A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore Read Free Book Online

walked out to the parking lot, the probation officer followed. The American flag was flapping noisily next to the Perkins sign; the air was picking up wind and snow. The probation officer walked to his car and got in but did not start it. Amber’s face was completely lit up. I saw that she was fantastically in love with him. She was not concentrating on any of us, and something about this provoked Sarah.
    “Well,” she said, studying Amber with an artificial smile.
    “Yes, well,” said Amber.
    “All right then,” said Letitia.
    “Can I give you some advice, Amber?” Sarah asked, standing there, as Letitia clutched Amber even tighter. Letitia was ecstatic to have a white birth mother in tow, one with a little white bun in the oven, and did not want a rival agency to get ahold of her. Or so Sarah would say later. The windbreakered parole officer gave a wave and drove off.
    “What?” Amber said to Sarah, but to me she smiled and said, “He was definitely following me.”
    “When I was your age, I had some rebellious ideas,” Sarah continued her unsolicited advice to Amber. “I got in trouble now and again, here and there, but I realized it was because I was doing things I wasn’t any good at. Look at this.” She tapped Amber’s electronic bracelet with a gloved index finger. “You’re eighteen. Don’t sell drugs. You’re no good at it. Do something you’re good at.”
    Sarah meant this tough-love speech compassionately, I could see, but Amber’s face flushed with insult, then hardened. “That’s what I’m trying to do,” she said indignantly, and tore herself from Letitia’s grip, walked over to what was apparently Letitia’s car, and got in on the passenger’s side.
    Baby, it’s scold outside , Murph would have said if she were there.
    “We’ll talk later,” Letitia called to Sarah, waving good-bye and hurrying off to Amber. Perkins’s flag was whipping loudly in the snowy wind.
    “Well,” said Sarah as we both got into her car. “That was, for all intents and purposes, a complete disaster.”
    She started up the engine. “You know?” she continued. “I always do the wrong thing. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.”
    We rode home mostly in silence, Sarah offering me gum, then cough drops, both of which I took, thanking her. When I glanced over at her, driving without her sunglasses, her scarf wrapped now around her head like a babushka, she seemed watery, far away, lost in thought, and I wondered how a nice, attractive girl—for I’d thought I had glimpsed on the way up the girl I imagined she once was, her face still and thoughtful, her hair in the sun ablaze with light—how a girl like that became a lonely woman with a yarny shmatte on her head, became this, whatever it was. After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.
    Sarah’s cell phone played the beginning to “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” its vigorous twang not unlike a harpsichord at all, and so not completely offensive to the spirit of Mozart, who perhaps did not, like so many of his colleagues, have to roll about as much in his grave since the advent of electronic things.
    Sarah pulled the phone from her bag and slowed the car slightly while she did. “Excuse me,” she said to me. “Yeah?” she said into the phone. All this despite the bumper sticker on her car that read PERHAPS YOU WOULD DRIVE BETTER WITH THAT CELL PHONE SHOVED UP YOUR ASS. She also had one that said, IF GOD SPEAKS THROUGH BURNING BUSHES, LET’S BURN BUSH AND LISTEN TO WHAT GOD SAYS. It was interesting to me that such a woman, one with such rhetorical violence adhered to her car, had gotten past the adoption agency’s screening