Later

53

By then we were doing well enough that I could have gone to a private school. My mother showed me brochures from the Dalton School and the Friends Seminary, but I chose to stay public and go to Roosevelt, home of the Mustangs. It was okay. Those were good years for Mom and me. She landed a super-big client who wrote stories about trolls and woods elves and noble guys who went on quests. I landed a girlfriend, sort of. Mary Lou Stein was kind of a goth intellectual in spite of her girl-next-door name and a huge cinephile. We went to the Angelika just about once every week and sat in the back row reading subtitles.

One day shortly after my birthday (I’d reached the grand old age of fifteen), Mom texted me and asked if I could drop by the agency office after school instead of going straight home—not a huge deal, she said, just some news she wanted to pass on in person.

When I got there she poured me a cup of coffee—unusual but not unheard-of by then—and asked if I remembered Jesus Hernandez. I told her I did. He had been Liz’s partner for a couple of years, and a couple of times Mom brought me along when she and Liz had meals with Detective Hernandez and his wife. That was quite awhile ago, but it’s hard to forget a six-foot-six detective named Jesus, even if it is pronounced Hay-soos.

“I loved his dreads,” I said. “They were cool.”

“He called to tell me Liz lost her job.” Mom and Liz had been quits a long time by then, but Mom still looked sad. “She finally got caught transporting drugs. Quite a lot of heroin, Jesus says.”

It hit me hard. Liz hadn’t been good for my mother after awhile, and she sure as shit hadn’t been good for me, but it was still a bummer. I remembered her tickling me until I almost wet my pants, and sitting between her and Mom on the couch, all of us making stupid cracks about the shows, and the time she took me to the Bronx Zoo and bought me a cone of cotton candy bigger than my head. Also, don’t forget that she saved fifty or maybe even a hundred lives that would have been lost if Thumper’s last bomb had gone off. Her motivation might have been good or bad, but those lives were saved either way.

That overheard phrase from their last argument came to me. Serious weight, Mom had said. “She isn’t going to jail, is she?”

Mom said, “Well, she’s out on bail now, Jesus said, but in the end… I think there’s a good chance she will, honey.”

“Oh, fuck.” I thought of Liz in an orange jumpsuit, like the women in that Netflix show my mother sometimes watched.

She took my hand. “Right right right.”