“Nothing makes him happy right now,” I say before I can catch myself.

She swings her eyes over to me, looking concerned. “Yeah, I’ve gotten that idea. So . . . is it really just the art show, do you think? Or is something else going on?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“It’s like he’s not even here,” she says. “Isn’t it?”

Something is forming in the back of my head.

“Men can withdraw so completely when there’s something else going on,” she says. She’s not looking at me. Her words hang in the air, like little drones all pointed at my head.

A thought suddenly forms up near the ceiling. I watch it coming closer to me and settling in my head, and I realize I’ve known all along what’s going on. I’ve even mentioned it, without truly taking it in or believing it.

Patrick isn’t here because he’s reliving his relationship with another woman.

That’s it, isn’t it? I think. It’s as though he’s in that other room, dancing with death.

Yes.

“Y’all should be sleeping in the same bed so you can fix this,” my mom is saying, but I can barely hear her over the drumming of my own thoughts. “I’m being horribly selfish,” she says. “I need to find a place of my own, and you need your time to reconnect. I feel like you’re growing apart more each day, and I bet you anything, it’s because you’re not getting any sex. Sex holds people together, keeps them from murdering each other.”

“It’s not just sex,” I say slowly. But maybe those words were inside my head, too.

She keeps talking. “I’m going to look for a place to live. I’ve been having such a good time being here with you, but this is ridiculous. You’re sleeping in a bed with your mama, and your boyfriend is having to sleep in his studio. I should be sued for this.”

“No, no, Mom,” I say. “He wants to be there, with the paintings. He told me. It’s fine. Really.”

The knowledge clunks into my head like it’s been floating above me and just now found the way into my brain. He is actually involved again with Anneliese. She’s the one he’s thinking about all the time, not me. I’m freaking competing with a dead woman, and I’m losing!

It would seem to be quite the opposite, wouldn’t you think? She’s already put forth all her best stuff and has no more cards to play—and I, being alive and sentient, could just possibly wow him with some amazing feat of love and tenderness that only a living, breathing human could do. I can cook meals for him, for instance. Make love to him.

But it’s not that way at all. She’s frozen in amber, she’s perfection, and I am hopeless and real and messy, and I say and do the wrong thing, and even when I try to love him, to use my body on his body—it’s pathetic. That’s it. I am pathetic.

After a moment, my mom sighs and looks back at her computer screen. “And then here is young, perky Randolph Greenleaf. A medical doctor and he’s fifty-four years old, and he has a nice mustache and he’s never been married. What do you think the pitfalls are?”

“Gay? Misogynistic? Selfish? Crabby?”

“I’m thinking of clicking on him. Here we go!” she says. “Should I? Gosh, it’s surprisingly hard to pull the trigger on these guys.”

“Mom.”

“Millie, if you please.”

“Millie. Sorry. Are you going to go home to see Dad at Christmas?”

She doesn’t look at me, just scrolls through the computer screen. “I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Is he coming up here then?”

“No . . . haven’t heard anything about that.”

“You do know this is weird though, right?”

“Christmas isn’t that big a deal when you don’t have children at home,” she says. “You get over it real fast.”

Do you? Because I have never in my life gotten over anything real fast, and now I just want to crawl into a little ball and sleep through the holidays. Sleep until I know what I’m supposed to do next.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

MARNIE

I set out one Saturday morning with Fritzie and my mother to get a tree, which we find on a street corner in Greenpoint, and manage to drag home on the subway. Which is so crazy and ridiculous because three men have to help us get it both off and on the train because it’s so big (“We are soo not having a merry little Christmas!” says Fritzie), and then we carry it home and up the stairs, and my mother says she’ll be surprised if there’s even one needle on the thing by the time we get it indoors. But somehow there is, and also it fills up the whole living room, having actually grown in stature on the way home. Surely it wasn’t this big when we saw it on the street corner, bundled up and leaning against a box truck.

In past years, being an artist and all, Patrick has loved decorating the tree, but this year he doesn’t come out of his studio. I get the box of decorations from the attic, and my mother helps me string up the lights. As soon as she gets them on the tree, she announces that she can’t stay for the whole time because she’s got a date with Dr. Randolph Greenleaf, who turns out to possess not all the bad qualities I had predicted. Sure, he hates restaurants and loves karaoke bars—an odd combination for one man, I think, but maybe he’s as complicated as the rest of us—and my mother says it works because he’s actually kind of stuffy and boring until he starts belting out tunes in the bar, off-key but at full volume.

I’m not sure how I feel about my mother going out with Randolph Greenleaf, even if it is strictly platonic as she says. And even if it technically is none of my business. I think I would just as soon not know him, to tell you the truth. She tells me I’d like his joie de vivre, and I tell her that I’d like his joie de vivre lots better if it was being lavished on someone else’s married mother.

She laughs. “Your father would sooner cut off his arm than sing in a karaoke bar, and he would certainly never permit any friend or relation of his to do such a thing,” she says. “So this is sociologically interesting to me.”

“Sociology, huh?” I say.

“Perhaps it’s anthropology,” she answers. “I want to see how the natives of New York deal with old age approaching.”

In her research, she also has joined a yoga class two mornings a week, and to blend in better with her subjects of research, she has a new haircut that is all slanted and shorter on one side than the other. The hairdresser complimented the pink slash that Ariana had put in her hair. I honestly don’t know what to think anymore. This is my mom, the person who used to wear Christmassy light-up earrings and bulky holiday sweaters with reindeer on them and little white Keds with ankle socks with lace trimming. She had a pageboy haircut and Bermuda shorts.

She tells me to lighten up. “I’m shocked that you, of all people, are judging me,” she says. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I am not sleeping with Randolph Greenleaf. And I don’t intend to.”

Anyway, so my dad doesn’t come for Christmas, and my mother doesn’t go to Florida either. He calls me at work at least seven times in the weeks before Christmas to ask me if I think she’d come home if he sent her a ticket, and I have to tell him each time that she doesn’t want to. She’s not ready to go home yet.