“Well, it’s sad,” he said to the back of Sally’s head. “Isn’t it? The whole family’s gone.”
“Except for the sister’s kid,” he heard her say.
“What?”
“You said,
He doubted he’d used these exact words, but it didn’t seem an important point at the moment.
“The
And then, as if to echo this dismissal, Sally turned away. He saw now that her brother-in-law had departed, and that she had made a new friend on the next bar stool over.
Sally turned back to look at him. She seemed to require a moment to get her bearings, or possibly to remember who he was. “Wait what?” she said, with real hostility.
“Where does his niece live?” Jake managed to say.
She pinned him with a look of extravagant contempt. “How the fuck would I know?” she said. And that really was the end of their conversation.
The conventional wisdom was that they were alike, mother and daughter: both smart, both feisty, both highly intent on not spending their lives in Earlville, New York, and incidentally so physically similar—narrow and tall, with thin dark hair and a definite tendency to slouch—that Samantha struggled to see Dan Weybridge anywhere at all in the girl. But watching Maria grow up—and Samantha did watch, that was pretty much all she did—a few key differences gradually came into focus. Maria, in marked contrast to her mother’s fervid planning for departure, seemed to waft toward this goal without much obvious effort, and even less in the way of apparent concern. She lacked even Samantha’s small inclination to placate (let alone capitulate to) others, declined to grub for favors of any kind, and could not have cared less that there were adults in her life (notably those in her school life) who wanted to encourage her and ease her way forward. Where Samantha had been diligent with schoolwork and careful not to mess up (one significant exception there!), Maria turned in homework when she felt like it, departed from assignments if they failed to interest her, and disparaged her teachers when she thought they’d misunderstood (translation: were too stupid to understand) the material.
Also, Maria was a lesbian, which meant that whatever else might happen, she was hardly going to drop the ball just short of the goalpost, the way her mother had.
Her classmates included the children of Colgate professors and the children of Colgate grads who’d settled in the area (mostly organic farming or making art) alongside the children of the county’s oldest families (dairy farmers, county employees, plain old upstate hermits), but they broke down along another divide: those determined to make high school the best time of their lives and those who expected to move on to far more interesting experiences. Maria, it was obvious to all, was just passing through. She drifted between cliques, unconcerned by a party she hadn’t heard about or some rift in the social fabric of her class, even if she was one of the parties involved. Twice she shed her entire friend group, leaving people mystified and wounded. (About these social acts Samantha was completely unaware, until somebody’s mother called her to complain.) And once she stopped speaking to a girl who’d been coming around to the house for years, a rupture so obvious that even Samantha knew about it without being told. Maria, when asked, simply said: “I just can’t anymore, with a person like that.”
When she was thirteen she taught herself to drive in the new Subaru (a replacement for her grandfather’s, which had finally given up the ghost), and in fact drove herself to the DMV office in Norwich to pick up her learner’s permit. When she was fifteen she made out with a senior named Lara in the lighting booth during a rehearsal for
