The Moment of Everything Read Online Free PDF Page B

house, which was too full of my parents’ deliberate joy with each other to leave room for me. As I pictured it, I could smell my mother’s lilac soap. She’d wait until just an hour before my father’s arrival at home to bathe, washing away the scent of the day spent out of his presence. Her longing for him frightened me. Our home was not enough for her. I was not enough for her. If I had ever lost my father, I would have been an orphan.
    “Do you know what your uncle Jamie said to me the other day?” Mama went on. “He asked me if you were one of those funny kind of girls. Then he tells me that it’s okay if you are because he accepts your ‘alternative lifestyle.’ He says this to me right by the Vidalia onions at the Winn-Dixie. I cannot have a gay child, Margaret Victoria. That’s all just fine about Dizzy. His mama has four more boys. But not me. It’s just you, and if you’re gay…Well, that’s just too much to ask of me.”
    I looked over at Dizzy and remembered telling Mama he was gay. To her credit, she never said a bad thing about him or treated him any differently, in that she still expected him to kowtow to her every desire in exactly the same way she did with everyone else. But every time she was around him, I could see the effort in her eyes as she reconsidered everything she said or did, as if instead of gay, he was from a foreign country. It wasn’t the matter that Dizzy was gay that bothered her. It was the inconvenience of it.
    “It’s because we let you read too much isn’t it?” she asked. “I never should have let you quit the tennis team. If you’d gotten more sun you wouldn’t be like this.”
    “Mama, I’m not gay.”
    Dizzy spewed his mocha all over his steering wheel.
    “Then come home and get married like a decent woman,” Mama said. “Bill Cumberland just got divorced.”
    “He’s as old as Daddy.”
    “He’s single.”
    “I have a life here.”
    “Do you have a husband? Do you have a family?”
    Again, I answered her with silence. Marriage had always seemed like some distant event to me, like that extra ten pounds people always say they’re going to lose.
    “Margaret Victoria, please explain to me what the point of all this is. You’ve been out there for ten years. Ten years. Now, you have gotten neither rich yourself nor married someone who is. I saw on Oprah the other day that there’re so many single men in Silicon Valley that they call San Jose ‘Man Jose.’ Apparently you can’t swing a dead cat without knocking over a dozen single men. With those kinds of numbers, what’s wrong with you, Margaret Victoria?”
    I could tell her about my last blind date, a couple of weeks ago, who canceled twice because of work then took me skydiving because he’d read a study online that doing something physically exhilarating on a date activated pheromones that led to attraction. I’m sure he was very interesting, but I was too busy throwing up from all the exhilaration to pay attention to what he was saying.
    “The odds are good, Mama. But the goods are odd.”
    “Then what is the point of staying out there?”
    I looked at Dizzy, hands on top of the steering wheel, thumbs tapping at a song in his head. I wanted to tell her that I came out here to be with my friend, that Dizzy and his family became my family when I realized I really had none of my own. I came here to prove something to myself, and that I was still trying to figure out exactly what that was.
    “Thank you for the table,” I said. “But I can’t accept it, and I can’t accept the money.”
    “You’re going to starve to spite me? They’re hiring secretaries at the new Mercedes plant in town. Men like secretaries. You could live here and drive to the plant every day.”
    “I’m not keeping the check, and I’m not keeping the table.”
    “You have to keep the table. It belonged to your grandmother.”
    I looked at the shipping invoice taped to my mother’s envelope. “It’s a Pottery