Sleeping Tigers (19 page)

He smiled. “They look more like soup bowls to me.”

I punched him lightly on the arm. “The thing is, I keep wondering if the whole handle will break off next, you know?”

David looked at me with those dark, kind eyes and then kissed me full on the mouth. “We all get to be new once,” he said. “And then we all have to survive the dishwasher. You’re a beautiful woman, Jordan,” he had added, and I believed that he meant it.

“You all right?” David asked now, leaning down to kiss me good morning.

“Sure.” I propped myself up on the pillows, bleary from lack of sleep and cotton-headed with a throbbing hangover. I wished I had a comb and a mirror, or that I could at least brush the sweaters off my teeth before David kissed me goodbye.

I took his hand and held it to my cheek, hoping to persuade him to stay a little, but then the doorbell rang. It had to be Karin with Paris. Who else would appear at this hour?

It was as if someone had thrown a switch from forgetting to remembering. Immediately, I was conscious again of Paris, of how much I missed her. Her blanket was still tucked beneath my pillow, where I’d stashed it after David fell asleep, just to have her smell nearby. Now the waiting was over. Hangover momentarily forgotten, morning lust shoved to the back burner, I sprang out of bed and pulled on my underpants and a faded t-shirt.

“Need these?” David held up the jeans I’d stripped off last night. “I can hide in the closet if you want.”

I tugged on my jeans. “No need. I’m sure it’s Karin, and she’ll want full credit for you being here.”

I stepped outside, wincing at the feel of cold cement on my feet. I was dimly aware of Karin’s presence, and of her car idling at the curb beyond her, but I had eyes only for Paris. I caressed her silky head. “Hey, baby,” I murmured. “I missed you!”

Paris squealed, clapping her hands.

“Hey, yourself.” Karin sounded grumpy, so unlike herself that I looked at her more closely. I didn’t like what I saw. Karin looked stunned, as if she were the one who’d been up all night. Maybe she had. Her face was pale, devoid of makeup, and her hair was tangled. Even her clothing, a gray sweatshirt and a pair of matching sweat pants, didn’t look right. I urged her to come inside. “I’ll make you tea.”

“I really can’t stay.” Karin rolled her eyes and jerked her chin toward the street. “Prepare yourself.”

Was she having a seizure? Exercising her facial muscles? “Oh, come on. Just for a minute. I’ve got a surprise for you,” I coaxed.

“Yeah? Well, I’ve got a surprise for you, too,” she said.

I heard David’s footsteps behind me. Karin peered around my shoulder and groaned at the sight of him. “This is going to be even worse than I thought.”

“What is? Why are you acting so weird?” I asked, impatient now.

Behind Karin, my mother burst out of the car like a stripper out of a cake. One minute there was emptiness, and then there was Mom, armed with an umbrella, a shoulder bag and a suitcase on wheels.

“Mom! What are you doing here?” I clutched the baby to my chest like a shield.

“Hello, Jordan,” she said through her teeth. “There’s no need to shout.”

Mom wore her best wrinkle-free pants suit. She’d worn that same knit suit on the two-day drive to Grammy’s funeral, and once on an anniversary car trip to the Cape with my father. The suit was a luminescent orange color that she optimistically called “ripe pumpkin.” If you knotted the legs and arms of that suit, it would make a perfect life raft.

She had splurged on a new perm. The frayed gray curls stood about my mother’s head like sea anemones on a rock, waving slightly in the morning breeze. “Who’s this?” Mom pointed over my shoulder with the umbrella.

“Uh, this is Karin’s friend, David Goldstein,” I fumbled. “And David, this is Grace O’Malley, my mother. He’s a doctor,” I remembered to add.

“A doctor making a house call! Well. And here I was, thinking that our nation’s health coverage was going to hell in a hand basket.” Mom sailed past me, the suitcase wheezing and tottering behind her like an arthritic spaniel on a leash.

“Meet my mother,” I said to David.

Karin fluttered her fingers. “Good to see you, glad not to be you!”

“Oh, no, you don’t.” I grabbed Karin by the elbow. “Stay for coffee, why don’t you?” I hissed.

“Not a chance.” Karin set her jaw.

“What am I going to do?”

“I don’t know, but think fast,” Karin said. “I’ve been with your mom since 11 o’clock last night, when I found her weeping outside the baggage claim at the airport because you didn’t pick up your cell and she was convinced that you’d been mugged in the big bad city. And hey, guess what? I had to tell her she was right!”

“Oh, no,” I moaned.

“Oh, yes. I had to drive with that baby of yours screaming in the back seat like a howler monkey all the way to the airport and back. Now your mom knows she’s a granny. Imagine her surprise! I know you must have told her somewhere along the line, but gosh, somehow it must have slipped her mind.”

“I just couldn’t do it.”

“I don’t mind being your stand-in,” Karin said, “but it would be a lot easier if I knew my lines beforehand.”

David draped his arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. “Just tell your mom the truth, Jordan. There’s no point in trying to hold anything back now.”

“I was trying to do the right thing,” I said. “I wanted to find Cam and get him to do something about Nadine and the baby before I told Mom anything.”

Karin sighed. “Yeah, but sometimes the right thing isn’t the best thing, is it?” She hugged me. “Good luck. I’ll check in later. I still love you even if you’re a complete idiot.”

David hugged me, too, and kissed me lightly on the mouth. “Want me to stay?”

I shook my head. “This is already complicated enough,” I said, glad to have Paris’s hand wrapped in my hair and anchoring me in place. Otherwise I might have fled the scene.

Then I was alone with Paris and my mother in my studio apartment.

