don’t you wait – I thought it’d be nice to eat together with Dad, at home.’ For a change. She couldn’t recall, right off, the last time they’d done this.
‘I’m hungry now,’ Savannah said, opening the box inside and taking out a wing. ‘You’re late.’
Meg pulled away from the curb, ignoring the weakness that remained in her arm and ignoring Savannah’s accusatory tone. Ignore whatever doesn’t suit: a strategy she’d learned at her father’s knee. She asked, ‘Where’s Rachel?’
‘Her mom picked her up at eight.’ It was now seven minutes past.
Meg sighed. A parenting book she’d read advised fighting only the truly important battles. The challenge was in how to determine, while her buttons were being pushed, just which battles were important. Yesterday morning, both of them tired after the security alarm had gone haywire and awakened them all at two AM, they’d fought over whether the milk was beginning to sour.
Savannah added, ‘Thanks for the chicken. It’s good.’
There was hope. ‘You’re welcome. Why don’t you hand me a piece? A leg – and a napkin.’ They could eat together in the car; Brian probably wasn’t home yet anyway.
Savannah rummaged in the box and found a leg. ‘Here,’ she said, holding it out. Meg intended to reach for it, started to move her hand off the steering wheel, but her arm felt sluggish again. Something wasn’t right. She thought back to her anatomy courses, considered the networks and pathways of nerves and signals; something must be pinched, torqued out of place by the difficult entrance of that second twin this morning. Janey, the labor nurse, had been rooting for a C-section, but in Meg’s view C-sections were overdone, riskier sometimes than just patiently working with nature. Besides, Corinne, the mother, wanted to do it all naturally as long as the babies weren’t at risk. Meg had been very satisfied, as Corinne had, when little Corey and Casey came through unscathed. The only price for taking the harder route, Meg thought, was this nuisance with her arm – which could probably be fixed with a short visit to Brian’s orthopedist.
When Meg didn’t take the chicken immediately, Savannah said, ‘Mom?’
Meg forced a smile. ‘You know, I think I’ll just wait – keep both hands on the wheel. What sort of example am I setting if I eat while I drive?’ One I’ve set a hundred times, she thought. Well, what was parenting if not a series of inconsistencies and the occasional hypocritical action?
She changed the subject. ‘So, tell me about this project you’re doing.’
‘It’s no big deal. Cell anatomy and function. Pretty boring.’
Meg remembered taking high school biology, studying those same things with her lab partner, Carson. More often, not studying. Savannah, though, was a serious student, curious about everything – or so she’d been, back when her every thought manifested as a question or observation. Presumably she was still the same girl, just quieter. Was she caught up in identity issues? Questioning her sexuality? She hadn’t yet had an official boyfriend; maybe she was gay – which would be fine, Meg would love her no matter what. Or maybe Savannah was just picky; she could be awfully judgmental, the ‘curse’, her fifth-grade teacher once said, of gifted children. In truth, Meg hoped Rachel had persuaded Savannah to meet some boys, if only so that Savannah would start getting her feet wet.
‘Well, did you find the info you needed?’
‘Mostly,’ Savannah said, her mouth full.
The traffic signal ahead turned red, and Meg slowed to a stop. She looked at Savannah, really looked at her, in a way she rarely remembered to these days. The dangling wood-bead earrings, the thick, hammered-silver wrist cuff, the mascara, the slight sheen of lip gloss – when did she begin wearing that? – the swell of breasts inside a snug green tée; all these signs said her daughter was essentially a woman. When had this maturing taken place? Surely it was just last week that skinny, flat-chested, unadorned Savannah was dressing Barbie dolls and perfecting cartwheels on the pool deck behind their house. Yet this week she was a sophomore at a private all-girl high school; a little more exposure to the opposite sex would do her good.
Meg rubbed her shoulder while thinking whether she should ask outright if the girls had been ‘researching’ with boys. But knowing Savannah, the question would be interpreted as an accusation – and she simply didn’t have the energy to defend herself tonight. So instead of asking, she changed the subject again.
‘Hey, I just saw Grandpa Spencer. Do you want to go have dinner with him Sunday? He thought you’d get a kick out of using the self-serve ice cream machine they have there.’
Savannah smirked. ‘I’m practically sixteen. Did he forget the teen part or something?’
The signal light changed and Meg turned the car, heading toward their gated community on the northeast side of town. She left her arm resting in her lap. ‘Be nice,’ she said. ‘The important part is that he wants your company.’
‘Whatever,’ Savannah said.
Meg glanced at her. ‘Is that a yes?’
Her daughter shrugged, slim shoulders signaling noncommitment. ‘Are you and Dad going?’
‘I plan to. I don’t know about your dad.’
‘He never does anything,’ Savannah grumbled.
True as it was, Meg felt obliged to defend him. ‘He has a business to run.’
‘I think I know that.’ Savannah opened the glovebox, shuffled through a few CDs, selected one, and slid it into the player.
Meg waited to hear what she’d picked. In a moment, the sounds of acoustic piano and guitar surrounded them, joined, after a few bars, by Carson’s voice. She smiled at how Savannah had moved from a grumpy thought about Brian to soothing herself with Carson’s music. Meg had done the same thing many, many times herself.
‘Good choice,’ she said.
‘Can I borrow this to upload when we get home?’
‘Sure, borrow it – but make sure you put this one back afterward.’
‘Duh,’ Savannah said as though she’d never forgotten before.
Savannah sang along softly, as invested in the music as if she’d composed it herself. Meg knew why she loved Carson’s music, but was Savannah’s connection inborn? The possibility alternately pleased or worried her, depending on how close the past felt when the thought bubbled up. Tonight, the thought was a bittersweet pleasure – a longing for the simpler life she and Carson and Savannah would have had if things had been different. But sometimes she hoped fervently that Savannah was Brian’s – wished for a clean break from Carson, for pure, open space between her past and the truth of her life now. The deliberate mystery of Savannah’s paternity had turned out to be much more troubling to her than she’d expected.
Probably, she concluded, she’d trained Savannah to love Carson’s music. Inadvertently, by example. Probably it meant nothing.
‘I guess I’ll go to Grandpa’s,’ Savannah said when the song ended. ‘Oh, we have our opening ballgame Sunday at one. I told Dad; he said he has a nine-thirty tee time with some client, so you’ll have to take me.’
Of course. When Brian wasn’t jetting off to some branch or another of the company he’d founded, Hamilton Investments Management, Inc., he was on the golf course. He rarely involved himself in their lives – ironic, considering he’d once been so determined to win her away from Carson that he and his father had spent $387,000 to close the deal.
He just wasn’t the sort of man who wanted intimacy, in the fullest sense of the word. What was surface level was uncomplicated and therefore desirable; he saved his energies for work. He was about accomplishments. Results. The successful pursuit of an ever-higher standard. He collected achievements the way other people accrue trophies. She