A Good Mother by Lara Bazelon (different ereaders txt) 📗

other members of her church. Cristina is with her, of course.” And Will, she adds silently. On the phone two hours ago, Will had told her little except that the prognosis was poor and that yes, he would make sure he and Luz were in court in the morning if Dars demanded it. It was while Will was talking that Abby had made the decision to go see Estrada at the jail, a decision she had not shared with him. Not sharing, as a general principle, seemed best right now. With all the men in her life. She thinks briefly of Nic, then firmly shuts him out of her mind before the guilt can smother her.

Jonathan watches her for a moment, his head inclined slightly. “How are things with Nic?”

His mind reading scares her. Jonathan is the reason why she doesn’t have many close friends. “Fine. Everything is fine.”

“That’s another lie.”

She doesn’t bother denying it. On her phone are six texts from Nic.

When are you coming home?

You need to come home now.

Right now.

Cal needs you.

You can’t pretend he doesn’t exist.

And then, WHERE ARE YOU???

All unanswered. There are probably more now. She hasn’t turned her phone back on since leaving the jail. Dars had kept them late and the last text had arrived as she was headed out to see Estrada. Abby had planned to go home immediately, was in fact on her way to the car when the call had come in from Will and with it a decision that could not be delayed. She had come back to her office just now only to drop off the files and then—Jonathan. With any luck, and God knows she is due for some, both Nic and Cal will be asleep when she gets back to the house.

“You act like nothing’s different.” Jonathan’s voice is cold. “Cal isn’t some kind of appendage you can remove and reattach when it’s convenient for you.”

Abby stands up, putting her purse back over her shoulder, trying to keep her voice level. “You have no right to lecture me about my parenting skills.”

Jonathan stands, too. “Why? Because I’m gay and childless?”

“Don’t throw that in my face. If you and your rich screenwriter boyfriend want a baby, you can go out and buy one.”

“Right, because that’s so easy. People are just dying to give their kids away to two gay men. We can’t even get legally married.”

“You don’t want to, is my point.”

“Actually, we do—on both counts. We put in an adoption application about six months ago. Average waiting time for gay couples is three years to infinity.”

She opens her mouth, then closes it. Jonathan had been over the moon about her pregnancy, had been the first person to visit at the hospital. She thinks of the look on his face every time she puts Cal in his arms, like it’s some kind of holy privilege. This is a sucker punch, but she should have seen it coming.

“Don’t make this about you, Jonathan. And don’t you dare pull this bad mother bullshit on me. I am so sick of you, of all of you, and your 1950s misogyny. I am doing my job. My very fucking important job.”

“You have an infant. And you act like you can put him—and his father—on a shelf until your almighty case is over and that they’ll still be sitting there in the same place like two stuffed animals when you decide to come back and start playing with them again. They won’t be, Abby.”

It occurs to her with a chill that Jonathan might actually be talking about her to Nic. Jonathan hadn’t hesitated to interfere in similar ways in the past when he was worried about her. But Nic’s not a talker. And anyway, she would never give Jonathan the satisfaction of asking. She heads for the door. “I have to go.”

Jonathan crosses his arms over his chest. “Why did you have him?”

She stops, her hand closing over the doorknob. “What?”

“Why didn’t you terminate the pregnancy?”

Unplanned, but not unwanted. That is what her mother had said about Abby and her brother, no matter that they had turned her life upside down. It had been doable, or, at least, manageable, until her husband’s untimely death—at which point Roz was broke and alone with three-year-old twins. She left her PhD program at UCLA, never to return.

Roz had made the best of it, was now a well-respected high school principal for an underserved public high school. Abby knew her mother derived great satisfaction from her work. But Roz had never become an art history professor in an ivory tower, spellbinding eager grad students with pixelated slides of Renaissance paintings and enjoying sabbaticals in Italy. In high school, Abby found a draft of her mother’s dissertation on Caravaggio in a cardboard box on a high shelf in the closet. It had been written on a typewriter, faded red-inked notes in the margins in Roz’s careful script. Flipping through the yellowed pages, Abby had felt a stab of pity followed by revulsion. She had shoved the box back into its dusty place, wanting immediately to rid herself of the knowledge of her mother’s beloved dead thing.

She turns around slowly to face him. “When I found out, I was in denial. I didn’t know what to do so I didn’t do anything except pretend it wasn’t happening. And then Rayshon was murdered and I—It did something to me.” She had made the mistake of looking at the crime scene photos, one in particular now embedded in her brain. A close-up of Rayshon lying in a McDonald’s parking lot, brain matter oozing like the insides of a rotten pumpkin after taking three shots to the head. The grief had been like drowning; every time she opened her mouth for air she breathed water instead. In the end, it had all been for nothing.

Without Cal, Abby would have kept drinking until she was dead or in the hospital. Forget feeling a sense of responsibility: the tiny seed in her body