Wife 22

“Funny how?”

“I don’t know. Are you going through some sort of a midlife thing?”

“I don’t know. Are you going through some sort of a midlife thing?”

William shakes his head and turns up the music. I lean against the window and gaze out at the millions of lights twinkling in the East Bay hills. Oakland looks so festive, almost holidayish—it makes me think of my mother.

My mother died two days before Christmas. I was fifteen. She went out to get a gallon of eggnog and was struck by a man who ran a red light. I like to think she never knew what was happening. There was a screech of metal hitting metal, and then a gentle whooshing, like the sound of a river, and then, a peachy light flooding into the car. That’s the end I’ve imagined for her.

I’ve recited her death story so many times the details are stripped of their meaning. Sometimes when people ask about my mother I’m filled with a strange, not entirely unpleasant nostalgia. I can vividly summon up the streets of Brockton, Massachusetts, that on that December day must have been garlanded with tinsel and lights. There would have been lines of people at the liquor store, their carts packed with cases of beer and jugs of wine, and the air would have smelled of pine needles from the Christmas tree lot. But that nostalgia for what came immediately before is soon vanquished by the opaque after. Then my head fills with the cheesy opening soundtrack to Magnum,P.I. That’s what my father was watching when the phone rang and a woman on the other end gently informed us there had been an accident.

Why am I thinking about this tonight? Is it, as William asks, a midlife thing? The clock is certainly ticking. This September when I turn forty-five, I will be exactly the same age my mother was when she died. This is my tipping-point year.

Up until now I’ve been able to comfort myself with the fact that even though my mother is dead, she was always out in front of me. I had yet to cross all the thresholds she had crossed and so she was still somehow alive. But what happens when I move past her? When no more of her thresholds exist?

I glance over at William. Would my mother approve of him? Would she approve of my children, my career—my marriage?

“Do you want to stop at 7-Eleven?” asks William.

Ducking into 7-Eleven for a Kit Kat bar after a night out on the town is a tradition for us.

“No. I’m full.”

“Thanks for coming to the launch.”

Is that his way of apologizing for how dismissive he was tonight?

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Sure.”

William pauses. “You’re a very bad liar, Alice Buckle.”

3

April 30

1:15 A.M.

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