Attach ments(91)

“Why do you think I can remember that,” she asked, “when you can’t? Why does nature do that to us? How does that serve evolution? Those were the most important years of my life, and you can’t even remember them. You can’t understand why it’s so hard for me to hand you off to someone else.

You want me to act casual.”

“You’re not handing me off. There’s no one else.”

“That girl. That terrible girl.”

“There isn’t a girl. I’m not seeing Sam.”

“Lincoln, she calls here. There’s no point in lying about it.”

“I haven’t talked to her. I haven’t been here to get her calls. Look, I’m sorry I lied to you, that I didn’t tell you about the apartment. But I’m not with Sam. I’m not with anyone. I wish I was, with somebody, I should be. I’m almost twenty-nine. You should want me to be.”

She huffed.

“I want to show you the apartment,” he said.

“I don’t need to see it.”

“I want you to. I want to show you.”

“We’ll talk about it after you eat.”

“Mom, I told you, I’m not hungry …” He pulled her arm toward him, away from stove. “Please.

Come with me?”

LINCOLN’S MOTHER GOT into his car reluctantly. She hated riding in the passenger seat, she said it made her nauseous. (Eve said letting anyone else control a situation for more than thirty seconds was what made her nauseous.) She was quiet while he drove to his new neighborhood, just a few miles away, and parked in front of the apartment building.

“This is it,” he said.

“What do you want me to say?” she asked.

“I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to see it.”

He got out of the car before she could argue. She followed reluctantly, stopping outside the car, in the middle of the sidewalk, and at the steps. He didn’t stop with her, so she followed. Into the building, quietly up the stairs, across the threshold. “Willkommen.” Lincoln held the door open. His mother took a few steps inside—looked around, looked up—and then a few more steps toward the windows. Sunshine was falling into the living room in thick golden stripes. She held her hand up, open, into the light.

“I’ll show you the kitchen,” Lincoln said, after a moment, closing the door. “Well, what there is of it. You can pretty much see it from here. And here’s the bedroom.” His mother followed him into the next room, glancing down at his new mattress. “And the bathroom’s right here. It’s really small.” She walked to the bedroom window, looked outside, then sat in the window seat.

“It’s nice, right?” he asked her.

She looked up at him and nodded. “It’s a beautiful space. I didn’t know you could find apartments like this around here.”

“Me neither,” he said.

“The ceilings are so high,” she said.

“Even on the third floor.”

“And the windows …Doris used to live here?”

He nodded.

“It suits you better.”

He wanted to smile and feel relieved, but there was still something about her—her voice, the way she was sitting—that told him he shouldn’t.

“I just don’t understand,” she said, leaning back against the glass, “why.”

“Why?”

“It’s nice,” she said, “it’s beautiful. But I don’t understand why you’d want to move out if you didn’t have to. If there really isn’t a girl. Why would you choose to be alone?”

He didn’t know how to answer.

“As long as you’re at home, you can save your money for other things,” she said. “You have plenty of space to yourself, you can do whatever you want. I’m there if you need me …Why?

“And don’t tell me,” she said, picking up speed, “that moving away is just something that people do. Because …because who cares what people do? And besides, that’s not even true. That’s a recent development. A Western development. This dividing the family up into tiny bites.

“What if you’d had nowhere to go when you came home from California? What if I’d told you the same thing that my mother told me when I left Eve’s father? ‘You’re on your own now,’ she said.

‘You’re a grown woman.’ I was twenty years old. And alone. I bounced around from one house to the next, sleeping on couches. With that tiny, little girl. Eve was so small …She slept right here”—his mother laid her hand on her chest, just below her throat—“because I was afraid of dropping her or losing her between the cushions …