“Only later,” I say. “After my mother pointed it out.”
She looks back and forth—to my face, back to the portrait.
“You still look the same.” She smiles at me. “Same killer cheekbones, regal nose, and serious dark eyes. You were an old soul.”
“So they tell me.”
I hand her a cup of coffee, and she takes it, puts it down on the coaster.
“So,” she says. “I think I was the last one to talk to Anisa.”
I settle in across from her.
“Brianna hasn’t spoken to her since February of last year,” she goes on. “Brent—you know Brent—has lost his phone since she left. So he doesn’t have a log of their calls. Just a few texts.”
She looks down studiously at the notes she’s scribbled in that Moleskine with just a few pages left blank. “Chloe can’t remember but thinks it was sometime after—you know, what happened.” She casts an apologetic look in my direction.
“Anisa mentioned Parker to Chloe. But like Brianna thought, Chloe also said Anisa didn’t seem that into him. Anisa billed him as some extreme early retirement guy—one of those geeks who lives on like ten percent of his income and tries to retire by thirty.”
“That tracks. Parker Pinches Pennies or whatever,” I say.
“According to Chloe, Anisa found that really annoying. Said he was cheap. A freeloader, basically.”
She really did hate cheap people; it was kind of a pet peeve. She was unfailingly generous—showering me and all her friends with expensive gifts, picking up the tab at tony restaurants.
Outside someone leans on a car horn. Some shouting follows. Then things go quiet again.
“I probably shouldn’t say this.” Emily takes a sip of her coffee, closes up her notebook. “I always figured you two would get back together—even after all the drama.”
My heart clenches a little.
“That’s a romantic notion. If I was her friend?” I say. “I’d have told her to run and not look back. I was not my best self.”
That’s such a “now” thing, isn’t it? My best self. Is it a goal? An ultimate destination? Or is it a fluid thing, something that might ebb and flow with the tides of our lives?
“What about now?” asks Emily. “Are you your best self now?”
“Honestly, I don’t even know what that means anymore.”
She lets out a little laugh, curls her stocking feet up under her.
“Does anyone?”
“Parker seems to.” I hold up the phone. He’s a good-looking guy—a vegan hottie with stylish stubble and cut abs. He’s fast becoming a millennial finance guru—quoted all over the place. But his stuff too—lifted more or less from everything else out there. Not spending a dollar is like earning a dollar. Um, hello, Benjamin Franklin—a penny saved is a penny earned?
Meanwhile, there’s nothing about him online. Parker doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile. There’s no personal Facebook or Instagram page—with pictures of friends and family, party shots, or his nephew’s first birthday party. His social-media presence is on point—only about his finance blog and his Parker Pinches Pennies persona. The real Parker is nowhere to be found.
She leans in to stare at my phone.
“He looks like a dick,” Emily says flatly. I laugh. It’s funny when kind, careful people say what they’re really thinking.
“She sure can pick ’em,” I say.
She issues a knowing snort.
The list of Anisa’s exes is long and colorful, kind of a running joke among her friends.
The tattooed bartender who smoked so much dope that he regularly passed out cold while they were making love. The hirsute hedge fund manager who could never, ever not be looking at his phone. The off-Broadway actor who kept a picture of his mother by his bed. The timid IT guy who still had a VCR, along with a complete cataloged set of Seinfeld episodes that he rewatched and quoted endlessly. I never minded talking about her past, especially since I was always billed as the light at the end of the long, dark dating tunnel. The prince to all her frogs. Until I wasn’t.
We decide Emily’s next call should be to Anisa’s mother, Jenny. There is a rule for calling Jenny. Never after six. Anisa’s mother starts drinking at lunch and is pretty much on an alcohol drip until she falls asleep in front of the television at night. She is fine, more or less, until the second glass after dinner—then she might turn maudlin or belligerent, nostalgic, exuberant, clingy, or downright mean.
It’s 7:02 p.m. when Emily calls her, putting her on speaker while I sit silent, and it apparently isn’t one of Jenny’s better nights.
“Hey, Jenny, it’s Emily, Anisa’s friend from college.”
“Oh,” she says. Anisa used to say there was a pitch, a shift in tone that she could pick up on in one syllable. Over the time I got to know Jenny a little, I became able to discern it as well. It was kind of a sloppy wobble to words, a sharpness of tone. “Hello, Emily. Do you ever hear from my daughter?”
“Actually,” Emily says, glancing at me, “I was calling to ask you the same thing.”
A snort, the tinkle of ice in a glass. “Would you believe it’s been over a year since she called her mother? Not that I’m sitting by the phone. I have a life, you know.”
“A year?”
“Well, you know she has nothing but a catalog of complaints about me. Apparently, I was the world’s worst mother. The last I heard from her—a text, of all things—she was done with me. She said I was a sandbag in her life, one she had to cut loose in order to be free.”
Clutter clearing, shedding the things that no longer serve, moving away from toxic people, dead relationships, the life-changing magic of getting rid of all your shit. It’s another very “of the moment” thing for our generation.
But I look around my parents’ place, the house that belonged to my grandparents, the same floors they walked on, pieces of well-made furniture that have aged with grace over generations, that have embraced us in times of joy and sorrow—Christmas mornings and birthday parties, the gathering after my sister’s funeral. There are boxes of photos, childhood drawings and report cards, wedding china on which festive meals have been served to imperfect gatherings of friends and family. Piles of books, collected art of varying quality, notebooks of poetry and fiction that will never be read.
How do you discern between the things that hold you back and the things that hold you up? My parents have made mistakes. I have too. Maybe they have enabled me, softened blows, causing me to grow up unable to deal with the harsh realities of life. And I have been in trouble, was a middling student, an inconsiderate son at times.
And I tried to kill the only child they had left—myself. But we’re all still here, making our way, together. I can’t imagine being done with them, or they with me. Sometimes if we cut too many sandbags, we float away. Is that what happened to Anisa? Did Anisa float away? Having shed all her family and friends, did she disappear into the ether?
“I tried to tell her.” Jenny and Emily are still on the phone, Jenny’s words dipping and pitching. “She can stop talking to me, stop visiting me. But I’ll always be her mother. Like it or not.”