Coq au Vin Read Free

the promise that I would call her the next day to give her a full report on Mom’s news, whatever it turned out to be.
    On the way out I ran into Justin.
    â€œWhat’s happening, Smash-up?”
    â€œSame old, same old, Justin. You know.”
    â€œHave a quick one with me, girlfriend.”
    â€œI can’t.
    â€œGot a date?”
    â€œYep. Dinner. With my mother.”
    â€œOoooh. Bring me back some cornbread.”
    I guffawed. He didn’t know how funny that was.
    The kitchen was spotless, as always. But then, why shouldn’t it be? Mom never cooked. Everything was take-out or premixed or delivered in stay-warm aluminum foil.
    â€œMom, I’m here! Where are you?”
    My mother’s cotton dress was as surreal as the kitchen counters in its neatness. Decorous pageboy wig bobby-pinned in place. Makeup specially blended by one of the black salesladies at the Macy’s in the mall.
    It must be eight, nine years now since Daddy left her. But if I no longer remembered the exact date that had happened, Mom sure did. I bet she could tell you what she’d eaten for breakfast that day, what shoes Daddy was wearing when he broke the news to her. On those rare occasions when Mom talks about him, she never uses his name, referring to my father only as “him.”
    My father soon remarried: a young white teacher on his staff at the private school where he was now the principal. Outside of the occasional birthday lunch, Christmastime, and so on, I saw very little of him. He was happy enough, I suppose, in his new life. And he never missed an alimony payment.
    â€œNanette, what have you got on your feet?”
    â€œThey’re called boots, Mother.”
    â€œThose things are something you wear down in the basement when you’re looking to kill a rat. Don’t tell me you dress like that for—”
    â€œHoly mackerel, Mother, what is it you have to tell me!”
    â€œIt’s about Vivian,” she said grimly.
    I fell into a chair, suddenly exhausted. No melanoma. Thank God. No wedding.
    Vivian, my father’s sister, had been my idol when I was a kid. Breezing into town and swooping me up, Aunt Vivian meant trips into Manhattan and eating exotic food and hanging with her hip friends and my first sip of beer and every other cool thing you can imagine when you’re ten years old and your father’s baby sister is a sophisticated sometime-fashion-model who drinks at piano bars and parties with people who actually make the rock ’n’ roll records you hear on the radio.
    My father felt about his little sister Vivian the way Justin feels about dykes. He disapproved of her friends and her nomadic ways and her prodigious consumption of vodka and her way-out hairdos and everything else about her lifestyle, which he didn’t understand at all.
    My mother didn’t understand it any better than he did, but she loved Vivian just the same. Maybe that was due to the same kind of sympathy with strays that had moved her to take Aubrey to her heart. Mom looked on with pity while Auntie Viv blew all her money and drank too much and got her heart broken by trifling pretty men and then recovered to start the cycle all over again.
    In time Vivian married and divorced—two or three times, if I remember right—and moved out of New York and then back again, half a dozen times—to L.A. and Mexico and France and Portugal—wherever the job or the party or the boyfriend might take her. Daddy and she finally had one final royal blowup during the cocaine-laced eighties and stopped speaking to each other altogether. We didn’t even know where she had been living for the past eight or ten years.
    And now, apparently, some disaster had befallen her.
    â€œIs she dead?” I asked. “How did it happen?”
    â€œNo, no. She isn’t dead.”
    â€œShe isn’t? Then what happened to her? What about Vivian?”
    â€œShe’s in trouble.