Terms of Endearment Read Free Page B

smiled. “You do it all the time,” she said. “It’s because all seventy-five pairs of them hurt your feet.”
    Aurora didn’t deign to reply. Her departures, like her moods, were unpremeditated and always quite abrupt. Emma got up and followed her mother out the door, down the steps, and along the driveway. It had come a little summer shower and the grass and flowers were still wet. The lawns up and down the street were a brilliant green.
    “Very well, Emma,” Aurora said. “If you’re going to contradict me I suppose it’s a good thing I’m leaving. We should inevitably quarrel. I’m sure you’ll find my shoes the minute I’m gone.”
    “Why didn’t you look for them yourself if you’re so sure they’re there?” Emma said.
    Aurora looked aloof. Her seven-year-old black Cadillac was parked, as always, several yards from the curb. She had had a lifelong horror of scraping her tires. The Cadillac was old enough, in her view, to pass for a classic antique, and she always paused a moment before she got in, to admire its lines. Emmawalked around the car and stood looking at her mother, whose lines, in their way, were also classic. West Main Street, in Houston, was never very busy, and no cars disturbed their silent contemplation.
    Aurora got in, adjusted her seat, which never seemed to stay the same distance from the pedals, and managed to insert her key in the ignition, a trick only she could manage. Years before she had been forced to use the key to pry open a screen door, and since then it had been slightly bent. Perhaps by now the ignition was bent too—in any case Aurora was firmly convinced that the bentness of the key was all that had kept the car from being stolen many times.
    She looked out her window and there was Emma standing quietly in the street, as if waiting for something. Aurora felt inclined to be merciless. Her son-in-law was a young man of no promise, and in the two years that she had known him his manners had not improved, nor had his treatment of her daughter. Emma was too poor and too fat and looked awful in his T-shirts, which, had he any respect, he would not have allowed her to wear. Her hair had never been one of her glories, but at the moment it was a distinct stringy mess. Aurora felt inclined to be quite merciless. She paused a moment before putting on her sunglasses.
    “Very well, Emma,” she said once again. “You needn’t stand there expecting congratulations from me. I was not once consulted. You have made your bed. You no longer have an open destiny. Besides, you’re far too stubborn to be a parent. Had you cared to take me into your confidence a little sooner, I could have told you that. But no, not once did you consult me. You haven’t even a proper residence—that place you live in is just the top of a garage. Infants have enough respiratory problems without having to live with cars beneath them. It isn’t likely to do much for your figure either. Children never think of these things. I am still your mother, you know.”
    “I know, Momma,” Emma said, stepping close to the car. To Aurora’s surprise she didn’t argue, did not defend herself. She merely stood by the car, in the awful T-shirt, looking, for the first time in years, mild and obedient. Emma looked down at herquietly, in the manner of a proper daughter, and Aurora noticed again something she was always forgetting: that her child had the loveliest eyes, green, with lights in them. They were the eyes of her own mother, Amelia Starrett, who had been born in Boston. And she was so young, really, Emma.
    Suddenly, to Aurora’s terror, life seemed to bolt straight from her grip. Something flung her heart violently, and she felt alone. She no longer felt merciless, she just— She didn’t know, something was gone, nothing was certain, she was older, she had not been granted control, and what would happen? She had no way to see how things would end. In her terror she flung out her arms and caught her