Total pages in book: 112
Estimated words: 108049 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 540(@200wpm)___ 432(@250wpm)___ 360(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108049 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 540(@200wpm)___ 432(@250wpm)___ 360(@300wpm)
24
Taylor
On Sunday morning, while Conor’s out with the guys helping Coach Jensen get his kitchen in order, I do laundry and clean my own disaster of an apartment. It tends to be that the deeper into the semester it gets, the more my habitat starts to resemble the harried chaos shuffling around in my head.
When my phone rings, I drop the fitted sheet I’m struggling to fold, grinning to myself. I don’t even have to check the screen to know who it is. I knew this call was coming, and I knew it would happen this morning. Because my mother is the most predictable person on the planet and basically it went down like this: after driving back to Cambridge Saturday afternoon, she would’ve stayed up reading and grading papers with a glass of wine, then gotten up this morning to start her own laundry and vacuum, all the while rehearsing in her head how this conversation would go.
“Hey, Mom,” I say, answering the phone and plopping down on the couch.
She gets right to the point with a soft opening: “Well, that was some dinner.”
And I politely laugh in agreement and say, well, it wasn’t boring.
Then she agrees and says, good spring rolls, too. We’ll have to go back to that place.
So for two minutes we’re just stuck in a ping-pong match of platitudes about pad thai and plum wine until Mom works up the nerve to finally ask, “What did you think of Chad?”
How did this happen to us?
“He’s nice,” I reply. Because it’s the truth and reassuring enough. “He seems cool, I guess. And Conor says good things about him, so that’s something. How’s his hand?”
“Not too serious. It’ll heal in a few weeks.”
I hate this. Neither of us saying what we mean to say—that I don’t know how to like the guy my mother is dating, and that she, in turn, will be broken-hearted if Chad and I can’t find a way to be friends. Or if not friends, then at least something that looks close enough from a distance, because the alternative would be some awful feeling of incompleteness every time the three of us are in a room together.
I’ve never needed a father. Mom was more than enough, and if you asked her she would say the same thing—that I was enough for her, too. Yet I feel like there’s this programed patriarchal voice buried deep inside her, maybe the remnants of the society that raised her, saying she’s a failure as a mother and a woman if she doesn’t have a man in her life or can’t give her only daughter a male role model.
“Do you like him?” I ask awkwardly. “Because really, that’s more important. I saw no glaring flaws in him other than maybe don’t let him near an oven again.”
“I do like him,” she confesses. “I think he was nervous last night. Chad’s a private guy. He likes simple things and not a lot of fuss. I think getting you two girls together for the first time, having all of us together, was a lot of pressure for everyone. He was worried you might hate him.”
“I don’t hate him. And I’m sure he and I will find a way to get along if, you know, this is going to be a thing.”
Although I suppose it already is a thing. Wasn’t that the point of last night? Why we all nearly burned to death for a pot roast or whatever that blackened mess was?
My mother has gone and gotten herself into a thing with a Chad. A hockey Chad, to boot. What the fuck is it with us and hockey?
Did my dad play hockey? Isn’t it also a huge sport in Russia?
Has this been festering in my DNA this whole time like a dormant virus?
Am I going to be one of those fucking clichés who grows up to marry her dad?
Did I just insinuate I’d marry Conor?
Fuck.
“How will it work long term, though?” I ask. “I mean, if long term is where this is headed. Are you going to keep commuting or—”
“We haven’t discussed that,” she cuts in. “At this point it isn’t—”
It’s my turn to interrupt. “Because you realize you can’t leave MIT, right? For a man. I don’t want to be a snob or a bitch or whatever you want to call it, and I’m not trying to be mean. But you’re not leaving MIT for him, okay?”
“Taylor.”
“Mom.”
A flicker of panic tears through me, and I realize that maybe this new development is getting to me more than I’ve been willing to admit. It’s not like MIT and Briar are that far apart. But for a moment there, I imagined Mom selling our house, my childhood home, and—another jolt of dread hits me. Yeah, I definitely haven’t quite processed everything yet.