Nicole and Christine

Nicole stood very still in her own kitchen at ten in the morning, with her thumb over the button that called the security company.

The woman on the doorbell camera, as shown on Nicole’s phone, was a stranger. Sixty, perhaps, wearing a denim jacket. Sun-worn in the California manner. She stood a full step back from the door, looking around with a nervous air, holding a plastic grocery bag in front of her with both hands.

Nicole ran the checklist. Nobody was expected, no packages ordered. In fifteen years of being famous, she'd been found by a man who mailed four hundred letters, a woman who believed they'd written the second album together using ESP, and a process server dressed as a florist. The house rule was you don't open the door, you call the number.

The woman looked up, around the doorframe. The camera got her whole face, and Nicole’s entire nervous system turned to dry ice.

Nicole knew the face. Oh, not from life; the last time she’d seen that face would have been from before memory. She’d seen it in the albums in her grandmother's dining room coffee table in McKinney, the ones with the plastic over printed photos. One picture in particular jumped out; her mother at maybe twenty, sitting on the hood of somebody's Trans Am, laughing, all that wild blonde hair. Nicole used to sneak looks at it when she was little, and then go look in the mirror at her own wild, curly, blonde hair.

Raffy the Duck Toller started barking, but Raffy was known to bark at leaves and ants.

Danny came in from the office with his reading glasses pushed up on his head, and his expression immediately showed that he saw something in Nicole’s face. He crossed the kitchen fast and looked at the screen.

“Who is it?”

“My mother.”

“Huh? Angela’s, here, what? Aren’t they still in Mazatlan?”

“No, not Grandma, not my grandmother. My MOTHER.”

Danny had been married to her for eleven years. Nicole could talk for an hour about a soundcheck in 2005 and would not speak for ten seconds about 1980, so she knew how he’d react.

He said, “Okay. What do you need?” It was approximately the eleven billionth thing he’d done over the years that demonstrated why she loved him so.

The doorbell rang a second time. On the screen the woman leaned in when she pressed it, listening for the sound through the door, leaning in to hear if the knock worked. Nicole did the same thing at doors.

Raffy barked more. Danny ordered him to his Place, the dog bed by the back door that was his designated spot to go be quiet. Raffy obeyed happily, knowing treats and praise would follow later. Raffy was a very good boy.

“Cody's at school till three,” was all Nicole could croak out.

“Cody's at school till three,” Danny agreed. “I can tell her to go. I can say it nice or I can say it not nice? You can go out the back and I'll handle it and you never have to know what she wanted.” He paused and added, “Or I can put some coffee on.”

Behind them, the coffee maker was still half full of cold coffee from breakfast.

“I rehearsed this,” Nicole said.

“Okay,” Danny said, not asking about the rehearsal or its contents. Danny took the phone gently out of her hand and set it face down on the counter, so the woman rang a third time to nobody watching.

“I did, you know.”

“I gotcha, babe,” he said. “What do you actually want, right now, this Tuesday?”

Nicole was wearing yoga pants and one of Danny’s T-shirts, the one with Luke Skywalker on it. On the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like California, was Cody's practice schedule and a drawing he'd done of the three of them and Raffy.

“I want her to see it,” Nicole said. “I want her to stand in my front hall and see what I have now and make sure she knows she can’t have it. Is… oh, is that bad?”

Danny thought about that for a few moments and said, “Sweetie, you do what you need to do.”

Nicole went to the door, took a deep breath, and pulled it open.

Up close, the woman was small. Nicole was a small person herself, but her mother’s diminutive stature was impossibly surprising. In the pictures she’d been a giant, Nicole’s mother, holding her, always above her.

“Hi,” the woman said. Her mouth moved wordlessly for a bit, and then she tacked on, “You look just like your grandmother.”

Nicole, especially after she’d gotten old enough to be fully aware her grandmother was a person with all the strengths and weaknesses and armor and vulnerabilities of a human being, had seen, once in awhile, the pain that her mother’s abandonment of them caused her. Grandma and Grandpa had tried to hide it from her, raising their granddaughter, but it slipped through all the same, every now and then. Fury rose in her, that this woman who’d caused her beloved, saintly grandparents such agony, would now speak of them.

With great effort, she kept herself under control.

“You look like the pictures,” Nicole said, completely under control, every bit the professional vocalist she was. “How'd you get past the gate?”

“Walked in behind a landscaping truck.” She said it matter-of-fact.

Nicole peeked around her to the left, where, sure enough, the Three Hermanos truck was parked. She’d talk to Marcelo later, remind him about security. He was a good guy, easy mistake to make.

“I'm not going to ask for anything,” her mother said, fast, sounding rehearsed. “I want to say that first. I'm not sick. I don't need money. I'm not writing a book. Nobody would read it, ha ha.”

