it’s personal.”
The girl in pink emits a stoned-sounding giggle and earns a punishing over-the-shoulder glare from Jill for the eruption.
Harkness looks at me. I make a nonsensical thumbs-up sign from my post at the washroom door, rub my now-throbbing arm, and will Spencer not to choose this moment to come out of hiding.
“Carry on, then, ladies,” Harkness says. “Enjoy what remains of the dance. And stay sober, please.”
Jill grunts, flips her hair, and leads her friends down the hall with the swagger of a teen movie bad girl who bests the doofus vice-principal daily. Mocking bursts of laughter float our way from the now out-of-danger pack.
Harkness watches them go. “I don’t like that girl’s attitude,” he says.
“I don’t know. Seems to me like she’s got serious leadership potential.”
He turns to see if I too am lipping him off and notices my door-barring stance for the first time. “Is anyone else in there?”
“I’ll go check.” I slip through the door again and almost trip over Spencer, not hiding but sitting on the floor, his back to the wall. He flashes me a peace sign and a grin, I mime to him to wait three minutes then leave, and I return to the hall, where I escort Harkness back to the gym doors without blowing Spencer’s cover or angering Harkness further.
A new pair of volunteer moms are sitting at the admission table, and Sylvia stands, leaning, against the wall, ready to go. “You two were gone a while,” she says, when Harkness has entered the gym, probably in search of couples dancing too close that he can separate. “Did you have fun back there?”
“Don’t make me sick.” I grip my arm, which is aching in rhythmic pulses now. “What happened to Mr. Sutherland?”
“He’s back inside. And our shift has ended anyway. I’ll go to the washroom, then we’ll leave, okay? But I’ll be quick, unlike some people.”
I find my jacket, put it on, sling my purse over my shoulder, and am headed for outside and some fresh air, when Spencer saunters into the foyer, walks over to me, and stands too close.
“Hey, Emily. Thanks for covering my ass.” He fixes his hooded eyes on mine. He’s never suffered from a lack of confidence, this kid.
I already regret having saved him from Harkness, but I’ll never be old enough to betray my youthful self and play narc. I can’t be bothered to chide him now, to issue some Mother-Knows-Best admonition about what he should or shouldn’t be up to in his spare time. His own private spare time. “Good night, Spencer.”
I step away, but he comes after me and places a friendly hand on my back, as if we are familiars. “No really. I appreciate what you did. Props, man.” He tilts his head to one side and forms his hand into a fist, offers it to me. And in the same way that it’s impossible to refuse a handshake or a hello kiss without seeming rude, I raise my own fist and brush knuckles with him, though the movement hurts my arm and my hand.
Sylvia bustles out, Spencer melts off, and Sylvia says, “What’s he up to? I thought I saw him coming out of the girls’ washroom when I went down the hall.”
“He’s slippery, all right, but he’s not our concern. Let’s go home.”
When I go to bed on this fun night, the capper of my fun day, I lie awake longer than usual. I can find no reclining position that does not pain me, and there’s the racing mind to contend with, the recriminatory thoughts to air — I should have walked away; Jesse will not be happy when he hears about this; Spencer is a devil, why did I protect him? To distract myself, I try to visualize the design for a bed that would allow people with sore arms to sleep standing up. I almost have it worked out when I remember that Dr. Joan gave me a task to do when I came home from her office, a task I should have performed this morning.
I get up, shuffle into Jesse’s room, turn on the light, grab a pencil off his desk. On a wall in his bathroom, we’ve been charting his growth — the latest mark, made four months ago, in June, has him at five feet, eleven and a half inches. With pencil in hand, I reach up to a blank section of the wall and draw a line at the highest point my right arm can touch, a full four inches lower than where I can touch with my left.
“Make a mark on the wall when you get home,” Dr. Joan said, “do your exercises several times daily, see if your reach improves, and check in with me again in three months. Do you understand?”
Yes, I understand. I also understand that according to the writing on this wall, Jesse’s still on the incline of life, but I’ve already crested the mountain and am making my slow, hobbled way down the decline. I get it. And now I’d like to get some sleep.
~ CHAPTER TWO ~
I drive out to the airport on Sunday evening to pick up Jesse from his New York trip, and when I see him waiting at our agreed-upon curbside spot — his hair messy, his jeans baggy, his eyebrows knit in a poor imitation of nonchalance — my heart does its usual salmon-spawning leap. The primal mother in me will always be relieved to find him safe, uninjured, and not crying after we’ve been apart, even when he’s thirty, I should live that long.
In the car, I take his hand and hold it for a moment, and the old, sweet, affectionate Jesse squeezes back. The newer, more independent Jesse ejects the Brandenburg Concertos CD from the car stereo and says, “How can you stand hearing this same old classical shit over and over?”
“It has a certain mathematical precision that I find soothing.”
He isn’t listening, meant his question to be rhetorical. He inserts his own CD in the player, turns up the volume, and does not fasten his seatbelt until I remind him to five minutes later.
“How was the flight?”
“Okay.”
“Did you get something to eat?”
“I had a Caesar salad at La Guardia, only I forgot to ask for no croutons so I had to pick them out, but don’t worry, I didn’t eat any crumbs.”
“Have you had any cramps?”
“Relax, I’m fine.”
Jesse’s celiac disease — a lifelong allergy to the gluten in wheat, barley, and rye — has weighed on me since he was diagnosed with it at the age of eighteen months, but I am not otherwise unrelaxed. I watch the road (I must get some new eyeglasses for distance), listen to him rap along in his tuneless voice to the music, and wait a verse’s length of time before saying, “How’s your dad?” It’s difficult not to modify the word dad with an adjective like pompous or puffed-up, but I manage.
“He’s okay. He’s put on some weight.”
“Bryony isn’t watching what he eats?” Bryony is a size zero, eats only fruit and lettuce, I’m convinced, and runs twenty miles every morning on a treadmill at seven o’clock with a trainer while the au pair minds the kids and Henry reads his first five newspapers of the day.
“She tries to get him to eat healthy, but he does what he wants.”
Henry always has.
There are doubtless more fascinating details Jesse could tell me about his weekend, like that he saw a NBA player up close at a game and how cool that was, or that one or both of his half-brothers was an out-of-control brat. But he will dole out tidbits of information later, when he’s in the mood — or not.
He says, “How was your weekend?” as if reading a line from a play spoken by a character more well-mannered than he.
“I did that chaperoning thing at your school dance.”
His archness drops. “Shit, I forgot about that. How’d it go? Tell me you didn’t do anything I’ll be hearing about on Monday at school, like say one word to my friends.”
I see again the cocky look on Spencer’s