Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

after five P . M . What do you mean, ‘all day.’”
    “I mean, it isn’t like Mom to miss a date with a friend, or one of her classes. Even if her car broke down, she’d have called.”
    Clare was trying to speak calmly. Clare was allowing me to understand that this might be serious, or it might not be serious. But she, Clare, the elder and more responsible of the Eaton sisters, was the one to provide information.
    I couldn’t think how to reply. My mind felt shredded. I’d been trying not to think of Wally Szalla while struggling to make sense of the mottled quality of the tape I was transcribing, wondering if it was my example that caused Wally too to be drifting, years had passed since he’d begun filing for a divorce from his wife, wondering if it was my fault that the tape was so difficult to decipher or whether it was the fault of the new, compact, Japanese-manufactured recorder, that made me want to cry. I had only until tomorrow morning to type into my computer some sort of coherent and entertaining “human interest” feature under the byline “Nicole Eaton.” Now, I saw that the tape cassette was still turning, soundlessly. In my haste to answer the phone I’d punched the volume and not the on/off button.
    “Fuck.”
    “Nikki, what ?”
    “—I mean, I did call Mom around eleven this morning. But she was out, I just left a message.”
    “And she didn’t call back?”
    “It wasn’t that crucial, Clare. Just thanking her for the party, no need for Mom to call back.”
    “But Mom always calls back…”
    “Look, did you drive by the house?”
    I’d asked this innocently, should have known better. Clare exploded, “Did I drive by the house! In fact yessss, I drove by our mother’s house, Nikki. In the midst of this crazed day, one errand after another, already I’ve driven Lilja halfway across town to a friend’s house, and swung around to pick up Foster from soccer practice, and waited for the plumber who finally came forty minutes late and now I’m due in fifteen minutes to pick Lilja up again and drop her off at home and drive out again to a late-afternoon dentist appointment I’ve already rescheduled not once but twice, and his office is in that new medical/dental center up North Fork, and you have the gall to ask me from Chautauqua Falls a very convenient thirty miles away did I drive by our mother’s house which is across town from my own, yesss in fact I drove by the house but Mom isn’t home, or wasn’t home around four, her car wasn’t in the driveway.”
    “You didn’t check inside…”
    “No. I didn’t ‘check inside.’ If Mom’s car isn’t in the driveway, she isn’t home.”
    I supposed this was so. For Mom never parked the car in the garage as Dad had wanted her to. In all weathers it was parked in the driveway becoming ever more rust-stippled, dotted with white bird droppings like accent marks.
    Clare spoke of calling Mrs. Higham, Mom’s neighbor across the street, asking her to look out the window, see if Mom’s car was back, I told her this sounded like a good idea, then Clare immediately objected, in a way that echoed Dad who dreaded neighbors becoming overly involved in the private life of our family as he’d have dreaded bubonic plague, “Oh, but that might embarrass Mom, you know how she prizes her independence, once Gladys Higham knows we’re worried about Mom she will tell everyone in the neighborhood, you know how people are, and Mr. Higham is retired with nothing better to do than gossip, it will get back to Mom and she’ll be upset with us.”
    I felt a tinge of alarm. It wasn’t like my sister to fuss in this way. I said, “The last time we were worried about Mom, remember?—it turned out she’d been talked into emergency babysitting over at Rhoda’s.” (Rhoda Schmidt was a cousin of ours with whom we’d never been especially close.) “And before that, around Christmas, someone called us from the hospital, where was Mom for her gift shop