Goodbye for Now by Laurie Frankel Read Free Book Online

car accident when he was thirteen months old. His dad said Sam was already saying, “Mama,” his first word, that he adored her and wailed when she left the room even for a moment, that they couldn’t leave him with a babysitter because his mother couldn’t pry Sam out of her arms, so ferocious was his grip. Sam believed these stories, not because he thought his dad would never lie to him—to give him back even a small piece of his mother, to fabricate even the tiniest scrap of memory, Sam suspected his dad would lie happily—but because all of that sounded exactly like any thirteen-month-old. Sam’s dad offered these details as proof of extraordinary love, but in fact, Sam knew, it was the most ordinary kind of love there was.
    The photographic evidence suggested ordinary too. There he was—red and wrinkled and wailing at first then wrapped in a blanket like a burrito then posed with the dog, with a snowman, with a very drippy ice-cream cone, covered in flour, surrounded by Tupperware on the kitchen floor, grinning naked and filthy in their front garden, on top of a slide in a too-big hat, and being nibbled variously by geese, calves, sheep, goats, and in one even a yak. There were pictures of Sam and his mom in ridiculously wide-legged pants and hideous shirts with walleyed collars and voluminous curly hair (his mom’s; she didn’t live long enough to see Sam grow much hair). Two pictures in particular stood out, at least to him. In one, she lies on green pile carpet on her back, her crazy hair spread out above her like when someone gets electrocuted in a cartoon. Sam sits inside this nest of hair, gathering and tossing it in great handfuls like snow. In the second, she’s nursing him, and he has a ringlet of that great mane clenched in a tiny fist and wound all the way down his arm in a move that would be illegal in professional wrestling.
    Sam scoured his memory but could not conjure the sensation of that hair. When he was seven, he found out from his dad what kinds of shampoo and conditioner she’d used and used them himself, hoping to trigger some olfactory memory. When he was ten, influenced by cop shows on TV, he went in search of hair samples, painstakingly looking through the boxes of her stuff bound for charity that his dad had never found the strength to move beyond the basement. He’d managed to untangle fromold sweaters and dresses and jackets and the hinge of a pair of sunglasses seven longish strands which he secured with tape inside the back cover of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. These he traced endlessly with angsty preteen fingertips but could never recover memories tactile nor, though he sacrificed one precious strand to Genevieve Trouvier’s Ouija board, even occult. When he started dating, he watched himself for a proclivity toward hirsute girls or, at the least, toward running his hands through their bobs or twisting their braids around his fingers or yanking their ponytails in playful flirtation, but he didn’t find any of that in himself, at least no more than ordinary. Ordinary seemed to be the hallmark of Sam’s brief relationship with his mother. But ordinary as it was, there was no getting it back of course, not even a moment of it. In contrast, it seemed to Sam, Meredith retained so much of Livvie. Comparatively speaking, it was almost like she was still around.
    On the last day of the regular season, Sam and Meredith went to the baseball game. This was a tradition Meredith and Livvie had kept for years. It marked the official end of summer so far as they were concerned, even though the weather had often turned well beforehand and even though Meredith had been back at school for weeks already, because Livvie would always leave for Florida the next day. She’d wait until the Mariners were statistically eliminated from the postseason before she booked flights, just in case, even in seasons—and there were quite a few of them—when it was clear by late April that she could go