<<Jennifer to Beth>> You couldn’t.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> The idea that he would be so overcome by love that marriage would just flatten him …

<<Jennifer to Beth>> It’s a cop-out.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Yeah, I know. When I think about it, which is pretty much constantly, I can’t decide if …

a. He’s capable of growing up and having a real relationship with someone. He just doesn’t love me enough. Or …

b. He’s not capable and also a jerk.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Probably both.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> But mostly the latter.

Do you think I’ve wasted the last nine years of my life?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Nyah, only the last two or three. You couldn’t have known when you spotted him in the student union that his heart was three sizes too small.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I think you might be humoring me. I think you think that Chris has been emotionally unavailable from day one—and that I wanted that for some awful reason.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> You’re right. I do think that.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> So I brought this on myself?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t think it matters what I think or what I did or didn’t see coming. You had to see it for yourself. You had to see it through.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Thank you for being honest.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> If I ask you a hard question, will you answer it honestly?

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Yes.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Do you think I’m responsible for my miscarriage?

<<Beth to Jennifer>> No.

Ninety-three percent no. I don’t think your attitude is to blame, but I don’t think it helped.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> I’m not sure I can live with 93 percent.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> You can.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> I want to try to get pregnant again, is that awful and dysfunctional?

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I guess it depends on why.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> I think the answer to why is—because I really want to have a baby. But I don’t trust myself not to have some twisted reason lurking in my subconscious. I feel like I’ve lost something so important. I know that I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve a baby.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Nobody deserves a baby.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> I feel like we should be having this conversation over a bottle of Blue Nun.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> My bad. I thought we were.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> The idea that you’re hard to love is ludicrous.

CHAPTER 78

LUDICROUS.

It didn’t change anything, knowing that Beth was single. Had been single for weeks. For practically months.

What did that change? Nothing, right? Nothing, really.

“Are you listening?” Doris said. They were playing cards and eating hoagie sandwiches they’d bought from the machines. (Doris never took anything for free.) Lincoln had spent the night at his apartment again and come straight to work.

“I’m trying to tell you about tens around,” Doris said.

Chris wasn’t ever the problem. Not the biggest problem, anyway. Not that it mattered anymore.

“It’s not that complicated,” Doris said.

Nothing had changed. Nothing.

“Listen,” Doris said, “I need to talk to you about something. Your mother called me today.”

“What?”

“She was supposed to give me the recipe for that carroty chicken thing she makes, with the celery?

And the rice? Well, she ended up telling me that she was worried about you. She said you haven’t been coming home at night. Now, you didn’t tell me that the apartment was supposed to be a secret. You didn’t tell me that you weren’t going to tell your mother you were moving out.”

“But I haven’t moved out. I haven’t moved anything.”

“That’s crazy talk. Is this about that girl?”

“What girl?”

“You mother told me what that girl did to you, that actress.”

“Do you mean Sam? She didn’t do anything to me,” Lincoln said.

“Didn’t she leave you high and dry for a Puerto Rican?”

“No,” Lincoln said. “I mean, not exactly.”

“And now she’s calling your house.”

“Sam’s been calling my house?”

“And I don’t blame your mother for not giving you the messages,” Doris said. “Look at the secret you’re keeping from her. Are you meeting that girl at my apartment?”

“No.”

“It would explain why you’ve been so moony. And why you ignore everything else in a skirt.”

“No.” It came out too high. Lincoln pressed his palm into his temple and tried not to sound like a child. “Did you tell my mom about the apartment?”

“I’m too old to be lying to other people’s mothers,” Doris said.

IT WAS TOO late to talk to his mother when Lincoln got home that night.

When he came downstairs the next morning, she was in the kitchen, slicing potatoes. There was a pot steaming on the stovetop. Lincoln leaned on the counter next to her.

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know you were here.”

“I’m here.”

“Are you hungry? I can make breakfast. But you’re probably rushing off to the gym.”

“No,” he said, “I’m not hungry. And I’m not rushing off. I was hoping we could talk.”

“I’m making potato soup,” she said, “but I could spare some bacon. Do you feel like bacon and eggs?” She was already cracking eggs into a cast-iron pan, pouring milk and stirring. “I’ve got English muffins, too. The good kind.”

“I’m really not very hungry,” he said. She didn’t look at him. Lincoln put his hand on her arm, and she scraped her fork against the bottom of the pan. “Mom,” he said.

“It’s so strange … ,” she said. He couldn’t tell from her voice whether she was sad or angry. “I can remember a time when you needed me for everything.

“You were just this little kitten, and you cried if I set you down even for a second. I don’t know how I managed to ever take a shower or make dinner. I don’t think I did. I was afraid to hold you too close to the stove.”

Lincoln stared down at the eggs. He hated when she talked like this. It was like accidentally seeing her in her nightgown.

“Why do you think I can remember that,” she asked, “when you can’t? Why does nature do that to us? How does that serve evolution? Those were the most important years of my life, and you can’t even remember them. You can’t understand why it’s so hard for me to hand you off to someone else.

