All This Talk of Love by Christopher Castellani

Author:Christopher Castellani
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2013-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

Part 2 Spring 2000

7 All of Us Are Leaving

IT’S NOT STALKING if you do it for your kids. This is what Prima tells herself as she idles in the parking lot of Padua Academy, sunglasses on, hair pulled back, waiting for Allison Grey. She’s Zach’s official girlfriend now, the one who’s luring him down from Penn State for her high school prom next month. He deserves to know what she’s up to while they’re apart.

It’s a warm March afternoon, the first of the season. The streets and cars are spit-shiny after the morning rain. Prima arranges herself in the driver’s seat in such a way to give her the best view while she soaks up the precious sunlight. Recently in McCall’s she read about a new disease called SAD, a mood disorder that can develop if you don’t spend enough time in the light. More women than men suffer from it, some so bad that doctors prescribe lying under lamps for hours at a time. It got Prima worrying that Syracuse was the wrong choice of college for Ryan. Frankie, too, up in snowy Boston. She can’t read anything nowadays without connecting it in some upsetting way to someone she loves.

It’s muggy in the car under the direct sun, but the windows are tinted and she can’t put them down. She struggles to remove the fur jacket Tom bought her six years ago—can it really be six?—for her fortieth birthday.

At Christmas, Frankie told her, “You can’t wear that thing in Boston, you know, if you ever visit me.”

“And why’s that?”

“They’ll scream at you. ‘Killer! KILLER!’ ”

“She didn’t club those little chinchillas to death,” Tom said. “If I didn’t buy it, some other lady’d have it on.”

“By wearing it, though, Prima implicitly endorses the process.”

“I guess I won’t see Boston in the winter, then,” she said. “Imagine owning a coat like this and not wearing it.”

It broke Prima’s heart when Frankie got so excited about a family trip to Boston. Only her parents have visited him there, and just the once, to move him in. Frankie drove them up in the old Toyota he bought from Tom, and they flew back the next day. He’s not a parent. He doesn’t know there are some things a mother can’t bear to see: the run-down apartment where her son will have to clean his own toilet, the city he chooses over you, his life spinning away from yours. Prima has visited Ryan at Syracuse and the twins at Penn State once only, to get them settled. She stayed three hours. It took a lot of effort not to look closely at anything. She didn’t want to remember the details—the cinder-block walls, the stinky ginkgo tree outside the dorm room window, the pretty girls in pink jackets bouncing along the paths. She bought no souvenirs from the campus bookstores. She prefers the blue-and-gold high school sweatshirts and pom-pommed hats, which remind her of fuller days.

At two thirty the double doors open and the Padua girls spill into the parking lot.

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