Page 39 of Plum

Mom thins her lips. “I did not put in all theseyearsof work to stand by as Thomas Wade becomes a regular at Faro under the guise of bringing his errant son to heel.”

“You’ve heard of Faro’s?” ItisPyle’s premiere gentleman’s club, but it’s the kind of place that doesn’t advertise. Not like the billboards for The White Van all along Route 29. My neck heats. I ignore it.

And then my classy mother, the woman who will only cross her legs at the ankles and nags Marjorie about wearing pajamas in front of the staff, says, “I knoweverything. I know Eric fucks whores and snorts coke. And he fucked Renee, and I’ve said it before, but he did you a favor. She was unbalanced. I know your father gets a massage with a happy ending from the Ginger Spa every Tuesday which is why I am going to wait until tomorrow evening when he’s nice and relaxed to ask for a fifty thousand dollar increase to the Hearts and Diamonds budget.”

Holy hell. Mom is never this frank. I don’t know how to respond. “If the fifty thousand is for the new flower vendor, you’re getting ripped off.”

“It’s not, and you know I don’t get ripped off. And I don’t leave things to chance. Get Eric in line. Call your father. Take him golfing. Invite him along on one of your trips to Palo Alto or Cupertino or wherever. Bore him into giving up this idea aboutgetting his hands dirty.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“You’re forgetting,” she bites out. “I pulled us up fromnothing.”

“Was it really so dramatic?”

“When you have a child, you won’t ask me that anymore.” It’s almost a throwaway line.

We both know that neither Marjorie nor I was the reason my mother sunk her claws in Thomas Wade. I almost ignore the comment, but my brain throws up an image, a mashup of the past and the present.

Plum, round belly making her look like Humpty Dumpty, sitting on a concrete stoop in front of a rundown tenement on Gilson Avenue.

It socks me in the gut. I want it, Plum belonging to me in some irrevocable and undeniable way, needing me, and the idea terrifies me, and it seems right and impossible. It’s dizzying.

I need to wrap this up, calm my ass down, and get back to work. Besides, I’m arguing out of habit more than anything else. I’m not going to turn my mother down. We’ve been partners in crime too long.

“Eric is Eric. He’s not on some downward spiral. I’ll get him to shower and shave before board meetings. It’ll be fine.”

“It better be.”

“You worry too much.”

“Not worrying is a luxury I can’t afford.” My mother raises her hand, beckoning the waiter.

It’s while we’re waiting for the check that it pops out of my mouth. I wasn’t even thinking about it. Not really. But it’s been living in the back of my head for weeks now. A drawer in my mind that keeps sliding open.

The email fromyour father ryan Adam morrison.

“I think my father has been trying to contact me.”

Mom has her phone out, scrolling. “Well, call him back.”

“Not Thomas. Ryan Morrison. He emailed me.”

She freezes, and then very slowly, she looks up, carefully placing her phone on the table. I swear, she looks like the T-Rex inJurassic Park. Cold-eyed. Predatorial.

“Did you talk to him?”

“I didn’t reply.”

“What did he say?”

“Something about reading my name in the paper. He asked me if I wanted to get a beer.”

“And you didn’t reply.”

“No.”

I know he was a junkie who left us broke, that we were nearly homeless because he took the car, which caused my mother to lose her job. I know he was the reason my mother’s family cut her off. That and some vague memories of a man in a baseball cap and a gap-toothed grin is all I’ve got. And a dozen or so emails that read more or less the same.

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