Page 21 of One on One
“Are you sure you don’t want me to pick you up tomorrow?” Mom asks Kat. “I don’t mind.”
Of course she doesn’t, because driving is how Mom shows her love. In first grade, I listed it as her job on one of thosecutesy Mother’s Day questionnaires: “driver.” She did the school drop-off and pickup every day. She shuttled Kat and me to and from basketball and film club, respectively. We sat in the car in the drive-thru line, picking up dinner. We gave rides to Dad’s players, going far out of the way to bring them home in the dark, idling at the curb until they got inside. Kat and I stayed in the back seat while Mom showed her clients empty houses for sale. “We’re going for a ride,” she’d say, and she’d be wearing shoes that clicked and Clinique Happy, and that was how we knew we needed to bring toys, we’d be waiting awhile.
To this day Mom loves nothing more than to chauffeur somebody from point A to point B.
“I’ll be fine, Mom,” Kat says. “It’s the train and a Lyft.”
“Twotrains! Two trains and a Lyft.” She cannot fathom this, why an adult woman would take two trains and a Lyft when she could force her mother to drive three hours round trip instead. “At least let me pick you up from the station.”
We sit down for lunch in a tall-backed booth at a loud restaurant with artificial columns and a menu as thick as a brick. We talk about work, about the team’s schedule and Donna’s phone conversations, about Quincy’s draft prospects. I walk them through my last hype video, even though they’ve already seen it.
Kat looks at me funny. “Youlikeit.”
“Of course she likes it,” Mom says.
My stomach dips. “ ‘Of course’?” I rip off a piece of bread from the basket and busy myself with the olive oil. “I didn’t know this was an ‘of course’ situation. What’s everyone getting to eat?”
I can’t stop to think about whether I like it. I need to concentrate on why I’m here: to put in enough time to give myself options.
Kat doesn’t give up. “Dad would be thrilled.”
It’s weird to have basketball again but not Dad. I can’t separate the two in my memories. I spent my childhood following him around from practices to games to team spaghetti dinners. I was eager to be a part of this thing that had such a hold on him, and I quickly came to love it as much as he did. I helped out his team in high school and worked all his camps during the summers. Even in college, when we were apart, we debriefed over the phone after every game.
I glare at Kat. “If you make me cry in a knockoff Cheesecake Factory, I will suffocate you with this loaf of bread.”
She rolls her eyes. “What about Ben? How’s the Great Pennsylvanian Basketball Showdown going?”
I take a long sip of water from a glass as big as a jug. “I can’t tell who’s winning, but there’ll be no sportsmanship trophies. Yesterday we managed to have a normal conversation for three whole minutes, and that’s the best it’s been all season. But then it went sideways. I don’t think we’re ever going to see eye to eye.”
Mom looks up from her menu. “When’s his birthday?”
Kat and I make knowing eye contact across the table. “I don’t know, Mom. I don’t believe in that stuff anyway.” But wait. I do know the answer, roughly. “There were birthday balloons in his office when I first started,” I admit.
Mom pauses to estimate the date. She makes an unreadable humming noise and looks back at her menu.
“What?” I ask reluctantly.
“I thought you didn’t believe in it.”
“Well, it can’t hurt to know.”
Mom takes off her reading glasses and sets them on the table. “It’s interesting, that’s all. You’re opposite signs. Lots of potential for conflict, but you could also balance each other out. It would help to know his rising sign.”
“Hang on, let me text him to ask what time he was born.” I mime typing on my phone.
Mom sighs. “Look, Annie, if he’s treating you badly, it says more about him than it does about you.”
“Have you tried to make peace with him?” Kat asks.
Kat has the sometimes-annoying mindset of someone who was exceptional at something from a young age. She sees a straight line from every problem to its solution. As a former standout athlete, she saw her hard work produce success. Cause and effect. Do the thing that makes rational sense, and your desired result will follow. News flash, it doesn’t work that way for everyone.
Kat squeezes a lemon wedge and plunks it into her glass. She will never understand.
“Restaurant lemons are filthy, didn’t you know that?” I say.
She takes a deep, pointed sip.
“It’s not that simple,” I go on. “Even putting aside the fact that we’re competing for one job—which is a big thing to put aside—we have fundamentally different views on certain important subjects.”
