“When’s your shift?”
“Ugh, you’re such an adult. People like a waitress a little loose.”
“Mom. I hope you don’t say that in public.”
“I don’t mean it in a vulgar way. Just … relaxed. Prepared for witty repartee.”
“I also don’t like you driving like this.”
Aggie lofted her wineglass imperially in her left hand and with her right tugged Liv’s wrist. Liv resisted.
“Sit with your old momma.”
“I’m sweaty.”
Her mom pouted and tugged. Liv inhaled, said nothing, and let herself be pulled down. The glass of wine sloshed, but Aggie was a virtuoso of liquid counterbalance. She sipped, then leaned into her daughter, nuzzling Liv’s neck. Liv closed her eyes, anything to be able to melt into her mom’s embrace.
Aggie wrapped her arm around Liv’s waist.
“You’re so strong,” Aggie sighed. “Feel those muscles. You’ve got such a nice body.”
“I feel like that’s gross, Mom.”
“Shush. I’ve been holding you since you were itty-bitty.”
Liv, though, was holding her mother. How could Aggie not notice that? Aggie’s free fingers ran through her daughter’s hair, her long nails slicing through damp strands and sliding along the sweaty scalp. It did seem motherly, Liv had to admit, this acceptance of her child’s dirtiness. Curled up against Liv, nearly in her lap, her mother looked tiny. The years revealed by the corners of her eyes and the backs of her arms only made her smallness more heartbreaking.
“I’d hold you,” Aggie cooed, “while your daddy read you poetry. He wanted to turn you into a little … what’s her name. Sophia someone. Sophie. Sylvia. Plath.”
“Sylvia Plath killed herself,” Liv said.
“Well, I’m sure he didn’t want that. He wanted the whole town strolling around being all poetic all the time. He had this whole fantasy.”
“Mom, I know. Resurrection Update, remember?”
“Oh mercy. If I never see another book-shaped package, it’ll be too soon.”
Lee Fleming’s poetry push had solidified around the hardscrabble collection of poems by James Galvin, who scowled from the back cover in an old denim shirt, as if furious about being photographed. Lee had won some victories in broadening the curriculum—wedging Toni Morrison’s Beloved into the mix of dead white guys, carving out a whole week for Philip K. Dick—but no one understood why you’d dump Frost and Thoreau for a living poet, despite Lee’s insistence that Galvin being alive was half the point, not to mention his Iowa connection. When the school had balked at the purchase order, Lee bought thirty-five copies out of his own pocket, scouring the Internet for used paperbacks and, when they ran out, paying full retail price.
“He always wanted me to pick my favorite poem from the book,” Liv said.
“Me too. I’d make it up. ‘The seventh one.’ Something like that.”
“I always chose ‘Sapphic Suicide Note,’” Liv said.
“Blarg. Suicide again. That’s poets for you.”
Liv shrugged against her mother’s warmth. “I only liked it because it was short.”
Aggie snapped her fingers in a pretty funny pantomime of a slam-poetry fan. She was loose. Liv could imagine her being plenty charming before steakhouse patrons, and wasn’t loose and charming better than what she’d been during her husband’s final year—tense, helpless, sick with worry?
“Recite!” Aggie cried. “Recite!”
Liv could have. Seeking a leg up on future classmates, she’d cracked Resurrection Update as a freshman. At seven words, “Sapphic Suicide Note” was the first—and only—poem in the book she’d read, one so short she’d unwittingly memorized it while trying to figure out how someone got paid for putting a mere seven words on a page.
day out
no worldly joy
italics mine
The whole thing puzzled her, though it was the last two words that most baffled. When she’d asked her dad what they meant, he’d explained that “italics mine” was a phrase writers used when adding their own italicized emphasis to a quoted source. Fine, but there weren’t any italics in “Sapphic Suicide Note.”
“Dad always said poetry was full of secrets,” Liv sighed into her mom’s hair.
“I’m sorry, baby,” Aggie said.
Liv didn’t think Aggie was apologizing for the thirty-five copies of Resurrection Update missing from Baldwin’s shelf.
“It’s okay,” Liv replied.
“One day it’ll be better. You’ll see. The house and the yard. The bills. Somehow they all got lost, but we’re going to find them. They’re around here. I’ll neaten up the place. We’ll find them. My phone has a flashlight. Does yours, baby?”
Liv’s eyes swam in tears.
“Mm-hm,” she said.
“Good.” Her mother yawned. “Now what’s all this about Charles Dickens? A Christmas Carol. Tiny Tim. I remember George C. Scott as Scrooge. He flew through the night with a ghost. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”
Liv looked from the pile of ceiling plaster to the ruptured ceiling above it, wondering if the fracture was big enough to permit her passage when, at night, a certain ghost in a certain memory tried to pull her through it.
“Oliver Twist,” she said.
“Your school is doing the play, hm?”
“The musical. The one Dad did.”
“That’s odd.”
Liv sniffled hard, hoping the sharp inhale would spark her dampened rage. “How can they do that?” she pleaded. “It’s only been two years.”
“Has it been that long? Seems like”—Aggie clicked her tongue—“nothing.”
“Everyone will start talking about it again. The whole thing.”
“Nobody saw that show, baby. It was a … what do you call it?”
“Dress rehearsal. I know. But everyone heard about it. They still talk about it. Maybe you don’t hear about it, but I sure do.” Liv listened for any change in her mother’s breathing. “Doesn’t this make you mad?”
“I’m trying to be, baby. It’s just … I’m so. I’m so. The wine, I guess.”
“I mean, Ms. Baldwin—how could she? She’s a bitch. Isn’t she?”
Her mother yawned into Liv’s neck. “That’s right, baby.”
“With me still in school? She couldn’t wait one more year?”
“Shh, baby.”
“They won’t let it die. They won’t let him die.”
“We don’t own the play, baby. We don’t own people. We don’t own anything. It’s all just—poof. Dandelions in the breeze.”
Hot sadness filled Liv’s chest and burned to be cried out. Why was it only when her mother was drunk that she uttered words of such perfect, inadvertent beauty? Liv raised her hand, placed it on the back of her mother’s head, and pet it. The hair was brittle and poorly dyed, but still pretty. Liv’s hand, meanwhile, was not. Her nail polish was chipped to hell and her knuckles scabbed. She watched the scabs dive into her mother’s hair, then resurface, then dive, and it felt like her life.