More Than Enough by John Fulton

Author:John Fulton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466890602
Publisher: Picador

Five

“YOU FORGOT TO TAKE the hat off,” Jenny said in the car.

“Jesus,” she said, pulling it off and throwing it into the backseat as if it were diseased. “I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe I ever worked that job.”

You wouldn’t have known she’d ever been a nurse by the way she was dressed now. She wore a crisp, knee-length khaki skirt that hugged her hips and emphasized the tight thinness of her middle. I’d never seen the pink blouse she wore, bright and new looking. It made me think again of how men could desire her, how they could want my mother not because her blouse was tight or suggestive, but because it was elegantly thin—you could make out the straps and lattice of her bra through the fabric—and because the brief handles of her clavicles showed in the slightly open V of her collar. She’d never looked this good around the house, and she’d never worn this particular outfit there, either. “You look beautiful,” Jenny said with too much enthusiasm.

“Yes,” I said in what I hoped was an accusatory tone, “you do.”

“Thank you, Steven,” she said.

When we pulled out of Oak Groves and onto Seventh East, I looked everywhere for a sign of my father in a cab, but saw nothing. “What’s wrong with you, Steven?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Sit still,” she said. She was looking into a little round makeup mirror and applying her lipstick as she drove. We were headed toward the Avenues, and something peculiar was happening with the weather. It was still drizzling, but the sun seemed to be rising and not setting. It had to do, I knew, with the descending edges of the mountains to the west so that as the sun dipped below them it seemed to ascend. It was an illusion. Still, I hadn’t expected to see this giant red sun light up half the sky so that bright curtains of rain seemed to hover in the air. It was like a spring shower, only it was still February. I rolled down the window and breathed in the green, damp smell of a season that had not yet come, and wondered where the hell winter had gone. We were supposed to be hunkered down beneath blankets at home, waiting it out together, staying warm, shoveling snow, eating soup, building log fires—though we didn’t have a fireplace, of course—doing whatever we needed to do to defend one another from the cold out there. It wasn’t right.

I looked over at my mother and saw a magnified slice of her mouth in the makeup mirror. She snapped it shut. “I’m sorry if Nurse Brown was hard on you two. She is a very unhappy woman. Some people are just unhappy, and they don’t know how to be anything else.” The way she said that, I understood that my mother was determined not to be one of them. That’s what all this was about.

“I didn’t mind Nurse Brown,” I said.

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