A Parallel Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

came and brought a dozen pink roses and a gold chain necklace with a tiny diamond—her birthstone. The next day Bill went back east on business for two weeks and I missed him.
    On the day after Bill left, I got a call at work from Jack. He and Roxie were flying to Miami to take a Caribbean cruise. It was something they’d always talked about but had never done. “The worst is over,” he said. “She’s on the mend.”
    I wanted to believe him. He said he’d call me when he got back.
    I hung up and was surprised by how much relief I felt. I wouldn’t see Jack again. I’d talk to him on the phone and tell him I was out of it. If he wanted to have an affair, he’d find someone—probably in a matter of hours. Ben Michaelsen, a co-worker, had been looking for someone to trade hours with so he could go back to school part-time. I’d give him my split shift. I’d go home at five each day and work in the yard. I’d buy seeds and compost and fertilizer and plant a vegetable garden. I’d be home in a kitchen redolent with spices, with the juices of simmering stews, with fruit in golden-crusted pies when Bill got home from work.
    Mr. Boudreau called a few days later to tell me that my mother had slapped the cheek of the daughter of one of the other tenants in the front hallway of the building. According to the mother of the girl, my mother had come out into the hall to tell her that she played her stereo too loud. When the girl said she didn’t think it was too loud, my mother called her a bitch. In return the girl called my mother a bitch and my mother slapped her.
    â€œYour mother, she can be so sweet sometimes, but other times . . .” Mr. Boudreau let his voice drift off like a radio slipping out of range. “She always pays on time and I appreciate that but . . .”
    â€œShe’s been there for years.”
    â€œI know . . .” He was waiting for me. I waited for him.
    â€œIf she was my mother, I’d be worried . . .”
    I was worried, I assured him. But she liked living there. I didn’t want to relocate her against her will. I could see him shaking his head in agreement on the other end of the phone the way he always did, no matter what I said, whenever I spoke to him. I told him I’d drive down that evening.
    My mother had moved to Oakland to be closer to her sister. When her sister died, my mother stayed on. Her sister, a religious woman who heard the litany of my mother’s tribulations over and over again, had been her only real friend. “High strung,” they’d once called people like my mother. “Nervy.”
    She’d always had a temper. She’d pulled our hair when we were girls. Slapped both of us. She threw things at my father. She had a bone to pick with the world and for this everyone suffered. She was angry, she was anxious, she was miserable. When my father had been there, she said he drove her crazy with his demands. When he was gone, she wailed because she’d been deserted. She used menopause as an excuse for more erratic behavior for the next fifteen years. Bill had me take her to a doctor, then a psychiatrist. Both were vague. The psychiatrist prescribed tranquilizers. She’d take them for a while and then decide that they were destroying her—and in a way she was right. She was an angry woman—not a tranquil one. She felt like a traitor to herself when she wasn’t filled with rage.
    She let me in without any problems this time, but she wouldn’t speak. I followed her into the kitchen where she sat and stabbed a fork into some brownish mess sitting in an aluminum tray—Salisbury steak?—forked a piece into her mouth and began to chew, scowling as her jaws ground the meat into paste.
    â€œI’ve had a bad report,” I said, sitting opposite and feeling foolish and resentful for having to behave like a principal.