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Excerpt: from Cristina Henríquez's novel,
The World in Half
“Hold on,” my mother calls from inside. “I’m coming.”
The knob rattles again. We wait.
“It’s locked,” my mother says.
“Unlock it,” I say.
There’s nothing but silence. The knob is still. I step forward and try to turn it. “Mom, unlock the door.”
“Hold on.”
I don’t dare look back at Lucy. It’s embarrassing. I just keep my hand on the knob and listen through the door while my mother fiddles and curses and, finally, turns the lock. When she walks out, she’s wearing a plaid wool pencil skirt, a purple turtleneck sweater, sheer brown hose, and her best heels. She pauses outside the bathroom door, as if she’s just stepped onto a stage. Then she says, as though nothing happened, “Were we going down to the basement?”
Later, after my mother has given Lucy her own tour and after the two of them have had time to ease into some semblance of comfort with each other, we all sit together at the kitchen table and go over the routine: Lucy will move into our house for the next three weeks. She will sleep on the couch. “I’m hoping you can provide the sheets and blankets, but I’ll bring my own pillow,” she says. “Nothing against your pillows. I’m sure they’re fine. But my neck needs a buckwheat pillow, and I’ve found that most people don’t keep those around.” Lucy will be with my mother all day, every day. At this, my mother makes a face. “Well, I’m not going to Velcro the two of us together. I just mean I’ll be in the house whenever you are. And if I need to leave the house, I’ll bring you with me. And if you need to leave the house, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” My mother opens her mouth and Lucy quickly corrects herself. “Not anywhere. But you know what I mean.” Lucy will do all the driving. She will use her own car. “It’s a reliable Volkswagen Rabbit,” she assures us. “Never had a single repair.” She will implement safety precautions around the house: cover the outlets with plugs; lock up our household cleaners; install night-lights. She will help my mother in all the ways that she can and all the ways that are necessary, but she is not, she takes care to stress, a babysitter. For anything for which my mother doesn’t require assistance — “I would guess that’s still most things at this point,” Lucy says — my mother will be on her own. Nor is she here as hired entertainment. “I can be very entertaining,” she says, “but that’s hardly the point.” Lucy knows, because I marked it on the paperwork, that my mother had to leave her job a month earlier. One of the lawyers in the office where she worked as the receptionist approached her one day after a batch of billing statements my mother was supposed to have sent got returned to the office for lack of postage. He told her that they were all fond of her and had always known her to be capable, but that the work had gotten away from her lately, and that they didn’t want to fire her, but they hoped she would see it was time for her to leave. My mother, who almost never goes with the flow of anything, said she did see. During her lunch that day, she scribbled a letter of resignation. Since then, though, my mother hasn’t quite known what to do with herself. After spending her entire adult life working — never calling in sick, dismissing the idea of vacation — she has no clue how to pass the time. For her, being unemployed is like wandering through a dark and beguiling forest. I assume, though, that’s what Lucy is referring to when she says she’s not entertainment. She’s not here to fill my mother’s time for her, only to keep her safe.
“When are you starting?” I ask.
“I believe I just did.”
Copyright © 2009 by Cristina Henríquez. This excerpt originally appeared in The World In Half: A Novel. Published by Riverhead Books. Reprinted here with permission.
Cristina Henríquez will take part in the event An October Sort of City on Thursday, Oct. 22. Click here for details.