The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond Read Free Book Online Page A

rent?”
    “Holding steady at twelve hundred, thanks to rent control.”
    “Look,” she says, “I’m going to transfer twelve hundred into your checking account on the first of every month until this whole thing is over with.”
    “Every month?” I ask, my heart sinking. “It’s terrible enough to imagine another week without knowing where Emma is. I can’t even fathom the idea of this stretching on for months.”
    “I hope you find her tomorrow, but this gives you one less thing to worry about.”
    “I can’t take your money, Annabel.”
    “No argument. Rick just made partner. Case closed.”
    “Thank you. I’ll pay you back.”
    “Abby,” she says, “are you okay?”
    “Everything was coming together,” I say. “Everything seemed so perfect.”
    I tell Annabel how I went over to Jake’s early Friday to help Emma see him off. He was spending the weekend in Eureka with Sean Doherty, a roommate from college who had recently divorced. Sean was in the throes of depression, and Jake went to his rescue, leaving Emma in my care. This would be our first weekend alone together, a kind of test. When Jake returned, he would tell Emma about our plan to marry.
    That morning, Emma and I had French toast and hot chocolate at Tennessee Grill. After breakfast we made a rag doll from a kit, with patchwork knees and blue buttons for eyes, thick black yarn for hair. In the afternoon, we saw an animated movie about a sickly girl of indiscriminate nationality who befriends a horse and saves her village from destruction. Emma had too many Swedish Fish, and on the way home from the theater she got a stomachache and began to cry. Learn to say no, I thought, as I reached over and rubbed her back.
    At my place, I gave her a glass of water, and she curled up next to me on the sofa while I read to her from
Old Hasdrubal and the Pirates
. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I sat for some time reading silently, lost in the comfort of my favorite book from childhood, loving the weight of Emma’s head against my shoulder. When I picked her up and carried her upstairs to bed, she opened her eyes drowsily, just long enough to say good night.
    I changed into my pajamas and crawled in bed beside her. Watching her sleep, I felt content. Perhaps motherhood was something I could do—or if not motherhood, then this other thing, stepmother, this role that was somewhere between motherhood and friendship. Emma was a willful, sometimes wild child, just as I had been, but in sleep she was deceptively calm. I thought of my own mother, who had me at the age of twenty-two, and I pictured her standing in the doorway of my bedroom in her short cotton bathrobe, her red hair pulled back in a ponytail, as I’d seen her do every night of my childhood. I wondered if she too had felt, as I did now, suddenly mature, suddenly at home in the world, possessed of great responsibility.
    “It was the first time in so many years I felt a connection with Mom,” I tell Annabel. “I felt like I was finally beginning to understand her. I wished she was alive so I could share it with her.”
    No matter what successes I met in my career, what interesting turns my life took, I knew my mother had always considered me ill-accomplished, not quite grown. Without a husband and a child, to her I was simply a girl adrift.
    “Did I ever tell you what she said to me toward the end?” I ask Annabel. “When I was back home taking care of her, she made me promise to find a good man, somebody who wanted children. And I did the dumbest thing. I made the promise, but I kept my fingers crossed behind my back, because, back then, I didn’t really see children in my future. Not that I was opposed to having them; it just wasn’t a priority. What kind of person lies to her mother on her deathbed?”
    “I’m sure you’re not the first,” Annabel says. “Anyway, she probably knew you were faking it.”
    “But the weird thing was, I actually lived up to the promise. I