Ninety Days by Bill Clegg
Author:Bill Clegg [Clegg, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316201926
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2012-04-10T04:00:00+00:00
Hey, lambchop, she whispers as I sit down. Annie is wearing, as usual, a thrift store ensemble of Rickie Lee Jones–style beret, a big-plastic-buttoned purple cardigan sweater, and denim overalls. Long time no talk, she says.
The meeting starts. At the break, I raise my hand and announce that I have one day and Pam gasps above the clapping, Oh, honey. In between the 12:30 and the two o’clock, I finally listen to my messages. It’s a familiar series of regular check-in messages that, one by one, lose their carefree tone and crumble from concern to anger. My mother leaves three or four and the last one is a doozy. She is crying and she is angry and she shouts more than says, You have stolen from me and you need to call me right away. I haven’t seen my mother since an afternoon last year when she left me in a restaurant after I brought up some difficult and never before spoken-about memories from my childhood. Since then we’ve barely talked and I have not seen her. I ask her, through my sister Kim, not to come to Lenox Hill while I am there, and when she offers to visit me in rehab and in the city after I return, again I tell her, through Kim, that I’d rather she did not.
Before the day in the restaurant I’d always been her faithful lieutenant in the ongoing war with my father. Never questioned her side of things, stood by her in the divorce, and generally agreed with her version of events, whatever they were. But with the marvels of therapy, a pushy counselor in rehab, and the miracle of suppressed memory, all that changed in the last year. Her tone with me—in voice mail messages, mostly—since that lunch has been conciliatory, careful, wounded. I cannot remember her ever being angry with me. We had always been on each other’s side. Me, Kim, and Mom against Dad. It was fun when he was away on a trip, tense when he returned. He was the dark one, she the light. When I was thrown out of college he was the one who delivered the harsh lecture and she the one who comforted me afterward. When I skipped school she rolled her eyes and wagged a finger, but she was never hard or harsh or punishing. So this message she leaves, short though it is, packs a hard, jarring punch.
I’m standing on the corner of 10th Street and University, not sure whether to return her call or go to the two o’clock meeting. How on earth does she know about the silver? I run through all the possibilities and come up with nothing. Are there serial numbers on silver ingots and coins? Did some precious metals office call her to confirm the sale? Thinking about government agencies triggers the paranoia from the night before, and in addition to feeling hungover, defeated, and ashamed, I start to feel that old nagging dread of being observed. I turn to walk home, and before I get more than a few steps down 10th, I hear Annie call my name.
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