The Rules of Inheritance (9 page)

 

My parents' reaction is more extreme than I imagined it would be. They close the restaurant early and the three of us get in the Volvo to go home. The drive is painfully quiet. My mother sniffles here and there in the front passenger seat and my father keeps both hands on the wheel.

 

At home my mother gently tells me to go to my room, which I do. I sit on the edge of my bed, with the door closed, my backpack still hooked over one shoulder, unsure of what to do with myself. I feel miserable. Heavy and undeserving. I drop my bag on the floor and curl into the pillows, crying.

 

Later that night, at dinner, my parents try to talk to me about it. We are sitting at the glass Eames table in the kitchen. Beyond the bay windows the backyard is a large square of green that promptly drops off into the bay. The sun is setting and two fat pelicans sit out on the end of the dock, carefully watching for their dinner.

 

This is my fault, my mother says. Her food sits untouched in front her. Is it Florida? Do you hate it here?

 

I am silent. I keep wondering what would have happened if I had just put the nail polishes down and walked out.

 

Gerry, my mom asks my dad, do you think it's the school system? I know the schools were better in Atlanta, but maybe Bruner is worse than we thought.

 

My father is silent.

 

Honey—she turns back to me again—is it your dad? Are you scared?

 

I groan inwardly. I knew she was going to bring up the cancer.

 

He's going to be fine, she says, and I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes.

 

She reaches across the table and takes my hand.

 

Honey, look at me.

 

I look up. My mother's face is lined with worry, her perfect hair tucked behind her ears.

 

It's the restaurant, isn't it? She sighs now, leaning back in her chair and covering her face with her hands.

 

How can I tell her that it has nothing to do with any of this? That it's something else entirely? That there's some kind of rage built up in me, a desperate loneliness brought on by simple adolescence and a sense of false immortality?

 

I can't.

 

So I lie.

 

I nod yes, when she asks if it's been hard for me to have her working so much, knowing, even at fourteen, that this will be a swift punch to her gut. But also knowing that it will be the only thing that will put a stop to her questions.

 

After dinner I am sent to my room again. I leave the door open this time and can hear them in the kitchen, talking in hushed tones at the table, long after they have finished eating.

 

I lie across my bed and stare at my math homework. The numbers shrink and grow, dancing across the page, mocking me. I have the urge to crumple up the work sheet, to throw it in the trash. So I do. But after a few minutes I dig it out again, smoothing the wrinkles away with my hand.

 

I am lying on my back, staring at the ceiling, when my mother appears. She taps on the doorframe before coming in.

 

Honey, can I talk to you?

 

I curl onto one side in response. I want to sink through the mattress and disappear.

 

Oh, sweetie, she says, lying down opposite me on the other side of the bed.

 

Do you know how much I love you? She smoothes the hair away from my face when she says this, but I keep my eyes down, staring at the pink bedspread.

 

Do you know that being your mom is the best thing that ever happened to me?

 

I don't look up.

 

Sometimes I think about how I almost didn't get to have you, she continues. I wanted to have a child all my life, but at a certain point I convinced myself that it wasn't going to happen.

 

I am listening to her carefully now.

 

When I met your father I was thirty-seven. My time was almost up. Besides, your dad was so much older and had raised three kids already.

 

Sally, he said to me one day, I don't want you to miss out on this experience.

 

I think I fell even more in love with him that day. We started trying soon after that, and I got pregnant surprisingly easily.

 

But a few weeks into it I miscarried.

 

I have never heard this part of the story before, and I lie very still, afraid that if I move she'll stop talking.

 

I was devastated. I don't think I got out of bed for a month. I didn't talk to your father for two weeks. That was when I realized how badly I wanted to be a mother.

 

But after a while your father convinced me to try again, and we did. I held my breath all the way through the pregnancy, so afraid that I was going to lose you. But I didn't.

 

She turns her head to me now and runs a hand down my cheek. I've adored being your mother, Claire. Sometimes I think it's the only thing I did right with my life.

 

She is crying now. I can tell by the way her voice has gone tighter. I still can't bring myself to look at her.

 

We'll get through this. Okay, sweetie? I promise.

 

I finally look up at her and nod the tiniest nod.

 

She turns on her side, pulling me into her like a comma, and we lie like that for a long time.

THE NEXT DAY AT SCHOOL I avoid Tonia in the halls. I briefly consider hiding out in the bathroom, skipping Home Ec, but I can't afford to get in any more trouble.

 

Tonia walks by my desk at the start of class.

 

Hey, she says.

 

Hey, I say back.

 

I want to tell her what happened. She's still my best friend.

 

I got caught, I say. Stealing nail polish at Kmart.

 

She blinks. Something in her demeanor shifts. Wow, are you okay?

 

Not really, I say.

 

That sucks, she says, and I look down, grateful for her sympathy. I hope everything turns out okay, she says softly, before she turns toward Jamie, taking a seat next to her a few tables away.

