Trouble Read Free Page B

so well. I decided not to thank him; he had forced this on me. I took a sip of wine and tried, unsuccessfully, to forget about him.
    “Merry Christmas,” he shouted, leaning in toward me. His rocks glass appeared in my peripheral vision; it held something amber, probably whiskey. The ice was crisp and fresh; the drink was almost gone. He was downing them fast.
    With a sigh, I knocked my glass with desultory dismissal against his, then took another gulp of wine and fished my cell phone out of my bag, ostensibly to see whether I had any messages, but really, of course, to shake him off.
    “Hello, darling, it’s your mother,” he shouted. “You never call! You never write!”
    I kept a straight face, but inside I couldn’t help laughing; he was so unrelentingly obnoxious. I put my cell phone back into my bag and gave him my most professional stare. My brief impression of him was that he was a lot younger than I’d suspected. Why was he hassling me? There were plenty of girls there who looked like Columbia students. I picked up my glass and my bag and struck off through the crowd to find another spot farther down the bar. I stood near the pool table, watching two boys take turns shooting balls into pockets. I felt myself melt with the almost-forgotten pleasure of solitary anonymity in a close, noisy crowd. I had been tense and brittle for so long, I almost collapsed with this release, this softening. I finished my wine and turned around to catch the bartender’s eye. It took a while to get her to acknowledge me, but I managed to procure another full glass of red wine. I tipped her two bucks, then turned back toward the room and breathed the sharp, yeasty smell of my glass of wine and took a sip. It tasted harsher and not as good as the first one, the one my unwanted pursuer had bought me.
    One of the boys playing pool noticed me and looked at me for a beat or two longer than necessary. The most flattering interpretation of this was that he was stunned by my foxiness, but he was probably wondering why someone old enough to be his mother was infiltrating his hangout. I looked back at him, and he dropped his eyes. It was just past midnight. Wendy was, no doubt, still awake, texting her friends on her cell phone under the covers, pretending to be asleep if Anthony checked on her, which he wouldn’t. This was because he was, no doubt, dozing in his chair, book fallen open facedown on his chest, whiskey dregs warming in his forgotten glass. The thought of our quiet apartment, the two of them isolated in their separate worlds, made the wine in my mouth taste bitter. If I were home now, I thought, I would be in my own hermetic cave, in bed with a novel and a cup of mint tea; I would get up and open Wendy’s door every now and then and listen to her faking being asleep, phone glowing under her comforter.
    Throughout her childhood, I had done my best to love and be loved by Wendy. Anthony and I had brought her home from a Chinese orphanage when she was not quite a year old. As a baby, she was very bright, verbal, and curious. As a toddler, she developed strong opinions about what she did and did not want to do, eat, and wear, but she could be reasoned with and convinced to do my bidding with some effort. About the time she started school and realized there were other people in the world, teachers, friends, she began looking quizzically at me, evidently wondering why I was bossing her around like that. It was around this time that she seemed to become aware of me as someone she disdained and preferred not to be around. When she was six, I administered her first IQ test and learned that her IQ was 177. In first grade, she quietly, subversively began to challenge and resist my authority as her mother, but she had continued to tolerate me with a stoic reserve. The instant she’d turned eleven, it seemed, her ability to bide her time with me as her mother had dissolved and given way to a frank yearning to be away from me, out of my