Mom stood in the middle of the room, her bags on either side of her, the umbrella dangling from her elbow. “So this is it?”

“Yep. Want the grand tour? I promise it’ll take less than an hour.”

She didn’t crack a smile. “Well, you never were one for housekeeping.”

I was suddenly aware of the bed with its tangled sheets floating in the middle of the room like a cruise ship abandoned at the docks. “No,” I agreed. “Cleaning house always seems so futile. The dishes are never all done and there’s always more laundry.”

My mother must have known I was looking at the bed behind her, but she didn’t turn around. “My God, Jordan! Your bed with Peter isn’t even cold, and yet here you are, frolicking!”

“Mom, it’s not like I’m a widow,” I reminded her. “Peter’s not dead. There’s no need for a proper mourning period. Look, let’s not talk now. You’re tired. I’m tired, too. Get cleaned up, and then we can have a real conversation. I’ll go for a coffee run.” I was desperate to escape.

“Where’s your brother?” she demanded. “Just tell me that much. I understand this trouble concerns him more than it does you.” She jutted her chin in the baby’s direction.

“This ‘trouble’ is your granddaughter. And I’ll tell you everything I know, but only after I get some coffee,” I said, lifting the baby backpack from its hook on the door.

“What in God’s name is that?” my mother demanded.

“A backpack for babies.”

“In my day, we strapped them into strollers.”

“The backpack’s easier when you’re shopping someplace like that little corner store. The aisles there are so narrow, Paris grabs stuff off the shelves if she’s in the stroller.”

Mom frowned, watching me open the metal stand on the backpack, set it on the counter, and drop Paris inside the canvas pack like an orange into a Christmas stocking. “In my day, we didn’t let children grab,” she noted, before exclaiming, “Jordan, that baby’s going to fall right out of there and break her neck!”

“No, she’s perfectly safe. Look, I’ve strapped her in.” I backed into the pack like a horse backing into a carriage, and buckled the belt around my waist to take the weight off my shoulders. “See how easy?”

Unfortunately, I turned without folding the metal backpack stand down first. The stand caught on the teapot and sent it flying off the counter.

Mom’s reflexes had always been good; I’d inherited that from her. She dropped her umbrella and caught the teapot before it hit the ground. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Perfectly safe.”

Paris giggled. For a minute, Mom and I smiled. Then we resumed our standoff. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” I promised.

Kanchan was besieged this morning by customers buying doughnuts and coffee, but today, as always, she ignored the line of customers to chat up the baby. “How’s life, little one?” she said.

“Her grandmother’s visiting,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

Kanchan read the panic in my eyes. She patted my hand and pushed a couple of fancy chocolate bars across the counter when I was buying the coffee. “Here! Sugar on the house!”

In all, Paris and I were gone twenty minutes. My mother was nowhere in sight when I opened the apartment door. I thought she must be in the bathroom until her head popped up over the kitchen counter. She wore rubber gloves and, when I stepped up to the counter, I could see that she’d been on her hands and knees next to a bucket of soapy water, scrubbing my kitchen floor.

“Mom! Your nice travel outfit!”

“You know what?” My mother sat back on her knees. “I had my colors done by that Belinda Little at my salon, and she says I’m a winter, not an autumn. How could I have gone so wrong?” She sniffed. “I’m dumping this suit into the free box at the church the very second I get home. Then it’s blues and greens for me.”

“Please, Mom. Get up! This is embarrassing! What makes you think I haven’t washed the floor?”

She waved a grimy sponge the size of a toaster. “I know how much time babies take. And you can’t ever have the floor too clean with a baby in the house.”

“But where’d you find that sponge? And those gloves?”

“I brought them with me in my carry-on. You just never know.”

I imagined my mother sponging out the tiny sinks on the plane. There would be no stopping her now. The next time I went out, she’d probably arrange my clothes by color the way she had at home when I was a child, from blacks to brights to pastels, white blouses dangling at the end of the rack like surrendering flags.

I kept Paris in the backpack while I made the coffee, then stood over my mother, arms folded, until she agreed to sit outside on the deck with me. I’d made cinnamon toast, too; Paris gummed a triangle of toast while stacking metal measuring cups on the wooden deck.

My mother still refrained from asking questions about the baby. What exactly had Karin told her? I studied Mom as we ate, trying to wrap my mind around the idea that she was now a grandmother. Even if she wasn’t acting like one, she looked the part: the gray curls, the tight mouth, the knit suit, the sensible rubber-soled walking shoes.

Had distress and fatigue made her look older in just a few days? Or had she always looked this way, and I only now realized it?

Mom was describing her cross-country odyssey. Yesterday, unable to reach me for the fourth day in a row, she’d taken a cab to the Boston airport and bought a ticket on the spot. “I just had this feeling that you needed me,” she said, her chin trembling.

She had called me every ten minutes from the San Francisco airport for two hours before finally giving up and phoning Karin. As she talked, I could imagine it all, even the suitcase packed with clothing that had been ironed and meticulously rolled into narrow tubes to avoid wrinkling, the tidy handwriting on the note she’d left for my father describing each plastic container in the freezer.

I was still incredulous. Mom had never traveled alone, not even to her sister’s in Rhode Island, because my father had convinced her it would be unsafe. Dad had deliberately bought a house in a town “on the way to nowhere,” just to keep his family untouched by city sinner ways. He was certain, therefore, that we were all easy prey.

“Your mother could carry on a conversation with a deaf mute for six hours,” Dad believed, “and his ears would be bleeding from the noise while some idiot snatched your mother’s purse on the sly.”