From inside the house came the sound of Danny in the kitchen, cabinet doors, the specific clink of him getting down coffee mugs. The odd loudness of it suggested to Nicole that Danny wanted it known someone else was in the house.

“My husband's making coffee,” Nicole said.

“Oh, yeah. You’ve been married for nine years.”

“You read my Wikipedia,” Nicole replied.

“You don't… I can just. Uh.” She held the bag up between them. “These are yours. They were always yours, I just had them.”

Nicole took the bag. Heavier than it looked, square-cornered, and she knew before she opened it, that they were records. Five of them, sleeves gone soft at the corners the way old vinyl album sleeves go. Rumours was the first one. Under it, Horses. Three more after that; Nicole didn’t check to see if they were other albums with plural noun titles.

“Mama kept the collection,” her mother said. “I know she did. I heard you say it in an interview once, the two hundred albums, the good turntable. But these five I took with me. I’m not sure why these five.” She stopped and started again. “I've moved I don't know how many times since. Forty-some years of moving. These came every time. But they’re yours, like the other ones.”

“You heard it in an interview,” Nicole repeated.

The albums had been left behind. Nicole couldn’t remember her mother even holding her, but she had listened to Sgt. Pepper’s, and Tapestry, and What’s Going On, and After The Gold Rush, and Ziggy Stardust, and on and on, and she’d fallen in love with how they made her feel. Then she’d begged for a guitar and singing lessons and her grandparents had done whatever they had to do to help her.

Nicole waved her in. “Wipe your feet.”

Her mother wiped her feet with a near-OCD level of thoroughness.

Nicole watched as her mother took it in. The ceiling, the piano, the photo of her and Danny at Marcus’s wedding, the platinum record she'd finally allowed Danny to move from the study to the front hall. There was a picture of Grandma and Grandpa in the living room, visible from the hallway.

“How are they?” squeaked Christine Russo.

“They’re at a senior’s resort on the Pacific coast,” replied Nicole Russo.

“Ah,” her mother said. She examined the platinum record. It was Nicole’s first, the one with the band. STARS AND CLOUDS, it said, by NICOLE AND THE STORM, having sold 3,000,000 RIAA CERTIFIED SALES UNITS.

“Do Grandma and Grandpa know you’re back? Did you go by their house?”

“I don’t know where it is,” her mother admitted.

Nicole was relieved.

She led Christine back. Danny had put out the good cups, cream, and the sugar bowl. He had taken a position strategically close enough to shake hands. Raffy had been summoned from his Place and stood, excited at the new friend but well trained, next to Danny’s left foot.

“This is my husband, Danny Heller.”

“How do you do,” Danny said.

Christine shook his hand and seemed too nervous for further politeness.

Danny said, “Honey, I’m gonna get back to what I was doing, I’ll be in the study.” He made a point of kissing her cheek and then exited stage right. Raffy followed, glancing back.

They sat. Her mother held the mug with both hands.

“I bought all the albums,” her mother blurted. “The first one, I got it in a Sound Warehouse in Amarillo. When I got it home I read the whole little folded insert, you know? You were there in the credits. There's your name, big, and those other three in the band, and then the little thank-yous, and you thanked Mama and Daddy, and other people, and a dog…”

“Raffy. The first one. Grandma and Grandpa’s English spaniel.”

“You thanked a dog.” Her mother was staring into her coffee, which she apparently took black. “And I stood there reading the back of that CD knowing there was no reason my name would be on it, and looking anyway.”

She sipped it and winced at the heat, then looked at the fridge, where the schedule and magnets were.

Nicole said, “He asked about you once. Kids are smart. He knows my grandparents raised me, so he knows there's a hole. Once he asked me if I knew where you were and I had to tell him I didn’t know, and he cried, because it scared him that maybe something would happen that he didn’t know where I was. Which is something that wouldn’t happen in a billion years, but he didn’t understand.”

Her mother was cringing. Nicole’s mind set upon something.

“Say the store again,” Nicole said.

“What?”

“Where you bought the album.”

“Sound Warehouse. In Amarillo.”

“Amarillo,” Nicole said. “That's five hours from McKinney. That's five hours from the house they still lived in then.”

Nicole set her cup down with great care, because she could feel herself wanting to throw it.

“Every record. You bought every record? You read every credit? You heard the interview about the turntable? The guys and I played Dallas on every tour. I’ve played more shows in Texas, everywhere… We played the state fair, Mother. I stood on a stage forty minutes from that kitchen table and sang to nine thousand people, and Grandma was in the third row with a shirt with my face on it. You could have been there, because you were never lost, were you? I spent my whole childhood telling kids my mother was dead because dead was fucking better.”

Her voice cracked, a rare event. She got it back. “You weren't missing. You were watching. That's worse. Watching is a decision you made every single morning for forty years.”

