Attach ments(12)
“How does money come between you and the people you love?”
“It’s coming between us right now.”
It wasn’t really the tuition that bothered his mother about California. She didn’t want him to go to California because she didn’t want him to go. She didn’t want him to go so far. And she didn’t want him to go so far with Sam.
His mother didn’t like Sam.
She thought Sam was self-centered and manipulative. (“Pot. Kettle. Black,” Eve said.) His mother thought Sam was loud. And pushy. And too full of opinions. She complained when Lincoln spent too much time at Sam’s house. But when he brought Sam home, that was worse. Sam would do something —rearrange the spice cabinet, turn on too many lights, say that she couldn’t stand green peppers or anything with walnuts or Susan Sarandon—that irritated his mother. “Is she always like that, Lincoln?”
“Like what?”
“Is she always so much?”
“Yes,” he’d said, trying not to sound as happy as he felt. “Always.”
His mother tolerated the Sam situation, mostly quietly, for about a year. Then she started talking to Lincoln about how young he was, too young to be so serious about one person. She asked him to slow down, to think about seeing other girls. She said to him, “It’s like buying shirts, Lincoln. When you go shopping for shirts, you don’t buy the first shirt you try on. Even if you like it. You keep looking, you keep trying things on. You make sure you find the shirt that fits you best.”
“But Mom, what if the first shirt is the best shirt? And what if it’s gone by the time I’m done shopping? What if I never find a shirt like that again?”
She wasn’t used to him arguing with her. “This isn’t about shirts, Lincoln.”
She always used his name when she talked to him. No one else said his name unless they were trying to get his attention. It was like she was patting herself on the back for thinking of such a great name—or maybe trying to remind him that it was she who had named him. That he was her doing.
Once, during those mildly turbulent teenage years, the Sam years, he had yelled at his mother, “You don’t understand me!”
“Of course I understand you, Lincoln,” she replied. “I’m your mother. No one will ever know you like I do. No one will ever love you like I do.”
Sam had proved his mother wrong.
And then had proved her right.
But before all that, Sam had sat on his bed with a green Mead notebook and said, “Come on, Lincoln, you have to pick a major.”
“You pick my major,” he’d said. He’d laid his head on her lap and kept reading a paperback, something with swords and goblin queens.
“Lincoln. Seriously. You have to declare a major. It’s required. Let’s focus here. What do you want to do with your life?”
He set down his paperback and smiled at her until she smiled back at him. “You,” he said, touching his thumb to her chin.
“You can’t major in me.”
He turned back to his book. “Then I’ll figure it out later.”
She snatched the book from his hands. “Can we please just talk about this? Seriously?”
He sighed and sat up next to her. “Okay. We’re talking.”
“Okay.” She smiled, she was getting her way. “Now, think about it, what do you want to do for a living?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think you might want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you good at? And don’t say you don’t know.”
He didn’t say anything at all. She stopped smiling. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll make a list.” She opened the notebook and wrote THINGS LINCOLN IS GOOD AT at the top of the page.
“Dangling preposition,” he said. “Dubious start.”
Number one, she wrote, Grammar.
“And spelling,” he said. “I won the fifth-grade spelling bee.”
2. Spelling.
3. Math.
“I’m not good at math.”
“You are,” she said. “You’re in honors calculus.”
“I’m good enough to be in honors calculus, but I’m not good at honors calculus. I’m getting a B.”
She underlined “Math.”
“What else?” she asked him.
“I don’t like this,” he said.
“What. Else.” She poked him in the chest with the end of her purple ink pen.
“I don’t know. History. I’m good at history.”
4. History.
“You’re good at physics, too,” she said, “and social studies. I saw your report card.”