Paris Was the Place by Susan Conley Read Free Book Online Page B

of cornflakes with milk. This was when Luke began to help raise me. He didn’t say anything about it. He was just organized with the clothes washing and making sure I had food for lunch. Even then he carried my sadness for me.
    The first night she was back, my mother unpacked the gifts at the kitchen table: a strong Greek liqueur called ouzo for Dad. A traditional black velvet vest for Luke; a white cotton dress with red embroidering for me. Her cheeks were flushed while she handed out the presents. Was she feeling guilt? Shame for leaving us? What Iremember is a mild defensiveness that flashed on her face if you questioned her too hard. I wanted to sit on her lap. I was too old for this, but I did it anyway and stared and stared at her green eyes to see if she’d changed. Then I buried my face in her chest. I didn’t have words for my longing for her. When she put me to bed that night, I asked her why she’d gone. I couldn’t not ask. I had to know. She said, “I just needed a little break.” Then she kissed me on the head like this was normal—like mothers flew to Greece and took breathers all the time. This wasn’t the answer I needed. I wanted her to tell me her research called to her. That it was vital work. I could understand that. Did mothers really need breaks? This was different. Muddier. It made me feel funny. Overlooked. Passed by.
    Had she gotten bored with her marriage? Her spell in Crete was nothing compared to running off with the artisanal cheesemaker on Mount Tam like our neighbor Mrs. Gallant, three houses down, did. The real problem was my father. I loved him entirely and he gave hugs that involved spinning me on his back in a circle, but my father was a mathematician. Yes, he listened to Jim Croce and smoked his homegrown weed, but he was not a real hippie. He liked structure. My mother had left and come back and my father was not done processing this information; there was more to come from him on the subject.
    It’s not that he was anti-feminist or anti-women or anti-anything, really. He just loved her with a mathematical conviction, and even though he’d sanctioned Greece, he couldn’t believe she’d actually stayed away for so long. “One time,” he said to my mom in the kitchen the fourth night she was home. I could hear him from my bed. “I got married one time. You’re not going to leave me and make me do this all over again with someone else, are you?”
    I watched him out my bedroom window that night—a small man with dark sideburns who threw one leg over the seat of his motorcycle and kick-started it and drove away. He waited two more months to actually leave my mother. Maybe her trip made him see how much he loved her. Maybe he couldn’t handle that kind of vulnerability. Or maybe he was just too stubborn and proud. It was May 1971. A Monday.One week before the end of seventh grade. He loved us, didn’t he? He gave those hugs.
    His leaving was the worst feeling I’ve ever known. He returned to the house on Thursday in his pickup to collect more of his maps—piles of old folded drawings and elevation charts and a pair of rare celestial globes by Vincenzo Coronelli. I found him in his basement office putting the globes in a blue plastic milk crate. I said, “You’ve ruined my life. I hate you with all my heart.” I wanted to tackle him and hold him to the ground and make him stay.
    This was the week in middle school when I began to spend a small part of third-period study hall reading the dictionary. Part of me felt like I was spinning off the flat surface of the earth. The words made my brain feel good. When I memorized definitions, it quieted my mind. Each dictionary entry was like an orderly, prescribed planet. How generous of the authors to give two or three alternative meanings and an archaic definition and to use the word in a sentence.
    Luke was in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
that week. He came home from school on Friday to cook the hamburgers before the performance.