Christine was staring at the kitchen table as if hoping the answers would be found there.

“You brought me the records,” Nicole said, quieter, but angrier. “Forty years and not a scratch on them. You know what? For a second there, I wanted to appreciate that. But that's the evidence, isn't it? You can be careful. You kept five albums safe through forty years of moving. You looked at me and looked at round pieces of vinyl, and Patti Smith made the cut.”

Finally Christine asked, “Do you want the real answer or the party line?”

“I’ve wanted the real one my whole life.”

“The real one is ugly.”

“Go on.”

Her mother turned her own cup a quarter turn, and Nicole's stomach dropped, because that was Grandpa's gesture.

“I came back once,” her mother said. “You'd have been six. I got as far as the church parking lot across from the house. Sunday morning, I knew they'd walk to the service, they always walked. And they came out, the three of you, and Mama had done your hair in the two braids, and you were holding Daddy's hand and doing that thing where you swing off a person's arm, and you were singing. Just singing to yourself, walking, some little nothing song you were making up. Perfect pitch at six. Nobody taught you that.”

She looked up.

“And I sat in that lot and I, uh… all I had in the car was two hundred dollars, a man in Lubbock who wasn't going to last, and a habit I was four months off of and would be back on by Christmas, and I knew that last part, that's the thing, I knew.”  

Nicole rolled her eyes. Of course, drugs, blah blah, I’ve heard this before, like the time…

“Everything I could ever bring you, I would eventually take back. That's what I was. I took things back. I would have hurt you. Worse. I’m a very bad person, sweetheart.”

Tears rolled down her face. No crying, just tears.

She pushed through it, “Watching was the one thing I could do that didn't cost you anything. So I did the watching. I should have been ashamed in that record store. I wasn’t. I was proud. I stood there, I read the back of your album and I was proud, like I had any right."

She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and it was Nicole's gesture from a thousand hot stages. Nicole hated that she kept seeing herself across the table. Nicole was fascinated, too.

“You asked why I never crossed the street? I'd have been doing it for me. Every version of coming back was for me. Staying gone was the only thing I ever gave you that I couldn't take back. But I was looking anyway.”

The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere out on Willow Glen Road, a leaf blower started up.

Nicole let the words soak into her brain, rearrange, be examined. They were logical, they made sense, they were likely entirely true, and they changed absolutely nothing. She had still left her daughter bereft and her parents heartbroken. Those were forty years of fact.

“I understand you,” Nicole said.

She took a moment.

“That's… I actually understand you. I've done hard math.” She thought of that green room in 2005, four kids and a piece of paper, everyone right, everything ending anyway, her first band doomed to both glory and dissolution by the same contract. That had just been logic, arithmetic. That was how life stabbed you in the heart.

“I’m sorry,” Christine said, “I know this doesn’t help you. It's just true.”

She stood and rinsed her own cup at the sink and set it upside down on the rack, as if not wanting to leave a trace of her having been there. She took a folded piece of motel stationery from the denim jacket and set it on the table.

“Burbank. Till Thursday. It's wrote down. You don't ever have to.”

It's wrote down. How very Texas. Grandma said it exactly that way. Nicole had worked so hard to lose it and still missed it.

At the front door her mother stopped one last time at the photograph of the old people.

“Tell them,” she stammered, and apparently couldn't continue that sentence, so instead she said, “You’re so beautiful Nicole. You’re so beautiful.”

Then she was gone down the long drive, small against it, past the gate that had never stopped anyone.

Danny came out when the door closed. He didn't ask. He put his hand on the back of her neck and they stood in the front hall of the real house.

“You heard?” Nicole asked.

“I got the gist of it.”

“She's not wrong.” Her voice finally broke. “She’s not wrong, Danny. The math was right. If she'd come back she could have wrecked everything, and she knew it. I still got to be the kid whose mother didn't want her. And… we’re all hurt, and it made sense anyway.”

She buried her face in her husband’s shirt. Danny held on, offering no solutions, just stroking her hair and soothing her. That, of course, was why she'd married him.

At six minutes past three the bus stopped out front. Cody came up the drive at a dead sprint, backpack swinging, shouting about Pokémon before he was through the door. Nicole caught him, scooping the seven-year-old clean off the ground, and held on one beat past the limit of his patience.

"Mom. Mom!”

“Yeah,” she said, and set him down, and fixed the part in his hair with two fingers while he squirmed. “Go put your school stuff away and get your swimsuit. Practice in twenty minutes.”

He thundered up the stairs. On the kitchen table, the motel paper sat. Nicole looked at it for a long moment. Then she took it and put it under the California magnet on the refrigerator, next to the swim schedule, where the family things went. Thursday morning she would probably drive to Burbank. It would not be forgiveness. That was much too far.

But, sometimes, the arithmetic led you to looking anyway.