My mom just got home, I said.
Is it crazy that I miss you?
Not crazy at all.
“How was work?” I said.
“Fine.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Send me a letter from Florida.
I will.
“What’s up?” I said.
She threw out the plastic jar. It landed hollowly in the bottom of the trash can. She sat against the counter. “Nothing,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I just thought you wanted to see me.”
SHE ASKED ME to leave by the middle of the next day.
“I just need this time alone before I work for twelve hours,” she said, walking me to my father’s car. “People take time off because they know I’ll cover it and I won’t complain,” she said, hugging me. “Thanks for understanding.”
“No worries, Mom. You should rest.”
“I wish I could.”
A MONTH LATER, she met the couple who would become her new family. They invited her to live with them in the nudist colony, and by Christmas, for the first time since flying me to college, she invited me down for winter break. I’m sure she did so knowing I wouldn’t come.
“You know my mind works so quickly,” she said, praising her new polycule’s generosity, their openness, their radical acceptance. “I’m very blunt, I talk quickly, it’s just how quickly my mind works, and I’m not a bullshitter. They’re the only people I’ve ever met who can keep up with me.”
I was happy for her.
When my father learned about her relationship, the first since they’d separated, he plunged into a depression that lasted for months. There were days of him not answering his phone. When he did, he was slow, as if drunk. “I know you don’t like her,” he told me. “I know that I left her. You know that I had to. But your mother is the only woman I’ve ever loved.”
IT’S AFTER MIDNIGHT. Jared’s head is in my lap on the porch, lit orange by a streetlight. A skink slips through a hole in the screen, then tries to find its way out again but can’t, and slithers into shadow. The pulse of the darkness closes in, and I realize I’ve waited too long to walk home, that I will need to ask Jared to drive me. A mosquito lands on the back of my hand, and I watch it suck me, detached but fascinated. I kill it.
Jared’s breathing has slowed, but he wakes with my movement, and I comb my fingers through his hair.
“I’m just curious,” I say, as he opens his eyes. “What if you and I wanted to fuck?”
He considers it. He rubs his face with his palm. “I would talk to Seth about it,” he says.
“I’m surprised.”
“As you know, he’s never been open to any kind of nonmonogamy, ethical or otherwise.” He sits up. “It’s his upbringing. He doesn’t espouse Lutheranism, but he takes comfort in its traditions.”
“It’s frustrating.”
“It’s up to you whether or not you want to accommodate him. I’ve talked to Seth about polyamory. He does listen. He’s just a very fearful person. Trauma has lasting effects.”
“I’m aware.”
“His parents divorced and his father died less than a year later.”
“Is it always about that?”
“In some ways, that’s when Seth stopped maturing.”
Four
When I don’t respond to her email, my mother begins texting me.
Happy birthday, Nina! she says. I’m so proud of the strong, confident woman you’ve become. We’re constantly changing and evolving. Cheers to many more years of growth and learning.
I’m sorry I haven’t reached out. I know I’ve been distant for a long time and I feel like a terrible mother. I just went to the beach and remembered how we used to look for sand dollars together. You were always so good at finding them! Love you, dear daughter.
Remember that I love you, dear daughter! Don’t ever forget that you are loved!
I hope you’re having a wonderful day! I miss you!
MY MOTHER IS the only person who has ever hit me in the face. I was eight and we were walking back from the public pool. I had finally learned to swim. In the past, when my mother has guilted me about my life choices, she has found it useful to remind me that she “taught me how to swim,” conveniently ignoring that it was mandatory for children to take swimming lessons in Florida public schools at the time.
It was summer and the sun was directly overhead. I had been taking swimming lessons at summer camp for three years already. But I wasn’t a strong swimmer and I was happy, finally able to tread water for sixty seconds or more, excited that this new skill would be rewarded with ice cream. This was before Breyers became “frozen dairy dessert.”
I was swinging my bathing suit in a circle, stupidly. It made a sound like thwack! when it hit her—I didn’t know what had happened. Before I could apologize, she hauled off and decked me.
I fell on the sidewalk. I sat looking at how it sparkled. She told me that I would have to lie to my father about the black eye.
We never talked about it, and she never apologized or explained herself, and it never happened again, physically. Those who know her know that beneath her anger is tenderness, and beneath her tenderness is fury. She’s the youngest of three children, with two older brothers. She had to learn at a young age how to defend herself. “She’s the most difficult person in my life,” my uncle Jude once told me.
IT’S THREE WEEKS before the move, and my father asks to see me. I bring Odessa as a buffer, and Odessa brings her twelve-year-old, Maxima. Max is genderqueer, but they haven’t told their mother, and their mother still uses feminine pronouns—Odessa thinks nonbinaryism and transgenderism are trends, and says things like, “Is everyone gay now?” and, “I wouldn’t know what to do down there.” She tells Max, “What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.” I’ve tried to complexify and resist this idea in private with Max, but it’s hard to explain to a middle schooler how they’re their own person.
It’s half an hour to the beach condo, where we hope my father will feed us. A storm is blowing in from the Gulf. It could wash the red tide out or spread it around; there’s no predicting. They’ve identified the culprit as chemical runoff from agriculture and phosphorous mining. Greed selling us out in Tallahassee. It could take months to dissipate, and there’s nothing they can do to speed it up. You can’t Monistat the ocean.
We park beneath the stilted building and climb the stairs to the second floor, looking out over the churning, rust-colored water. Some diehards are out there in the shallows. Disgusting. My father answers in his work slacks with his shirt open and a bottle of cold-brew coffee in hand. Since recovering from my mother’s midlife crisis, he’s become a serial dieter, obsessed with wellness. “I’m no longer consuming free radicals,” he told me on the phone last night. Apparently these are unpaired electrons that cause oxidative stress. Now he’s on a low-carb, high-antioxidant diet, of mostly nuts and berries. He looks fragile and bewildered, like a bird. The room smells pleasantly rancid, and it turns out he’s composting in a mini dumpster on the kitchen counter. I would say that my father needs to get laid, but he’s learned to be too happy alone.