Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner Page B

lease ran out, he’d moved in with another woman.
    My mom could have forgiven my father for what he’d done, for driving drunk, for hitting an innocent woman and child, but she couldn’t forgive him for Rita Devine. It had soured my mother, who’d always been so sweet, delighted by the smallest things: a trip to the shore, a bouquet of sunflowers, a mug of mulled cider in the backyard while my brother and I raked leaves.
    I dropped my backpack in the trunk, kissed my mom’s cheek,and buckled myself into the front seat. My mother drove with a light hand on the wheel, steering the car through the morning sunshine, along the familiar streets, until we merged onto the freeway that would take us from downtown to Squirrel Hill. “Classes okay?” she asked.
    “Classes are fine,” I told her.
    “And how is Dan?”
    “Dan’s great.” Dan and I had been a couple for four months, but sometimes I thought I didn’t know him any better than I had the first night we’d hooked up. He was good-looking, well-mannered, a rower with formidable shoulders, and had a fondness for 1990s-era grunge rock ...and that was it. “Well, you look great,” said my mom and I nodded.
    My mother and I have the same fair skin and pale eyes, and I know, from pictures, that her hair was once like mine. But now her skin was etched with hundreds of tiny lines, blotched and splotched with souvenirs of the summers when she used to gild herself in Johnson’s Baby Oil and lie in a bikini on a beach towel in her backyard. The pink of her lips had faded to beige, her hair was a too-bright lemony color, her fingertips were permanently stained from hair dye and cigarettes, and her body was slack and soft beneath her clothes.
    “I hope you’re hungry. I made a chicken pot pie for dinner.” She gave me a quick once-over when traffic slowed. “You look great.”
    “I’ve been running a lot. Five miles yesterday.”
    “Five miles. Wow. Good for you.” She looked at herself ruefully. “I bet I couldn’t run a mile. Not even if someone was chasing me.”
    “You just start slow. Run for thirty seconds, walk for two minutes. Start with twenty minutes a day...”
    She shook her head, smiling. She’d heard this before, my prescriptions for healthy living, advice about diet and exercise, andshe’d listen with a smile, then ignore whatever I’d suggested. As far as I knew, she’d never been on a date since my father had left. “I’m just not interested,” she’d told me the one time I’d asked.
    My father and his girlfriend lived in an apartment complex, a place called Oakwood Towers that boasted no oak trees and where the buildings topped out at three stories. The three-building complex, shaped like an H, was Section 8 housing, with a parking lot full of secondhand cars held together with Bondo and tape and baling wire, and apartments full of new immigrants and newly single men, families who’d cram eight or ten people into a one-bedroom unit, tired-eyed grandparents with babies and toddlers. My mother would drive into the parking lot, but no farther.
    “See you at two?”
    I nodded, leaving my backpack in the car, taking the plastic bag full of stuff I’d brought for my father. On the scraggly lawn in front of his building, two boys in corduroy pants and T-shirts kicked a soccer ball back and forth and chattered to each other in a language I didn’t recognize.
    I pressed the buzzer, waited until the door opened, and then walked past the empty fountain in the lobby (sometimes there was a girl in a football helmet sitting on the lip of that fountain, rocking and drooling), down a disinfectant-scented, green-carpeted hallway to apartment 211.
    Rita wasn’t there—she worked on weekends, a part-time job at a sporting-goods store. My dad was waiting for me at the door. He’d gained weight since his time in jail, and now his face was red, his fingers thick, his hands and cheeks swollen as he hugged me and said my name in his hoarse, raspy voice.