
“Oh, you play Dungeons & Dragons?”
“Yeah … ,” he said.
“That’s cool … ,” she said.
That made Lincoln smile. Which made Emilie smile even wider. Which made him feel kind of guilty.
DAVE ANSWERED THE door Saturday night. He looked at Lincoln and frowned.
“Either you’re in the game or you’re not,” Dave said, after Christine had set Lincoln up with a plate of homemade tacos and a flagon (an actual flagon) of beer. “You can’t just drop in now and then.”
Dave pointed to Troy, who was trying not drip taco juice onto his faded Rush T-shirt. “Troy has been dragging your unconscious dwarf on an earth sled, just to keep you in the campaign. You’re a constant drain on his magic.”
“It’s the least I can do,” Troy said formally. “I’ve owed ’Smov a life debt since we battled side by side in the Free City of Greyhawk.”
“Troy, that was seven years ago,” Dave said, pained, “and that entire adventure was outside of continuity.”
“I wouldn’t expect a halfling like you to understand the nature of a life debt,” Troy said.
“Thank you, Troy,” Lincoln said, bowing his head.
“It’s an honor, brother.”
“I’m trying to run a campaign here,” Dave said. “This isn’t improv. It takes planning. I need to know who I have to work with.”
“Maybe Lincoln has had a good reason to stay close to home,” Christine said. She smiled at him, hopefully.
“We all have good reasons not to be here,” Larry said, frowning. “Do you think I don’t
have anything more important to do?”
“I could be at the hospital, saving lives,” Teddy said flatly.
“I could be at my high school reunion,” Rick murmured.
“You guys aren’t helping,” Christine said. She looked back at Lincoln again, raising her eyebrows expectantly.
“Well,” he said, swallowing. “Actually, I do have news.” Christine clasped her hands. “I moved into an apartment.”
They all looked up.
“You moved out of your mom’s house?” Troy said.
“It’s about damn time,” Larry said.
“’Smov,” Troy said, leaning in for a sandalwood-thick hug, “I’m so proud of you.” Lincoln hugged him back.
Rick smiled.
“And I’m so proud of you,” Christine said. “That isn’t even the good news I was expecting.”
“I don’t know,” Dave said, rubbing his beard. “If I could go back to living rent-free, I would.”
“I never thought you’d do it, Lincoln,” Larry said. “I thought you were one of those guys.”
Lincoln winced.
“I never thought he’d move out of the dorms,” Dave said.
“Okay,” Lincoln said. “Enough.” He’d wanted them to be happy for him, but not this happy. Not this surprised. He hadn’t realized that everyone—even Troy, who lived in a studio apartment above an auto body shop—felt sorry for him. It was like getting congratulated for losing weight when you didn’t think anyone else had noticed that you needed to.
Christine was grinning at him across the table. Even the baby in the sling was smiling. Lincoln decided to smile, too.
“Are we going to play or not?” Teddy said. “My shift starts in six hours.”
“Now, we just have to find you a woman,” Troy said, thumping Lincoln on the back.
“Enough,” Lincoln said, “let’s play.”
“And with a crack of thunder,” Dave said, “black clouds swept over the hills of Kara-Tur …”
CHAPTER 81
From: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
To: Beth Fremont
Sent: Mon, 03/13/2000 3:08 PM