Perennials by Mandy Berman

Author:Mandy Berman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

7

John and Amy Larkin drove up Route 22 for Visitors’ Day. It was a clear, sunny morning, and Amy was surprised by how tired she was. As they drove, she realized that she hadn’t been up before ten since they’d dropped Helen off at camp three weeks earlier. Her body should have still awoken at six like clockwork given all the mornings over all the years making breakfasts and shuttling the kids to school. But every summer, once the kids were gone, she could not stop sleeping. She’d hear John’s alarm go off, roll over, and fall back asleep, only to reawaken some hours later to the late morning sun drenching her in its warmth. She wouldn’t get up right away; sometimes she would spend another hour in bed just watching the sun fall through the window. On these late mornings, she felt like a girl waking up in her mother’s bed—too small to have this thing all to herself and yet luxuriating in the feeling that this was a special occasion, that this could not happen on just any morning.

Her days were spent alone, planting flowers in the garden at home and then, later in the afternoons, driving to the community garden in town, where her vegetables grew, to harvest her cucumbers and tomatoes. Dinner was usually something simple, like a piece of salmon and a caprese with heirlooms and buffalo mozzarella. Sometimes John came home on time. Sometimes he did not tell her until the last minute that he wouldn’t make it for dinner. It had been like this on occasion when the kids were around, but it happened even more when Amy was the only one home. She never told him that this bothered her.

She had packed thermoses of coffee for John and herself for the drive, and she was guzzling hers. John had tuned the radio to jazz. He was doing that annoying thing, humming along to a song even though he had no idea where the tune was going. Amy had long ago stopped telling him about the things he did that annoyed her. She’d known John since she was nine, and now she was forty-six; she knew every one of his habits and tics, as spouses in most marriages did, but the difference was that Amy had watched those tics grow as he did. Now the humming, which was once a boyish quirk, had developed into a full-blown grown man’s assertion of himself. It was his way of taking up space in the car.

As they wound along the highway, she noted the breadth of trees flanking both sides of the road. There were no towns or even buildings in sight. Just trees. How quickly they had found themselves in the country. She felt a hint of jealousy of Helen, of her daughter’s still-intact childhood. She still got to attend camp, got to escape every summer, got to be a girl.

As soon as Amy drained the last of her coffee, she realized how urgently she had to pee.

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