Page 17 of Someone Like Me
I open my eyes, type the password, and Skype call my mother. It takes so long for her to answer, my mind starts running through terrible scenarios. But then her smiling face takes up my laptop screen.
“Hi, angel! How ya doing?” She squints at the screen through her glasses. “Is your hair wet?” She’s in her silk blue and white striped pajamas. She looks tired, but I can tell she’s curled up in her favorite chair, the lamp glowing beside her. The windows that look out onto their gorgeous garden are dark.
“Mom, what’s wrong? Why are you calling this late? Is Dad okay?” I can see just looking at her there’s no emergency, but I can’t help asking.
Mom tilts her head to the side, pursing her bottom lip with a regretful smile. “Everything’s fine. I didn’t mean to scare you.” She shrugs and shakes her head, wrinkling her nose. “I just can’t sleep. I think it’s hormones.”
Mom turned fifty in March, and the way she tells it, she got her first hot flash from blowing out her birthday candles.
The tightness in my belly unspools. I let go a sigh. “Sorry you can’t sleep.” I scoot back against my headboard, tuck my legs into a lotus pose, and prop the laptop on one knee.
“Honey, tilt the camera up. I’m staring at your neck,” Mom says.
I laugh and do as she asks. “So other than insomnia, what else is going on?”
Her hazel eyes turn owlish behind her glasses. “I think I should be asking you.” A small crease appears between her brows. “Tori says you’re going on a date Friday with a boy you despise and baking for an ex-con?”
I palm my forehead. Leave it to Tori to dramatize the most mundane of events. “Ugh. Is that what she told you?”
I see her fighting a smile. “Pretty much. Want to sort out fact from fiction?”
That’s when it hits me. It’s all fact.
“Well… Drake is one of my yoga students, and I sort of…” I make a face, “owed it to him.”
Mom arches a thin, perfect brow over the rim of her glasses. “Youowesomeone you don’t likea date?I feel sure your father and I raised you better than that,” she says in her teasing tone, but she leans closer as though to look me in the eyes, but really, she’s just looking at a screen. And I’m looking at her image on the screen in front of me, not directly into the camera.
So neither one of us is really seeing the other.
“How, exactly, did that happen?” she asks.
I sigh. “He’s been bugging me to go out with him, and Monday he hurt himself in my class, and I felt bad for him, and I guess also a little responsible, and…” I shake my head and roll my eyes. “I guess I couldn’t say no.”
Mom studies me, a smile curling one corner of her mouth. She’s always been so beautiful. Her platinum blonde hair has lost a little of its luster to a light gray, but she’s as glamorous as ever. Even at two in the morning.
Tori got her coloring, but I look like Dad. Dark eyes, curly brown hair.
“My soft-hearted girl,” she says with a sigh. “You’d better be careful. You’ll find yourself married to some poor slob just because you felt sorry for him.”
“Mom.”
My tone, which really comes out sounding like the one I used at sixteen, makes her laugh. I miss that laugh. I miss her.
Her laugh ends in a kind of humming lilt I’ve known all my life. “Just promise me you won’t let this Drake character take advantage of your good nature.”
“It’ll be fine, Mom.” But if I wasn’t looking forward to Friday night before, I’m all out dreading it now. I already know it’s going to be awkward, and now I’ll probably have to tell her all about it when we have our family Skype on Sunday.
Thanks a lot, Tori.
Then her gaze sharpens with interest. “And what’s this about baking for criminals? Is this a new charity endeavor of yours?”
“Tori,” I mutter under my breath. “I made a zucchini bread for Mrs. Vivian and her grandson, that’s all—”
Mom shoots up so that the top of her head is out of frame. “Her grandson? The Moroux boy? He’s been released?” Her hazel eyes are wide now, magnified by her bifocals.
Her surprise throws me. As does the fact she knows his name. “I — yeah, I mean, I guess so.” What kind of answer is that? Of course he’s been released. It’s not like he escaped.
He didn’t escape, right? Mrs. Vivian wouldn’t be harboring an escaped felon.
