What about a divorce? Fucking our daughter would certainly be good grounds for a separation. I’d clean up in court.
These crazed, disparate thoughts ricocheted through her brain. She had no idea what she was going to do. She had no plan of action. Nothing.
Then, as she sat there, outside a Denny’s in that trashy part of town called Cotton Heights, not far from the strip mall where Ray and Kim would often go to fuck, her cell phone rang. She picked it up, wondering if it was her husband. Perhaps he’d seen her. Perhaps he knew he’d been caught with his hand in the figurative cookie jar.
But no, it wasn’t him. It was her son. The name Greg appeared on the screen and she quickly answered it, an almost overwhelming sense of relief washed over her.
“Hello! Hello!” She was almost screaming into the phone.
“Hello, Mom? Are you okay?” He asked.
She paused for a few seconds. Am I okay? Well, that’s a big fucking question, isn’t it?
“Yes…yes, I’m fine.”
“You sounded a bit…weird.”
“No, no, I was just happy to hear your voice. Can’t a mother be pleased to hear from her favourite child?”
“Favourite son, don’t you mean?”
“Yes, yes of course.”
Both Greg and Kim knew the way the family dynamics worked in the Clemence household. They both knew which parent they were closer to, but it was rarely acknowledged out loud like this.
“Is there some problem, darling?” She asked him.
“No, I just wanted to see how you were. I phoned home, but there was no answer.”
“Yes, I was going to see a friend. Your father and sister…well…when I left them they were fooling around in the pool.”
Well, that’s one way of putting it…
Annie and Greg spoke for a few moments, and she asked him how things were going. He told her what he and his friends were getting up to – or at least a PG-13 version – and she made a fairly convincing job of pretending to listen. Eventually the conversation drew to a close.
“Okay, Mom, I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”
“Sure thing, sweetheart, stay safe.”
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too, baby, more than you could ever know.”
He hung up, and she sat there in silence. She was thinking. Ruminating. Wondering.
Annie’s life had been completely transformed that day, she just hadn’t truly comprehended that fact yet. Everything was going to be different from now on. She had seen things she couldn’t un-see. Soon enough, she was going to be doing things she could never have imagined possible. It’s not that she knew what was going to happen next. No plan had been hatched, no course had been set.
But a tiny seed had been planted. So small, so modest, she couldn’t even really grasp its significance. Yet that seed was going to grow, and strengthen. And before too long, it was going to overwhelm her.
…and her son.
There was a phrase she was grasping for. Some nebulous string of words, just out of mental reach. Annie’s mother was from England. She had met her father when he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. They had fallen madly in love and she had moved to the US. If you met her now, you might think she was a native-born American. She sounded like a local, save for the occasional word, where her original accent would suddenly shine through, like a ray of sunlight in a gap in a pair of drapes.
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