be said and in exactly what tone. Annie could say, “Don’t call me for the next three days, I’ll be studying for a test,” and her mother wouldn’t. She had boyfriends—her current boyfriend was a blue-blooded Bostonian named Jonathan who regarded her Kentucky upbringing as exotic—and when she told her mother she’d be out of reach for a while, it was like a code phrase they had. Annie would be spending time with her boyfriend, and her mother was not to call. When she did call she didn’t pry into how her daughter’s little romantic idyll had gone. They understood each other— since her sister’s death, it was only natural that her parents would take extraordinary care with her. But in her mother’s case it represented no effort. It was how she was. Gail Williamson cared, she cared enormously, but she had absolutely no capacity for devotion. And that suited Annie fine.
The only disagreement between them concerned her father. Her mother considered her ex-husband negligible, and Annie didn’t. Time had passed him by, and Annie, with nothing to back her up, begged to differ.
She believed her father was lonely. He’d lost both his mother and father. His brother, Charley, lived in California and showed no interest in coming east. Her father had had a wife, and then he hadn’t. He’d had an older daughter, and then he hadn’t. But he still had her, his younger daughter, and he came often, even though he tried to stay out of her way. Once she’d seen him when he hadn’t bothered to tell her he was coming; it was as if he were haunting the campus. “He’s lonely, Mother,” she’d said. Her mother had answered, “Nonsense. I offered to fix him up with one of my clients. They would have suited each other fine. At the last moment he backed out and nearly cost me a sale.”
Annie wondered about the ethics of that from any angle at which she cared to examine it. But her mother had an ease with ethics that could almost win you over.
“I haven’t heard from him in more than a month,” Annie confided to her mother during their latest phone call.
“Now that you mention it, neither have I. Are you worried?”
She wasn’t, but that last time he’d visited he’d behaved strangely. They’d had dinner together. They’d talked about nothing in particular, then out of nowhere he’d made a comment about digging in to face the day that was sure to come, and she’d thought he was referring to some paper she was putting off writing, or upcoming exams. She’d laughed in his face. Then she’d kissed him good-bye. But he hadn’t left. Friends had seen him in the library, squeezed into one of the stack carrels, and once in the Government Department, standing before a professor’s door. Her sister had been a government major, with a concentration in international relations. The irony of that had struck Annie as criminal in itself. Maybe her father had gone to her sister’s professor to protest that at long last something had to be done.
When she’d called his hotel for an explanation for his behavior, she was told he’d checked out. The programmed voice of the man who told her that left a cold empty space in her ear.
She was annoyed with herself, that for her last communication with her father she had laughed in his face. And she was annoyed with him, that he would make her regret her laughter, that he would force her to accuse herself of laughing out of place.
She liked to laugh. Her laughter was like her trademark. When Michelle was alive her laughter was sometimes her only means of expression; then, when Michelle died, it was as if she were being forced to defend her laughter. Now she laughed every chance she got. “Digging in to face the day that was sure to come” was certainly worth a laugh.
Yet in spite of herself, and especially in spite of her mother, she still considered her father capable of a serious act.
“I want to see him, that’s all,” she explained to her mother. “I miss him.”
After a puzzling pause, her mother said approvingly, “Well, good, good for you.”
Then her mother began to tell her about Rennick Road. This was a road running out of town that Annie didn’t know. It was barely a mile long, and at least half of the land was taken up by what used to be a small dairy farm but was now given over to the raising of goats. Apparently in Greek and Arab restaurants there was a big city market for goat meat. But Annie had to imagine looking out over a pasture; instead of goats she was to see popcorn popping. Seemingly unprovoked, and from a standstill, the little white kids would leap straight up, and it was like watching corn pop. All over that pasture—pop, pop, pop!
Each time they talked, it seemed, her mother had a tall tale to tell. She’d just served up a pasture of popping kids.
Well, on that short road, last week, her mother had closed on three houses, two as a buying agent and one as a seller. She attributed her extraordinary success to the goats. She’d personally taken the two buying families to the goat pasture on a sunny day, and the fleecy white kids had performed. The kids—Homo sapiens, now—had gone crazy. She’d made sure the buying agent for the house she was selling did the same. People, against their sensible best judgment, were so easily won. A boiler could be about to go, water damage all over the house, and goats on a sunny day could make them forget it. What does that tell you?
“What?” Annie replied. “That people like goats?”
“No, sweetie. That people are still children. Appeal to the child in a buyer, and you’ve got him. But it can’t be just anything. We’re not talking an old rope swing hanging from an oak tree. People have calluses on top of calluses just trying to stay alive in this world. It’s got to be something mysterious, powerful, but something as fresh as spring.”
Annie said, “Was there a boiler about to go, and was there water damage all over a house?”
“Please! The pasture of popping goats was a bonus. The houses were all first-rate. They’ll pass inspection like that.”
Her mother snapped her fingers. Her mother was a great finger snapper. Annie could hear it over the phone, and she could hear it in her mind’s ear. Time to get going—snap! I want that bed made up like this—snap! Let’s cut the shit, it’s over—snap! The popping goats and the snapping fingers, and she realized that in the midst of the tall-tale telling she hadn’t stopped thinking about her father.
She said, “I know you divorced him, but you have to stay friends. Friends look after friends—”
Her mother cut her off. “Annie, that’s enough about your father! I divorced him because I didn’t intend to stagnate with him. I’ve told you this a hundred times. It had nothing to do with love. The kind of love your father believes in doesn’t exist—it never did. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stand by and watch him walk off the edge of the earth, if that’s what you’re saying. To be honest, he’d never find a way to get there. . . .”
“Where? The edge of the earth?”
“Anywhere beyond his beaten track!” There was some impatience in her mother’s voice now, and some heat, which Annie knew not to take personally. Unless she were taking her father’s side. “I wasn’t going to stay with him just because he lost a daughter. I lost a daughter. I wasn’t going to stay there and match his loss against mine. There’s a law of survival, you know. And if you don’t, there’s nothing they can teach you in that university worth a damn. I wasn’t going to let Ben pull me down, Annie— although ‘pull’ puts it too strongly. Not Ben—”
She stopped her mother there. “Give it a rest, Mom. Okay? Dad’s doing what he has to do.”
As usual, her mother handled her daughter’s occasional flare-ups of temper by marking off a cool distance on the phone. Then she said, “Oh, really? And what might that be?”
“He’s seeing me through school.”
He’s doing his court-ordered duty, nothing more or less, her mother might have replied. And Annie might have responded, You demanded it of him as a way of making clear how badly, how catastrophically, he had failed with Michelle.
Her mother asked her about her boyfriend, Jonathan, instead, and if Annie were being honest she would have admitted that Jonathan was beginning