The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

Author:Claire Lombardo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

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Violet was obsessive about college, about where she would get in and what she would study. And yet her mother seemed sort of bored by the whole affair, making little asides about her determination and patting her gamely on the head as she took SAT practice tests. She’d gotten tired of it—tired of the dysfunction around her, of the hypersensitive focus on Wendy and of the subsequent fact that this was the most important thing she’d ever done and her mother didn’t even seem to care.

“Mom?” Her mother was filling out camp registration forms for Liza, and she kept jumping up to check on something in the oven. She could never just sit down and have a conversation; she was always holding Grace or a pile of laundry or a pot of water or one of her garden tools or sometimes combinations of those things, balancing Gracie on her hip while folding towels with a trowel sticking out of her back pocket. She inked in Liza’s middle name and looked up.

“What is it, honeybunch?”

“Why didn’t you finish college?”

They’d heard bits and pieces about their mother’s wild undergraduate days, information characterized primarily by Marilyn’s embarrassment and David’s teasing. That evening her mom frowned, rising to get the Wite-Out from the drawer by the phone.

“A slight hitch in cosmic timing.” She squinted, blotting at the paper with the tiny brush.

“But why did you— I mean, you were so close to finishing, weren’t you?” Her mother had always seemed highly intelligent, well read; last week she had come up behind Violet and, peering at the pages of Jane Eyre, said, “Oh, she hasn’t learned about Mr. Rochester’s wife yet?,” ruining the surprise. “You had— Didn’t you want things? Why did you just—stop?”

“I wanted a life with your dad,” she said, and it struck Violet as wildly narrow-minded, old-fashioned, sad.

“But you could have finished college in Iowa, couldn’t you?”

“Almost none of my credits transferred, as it were. And we were broke. And then Wendy arrived.” She spoke as though Wendy had orbed down from a star or staggered through their door on the run from a refugee camp. She’d stopped filling out the form, set down the Wite-Out. “Does it embarrass you, Viol? I’m— I have to say, I don’t know where this is coming from. It just wasn’t in the cards for me. I’ve thought about going back since, but I— Well, things got in the way. I didn’t finish college because I chose not to finish college.”

“But why?” Not going to college, for Violet, was a decision akin to relinquishing a limb.

“What kind of a question is that, sweetheart?”

She was trying to picture the fact that her mother had once been her same age, that she’d once been in high school, the world at her fingertips. She knew her grandmother had died when her mom was a teenager, and that her grandfather had worked a lot, but her mom had plenty of options regardless; she’d grown up with money, certainly more money than they had now, especially with four kids instead of one.

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