 

After school I head home. My mother has decided that she doesn't want me going to the restaurant after school anymore, and that for a while at least she's going to take the afternoons off.

 

My sneakers crunch on the oyster-shell driveway and the math book in my book bag feels impossibly heavy. When I walk in through the front door, it is immediately clear that something is wrong.

 

My mother is sitting on one of the couches in the formal living room, the one that we never sit in. My father is sitting next to her, when he is supposed to be at work. My mother is crying, and my father has his arm around her shoulder, his head bent toward hers.

 

My insides harden together like cement. I shouldn't have lied to her. I should have just told the truth that I wasn't stealing because she was working all the time. That it was for Tonia, so we could be friends again.

 

I stand in the doorway a moment longer before they notice me. I have to tell her. I have to tell her how much I love her. How she is actually my best friend. How glad I am that she got to have me.

 

My dad looks up first.

 

Claire.

 

My mother looks up sharply then, her breath catching in a sob.

 

Claire, my dad says, come sit down.

 

My feet are heavy, shuffling across the rug.

 

My mother blots her tears, and when I try to sit on the couch opposite them, my mother reaches out for me.

 

Come sit with me, sweetie. She is choking on the words.

 

I drop my bag on the floor and sit down next to my mother, who pulls me into her. She is hot all over, and her body jags against me with each wave of crying. I am frightened now.

 

My father leans over, one arm around my mother, the other around me. I peer up at him from underneath my mother's embrace.

 

Claire, he says, we just found out that your mother has colon cancer.

2002, I'M TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD.

I
'M STANDING OVER the cluttered desk of the West Coast editor of
Big Fancy Magazine
. Behind her Hollywood shimmers through the floor-to-ceiling windows of her spacious office.

 

How about some yogurt? I say gently. This suggestion is met with dramatic eye rolling and scoffing.

 

I try again. A smoothie?

 

West Coast Editor drops her head to her desk. She is nearing fifty, single, and surprisingly unkempt for someone who runs the LA office of
Big Fancy Magazine
. She is wearing jeans and an ill-fitting blouse. Her blond hair hangs limply past her shoulders and her face looks puffy from too many cocktails at whatever event she attended last night.

 

Nooooo, she moans.

 

It's important for you to eat, I remind her. I try to tamp down the rising sense of panic swelling in my sternum. This is not going well.

 

West Coast Editor offers no response. She doesn't even lift her head from the desk.

 

We could order something from that macrobiotic place, I say.

 

Or how about just a bar? I've got a box of raw-food bars at my desk.

 

All these suggestions are ones I have been instructed to use by the girl who had my job before me. Her last day was yesterday, and when she walked out of the office for the final time she had a look on her face like I've only seen on newly liberated kidnap victims in Lifetime movies: shattered and disbelieving, no longer able to recognize freedom. I know I should take this as a warning, but I'm too excited to actually be working at
Big Fancy Magazine
to care.

 

No, West Coast Editor says sulkily in reference to the raw-food bar.

 

She picks her head up and inspects her computer screen, scanning the new e-mail waiting there. Her hair is clearly unbrushed. One side of it is snarled. The other side stills retains some of yesterday's blowout from the salon.

 

A beat passes.

 

Fine, she says suddenly. A smoothie.

 

West Coast Editor swivels away from me, and I follow her gaze through the windows of her office. Buildings spread out against the backdrop of the distant mountain range that separates the city from the valley. The Hollywood sign is faintly visible in the background and palm trees dot the landscape.

 

I've been living in LA for three months. The city feels like the opposite of New York, where I lived for the past four years. The palm trees, the wide-open boulevards, the ocean air, and hazy sunsets all play with my head. I miss Manhattan. I miss the sidewalks and the throngs of people. I miss my walk-up apartment in the East Village. I miss my bartending job and my magazine internship.

 

It was a hard decision to leave New York. After my mother died I dropped out of my quaint Vermont college, with its white clapboard buildings and ruddy-cheeked students, and moved to Manhattan, where my first friend was the shirtless old man across the street who wore a pair of pearl earrings every day and had built a sixty-foot structure made of wood scraps in the community garden next door.

 

It had taken the better part of four years to feel like I actually belonged in New York. Not to mention that I had just been asked to apply for a job at
Time Out New York
, the magazine where I'd been interning during my final semester of college at the New School.

 

I cried that afternoon, walking home along Second Street, through the East Village, past the vintage clothing shops and little cafés, knowing that I would have to turn down the job. I had promised my father that I would move to California when I graduated. He'd been waiting patiently, storing up doctors' appointments for me to take him to, and planning day trips for just the two of us.

 

But then the
Big Fancy Magazine
thing happened and suddenly the move didn't seem so bad.

 

I think about this as I tap my high heel impatiently, waiting for the smoothie. I can't shake the gnawing feeling that taking this job was a mistake. I glance at my watch: 9:04 a.m. My father should just be arriving at the hospital for his third day of radiation treatment.