You want me to act casual.”

“You’re not handing me off. There’s no one else.”

“That girl. That terrible girl.”

“There isn’t a girl. I’m not seeing Sam.”

“Lincoln, she calls here. There’s no point in lying about it.”

“I haven’t talked to her. I haven’t been here to get her calls. Look, I’m sorry I lied to you, that I didn’t tell you about the apartment. But I’m not with Sam. I’m not with anyone. I wish I was, with somebody, I should be. I’m almost twenty-nine. You should want me to be.”

She huffed.

“I want to show you the apartment,” he said.

“I don’t need to see it.”

“I want you to. I want to show you.”

“We’ll talk about it after you eat.”

“Mom, I told you, I’m not hungry …” He pulled her arm toward him, away from stove. “Please.

Come with me?”

LINCOLN’S MOTHER GOT into his car reluctantly. She hated riding in the passenger seat, she said it made her nauseous. (Eve said letting anyone else control a situation for more than thirty seconds was what made her nauseous.) She was quiet while he drove to his new neighborhood, just a few miles away, and parked in front of the apartment building.

“This is it,” he said.

“What do you want me to say?” she asked.

“I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to see it.”

He got out of the car before she could argue. She followed reluctantly, stopping outside the car, in the middle of the sidewalk, and at the steps. He didn’t stop with her, so she followed. Into the building, quietly up the stairs, across the threshold. “Willkommen.” Lincoln held the door open. His mother took a few steps inside—looked around, looked up—and then a few more steps toward the windows. Sunshine was falling into the living room in thick golden stripes. She held her hand up, open, into the light.

“I’ll show you the kitchen,” Lincoln said, after a moment, closing the door. “Well, what there is of it. You can pretty much see it from here. And here’s the bedroom.” His mother followed him into the next room, glancing down at his new mattress. “And the bathroom’s right here. It’s really small.” She walked to the bedroom window, looked outside, then sat in the window seat.

“It’s nice, right?” he asked her.

She looked up at him and nodded. “It’s a beautiful space. I didn’t know you could find apartments like this around here.”

“Me neither,” he said.

“The ceilings are so high,” she said.

“Even on the third floor.”

“And the windows …Doris used to live here?”

He nodded.

“It suits you better.”

He wanted to smile and feel relieved, but there was still something about her—her voice, the way she was sitting—that told him he shouldn’t.

“I just don’t understand,” she said, leaning back against the glass, “why.”

“Why?”

“It’s nice,” she said, “it’s beautiful. But I don’t understand why you’d want to move out if you didn’t have to. If there really isn’t a girl. Why would you choose to be alone?”

He didn’t know how to answer.

“As long as you’re at home, you can save your money for other things,” she said. “You have plenty of space to yourself, you can do whatever you want. I’m there if you need me …Why?

“And don’t tell me,” she said, picking up speed, “that moving away is just something that people do. Because …because who cares what people do? And besides, that’s not even true. That’s a recent development. A Western development. This dividing the family up into tiny bites.

“What if you’d had nowhere to go when you came home from California? What if I’d told you the same thing that my mother told me when I left Eve’s father? ‘You’re on your own now,’ she said.

‘You’re a grown woman.’ I was twenty years old. And alone. I bounced around from one house to the next, sleeping on couches. With that tiny, little girl. Eve was so small …She slept right here”—his mother laid her hand on her chest, just below her throat—“because I was afraid of dropping her or losing her between the cushions …

“You’ll never have to fend for yourself like that, Lincoln. You never have to be alone. Why would you want to?”

He leaned back against his bedroom wall and slunk down until he was sitting on the cast-iron radiator. “I just … ,” he said.

“Just?”

“I need to live my own life.”

“You aren’t living your own life now?” she asked. “I certainly never tell you what to do.”

“No, I know, it’s just …”

“Just?”

“It doesn’t feel like I’m living my own life.”

“What?”

“It feels like, as long as I stay home, I’m still living in your life. Like I’m still a kid.”

“That’s silly,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Your own life starts the moment you’re born. Before that, even.”

“I just, I feel like as long as I live with you, I won’t …I’m not …It’s like George Jefferson.”

“From the TV show?”

“Right. George Jefferson. As long as he was on All in the Family, he was just somebody who made Archie Bunker’s story more interesting. He didn’t have anything of his own. He didn’t have a plot or supporting characters. I don’t know if you ever even got to see his house. But after he got his own show, George had his own living room and kitchen …and bedroom, I think. He even had his own elevator. Places for him to exist in, for his story to happen. Like this apartment. This is something that’s mine.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t know,” she said. “I never watched The Jeffersons. ”

“What about Rhoda?” Lincoln asked.

She frowned. “So you’re saying you want to be the star of the show now. That it’s time for me to fade into old age?”

“God, no,” he said. “It’s not like they canceled All in the Family when The Jeffersons started.”

“Stop talking about television. Stop telling me what everything is like.”

“Okay,” he said, trying to think clearly, bluntly. “I want to live my own life. And I want you to live your own life. Separately.”