“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “It’s all over now.”
My grandmother was not sure what she meant by “it,” but she did not press harder.
“Shall we head back?” my grandmother offered.
“How?” my mother said.
“To the house, Abigail. Head back to the house.”
They turned and began walking again. The houses one after another, identical in structure. Only what my grandmother thought of as their accessories marked them as different. She had never understood places like this – places where her own child had chosen to live.
“When we get to the turn to the circle,” my mother said, “I want to walk past it.”
“His house?”
“Yes.”
I watched Grandma Lynn turn when my mother turned.
“Would you promise me not to see the man anymore?” my grandmother asked.
“Who?”
“The man you’re involved with. That’s what I’ve been talking about.”
“I’m not involved with anyone,” my mother said. Her mind flew like a bird from one rooftop to the next. “Mother?” she said, and turned.
“Abigail?”
“If I needed to get away for a while, could I use Daddy’s cabin?”
“Have you been listening to me?”
They could smell something in the air, and again my mother’s anxious, agile mind slipped away. “Someone is smoking,” she said.
Grandma Lynn was staring at her child. The pragmatic, prim mistress that my mother had always been was gone. She was flighty and distracted. My grandmother had nothing left to say to her.
“They’re foreign cigarettes,” my mother said. “Let’s go find them!”
And in the fading light my grandmother stared, flabbergasted, as my mother began to follow the scent to its source.
“I’m heading back,” my grandmother said.
But my mother kept walking.
She found the source of the smoke soon enough. It was Ruana Singh, standing behind a tall fir tree in her backyard.
“Hello,” my mother said.
Ruana did not start as I thought she would. Her calmness had become something practiced. She could make a breath last through the most startling event, whether it was her son being accused of murder by the police or her husband running their dinner party as if it were an academic committee meeting. She had told Ray he could go upstairs, and then she had disappeared out the back door and not been missed.
“Mrs. Salmon,” Ruana said, exhaling the heady smell of her cigarettes. In a rush of smoke and warmth my mother met Ruana’s extended hand. “I’m so glad to see you.”
“Are you having a party?” my mother asked.
“My husband is having a party. I am the hostess.”
My mother smiled.
“This is a weird place we both live,” Ruana said.
Their eyes met. My mother nodded her head. Back on the road somewhere was her own mother, but for right now she, like Ruana, was on a quiet island off the mainland.
“Do you have another cigarette?”
“Absolutely, Mrs. Salmon, yes.” Ruana fished into the pocket of her long black cardigan and held out the pack and her lighter. “Dunhills,” she said. “I hope that’s all right.”
My mother lit her cigarette and handed the blue package with its golden foil back to Ruana. “Abigail,” she said as she exhaled. “Please call me Abigail.”
Up in his room with his lights off, Ray could smell his mother’s cigarettes, which she never accused him of pilfering, just as he never let on that he knew she had them. He heard voices downstairs – the loud sounds of his father and his colleagues speaking six different languages and laughing delightedly over the oh-so-American holiday to come. He did not know that my mother was out on the lawn with his mother or that I was watching him sit in his window and smell their sweet tobacco. Soon he would turn away from the window and switch on the small light by his bed to read. Mrs. McBride had told them to find a sonnet they’d like to write a paper on, but as he read the lines of those available to him in his Norton Anthology he kept drifting back to the moment he wished he could take back and do over again. If he had just kissed me on the scaffold, maybe everything would have turned out differently.
Grandma Lynn kept on the course she had set with my mother, and, eventually, there it was – the house they tried to forget while living two houses down.
