“Dori, he’s got her slaving away in a damn roach coach. She’s supposed to leave for college in two days and she absolutely refuses to come with me to claim her trust money. That damn trust was the reason I signed off on Martin’s—”
“Tsoo! Tsoo! Tsoo!” Dori pretends to spit three times in my direction to ward off the evil eye cast when I invoked the cursed name of my ex. Joking about our exes and being single mom outcasts in the suburbs is how we’ve survived.
“—screw job of a divorce settlement. I mean, how hard could it be to claim your college tuition? Aubrey knows I can’t do it without her. We both have to be present. We could have gotten it anytime in the past two weeks, but will she take a few hours to do this one simple thing? No. She keeps putting me off.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to take anything from Martin.”
“Who knows? She doesn’t bring him up much. Like, ever.”
“Can you blame her? Given that the school board is in an uproar over evolution, being the daughter of a cardinal or bishop or grand wizard or whatever of a church that believes we all descended from a race of space travelers isn’t exactly the magic ticket to becoming homecoming queen at Parkhaven High.”
I glance over at Dori so that she knows I am not amused. “Believe it or not, Dori, something as ridiculous as having your husband leave you for a …” I stutter, trying to come up with an epithet strong enough to contain my hatred for Next and have to settle for, “… a nutball religion actually makes it more painful, not less.”
“Oops. Sorry. Sixteen years. Too soon, huh?”
I splash Dori.
“Hey, at least you lost your husband to something kind of spiritual. Mine ditched me so he could wear scarves and tights and rat his hair up and sing ‘Walk This Way.’ ”
I don’t laugh.
“Cam, don’t stress. Aubrey is a good kid. Too good, really. She is going to be fine.”
Fine.
Our relationship is built on Dori telling me that Aubrey is going to be fine and me not telling Dori anything about how unfine Twyla is. Dori might actually be the only mother in Parkhaven for whom “fine” really is fine. The only one who doesn’t want superfine. Superior. Sublime. A five-point GPA and a full ride to Harvard. I know Aubrey is going to be fine. Eventually. But I want so much more than fine. And I want it to start in two days when she leaves for Peninsula State College.
“What can I do? Drag her to the bank bodily?”
“We all know how the dragging bodily ends.”
Dori is referring to the night last December when the roads turned into chutes of black ice and I tried and failed to keep Aubrey from going off with Tyler. That was the first night she didn’t come home. But not the last. Ever since Black Ice Night, Aubrey and I have both known that habit, manners, and whatever residual love she still has for me are the only things keeping her under my roof. We know that Tyler Moldenhauer would welcome her with open arms anytime she wanted. So I walk on eggshells with my child and will until the second I shove her onto that plane the day after tomorrow.
Dori splashes along beside me, a living reminder that a child can simply get up and walk out your door and not come back. I turn to her and say, “God, if only I hadn’t made those stupid comments about—”
“Do not say ‘hat,’ ” Dori cuts me off. “Cam. I am warning you. You can say ‘solar protection apparel.’ Or you can say ‘brimmed headgear.’ But one more time with the damn hat and I will …” She circles her raised fist like Popeye warming up to clobber Bluto.
I clamp my lips into a tight seam and press my crossed index fingers against them, X-ing out the forbidden topic.
But as I flutter-kick away, all I can think about is Aubrey and that damn hat. That hat was where it all started four years ago. She was a skinny freshman in baggy cotton shorts and a T-shirt, heading off to the first day of band camp, when the hat made its debut. Since the name of the landlocked team playing for her landlocked high school in our landlocked state is the Pirates, the hat was a goofy tricornered number with a giant white plume