Free The Sunday List of Dreams by Kris Radish Page B

occasional drunken nights with her friends at their favorite bar and restaurant or when she made the girls try them when they went camping, thinking that smoking a cigarette with a parent is the same as smoking it with your friends behind someone’s garage. But what she suddenly remembers as she is gasping for a solid fill of air is the comfort that the cigarettes gave her, the sense of evenness when the smoke hit her lungs and the nicotine surged through her bloodstream and jolted her with a narcotic fix. She wants to feel that way right this second, now, before she walks into the store that her daughter not only owns but runs and where both of them will undoubtedly feel so uncomfortable that one or maybe both of them will want to close her eyes, open them, and be on another planet.
    Wonder-nurse and super-mom Nixon knows her behavior is not only ridiculous, but probably unwarranted as well, but that doesn’t change her uncertainty, the way she imagines every possible outcome of what is about to happen. While the news-addicted New Yorkers buy newspapers, six women go into her daughter’s store, five come out, and absolutely no one looks her in the eye.
    Connie decides a cup of espresso to keep herself from fainting will help. She discovers a small bodega around the corner, orders her poison, and then unzips the side pocket of her travel bag to retrieve her list of dreams book.
    For a second she considers throwing it into the garbage and racing back to the airport but, as she lifts the book, a photograph falls out and catches her off guard. She’s saved the photograph from the stack on the kitchen table and she is astonished to realize that it is the fuel that will make her take the next step. It is a photo of Jessica at her 14th birthday party. Her hands are on her hips, she’s looking away from the camera, and she’s laughing at the Barbie doll birthday cake that Connie has made for her as a joke.
    More than anything else in the world Connie wants to find that Jessica again, the girl in the photograph. She wants to take her daughter into her arms and start over, retrace steps, forgive and be forgiven. She wants to run her hands along the back of her oldest daughter’s neck, kiss her on the lips, unlock the door and pass right through the very tall mountain separating them.
    As she scans down her list of dreams, flipping pages as if her fingers are on fire, Connie Franklin Nixon realizes that the most important number on the list, the one that means more than anything, the one that will solve every other riddle, her biggest dream, is #7.
    Recapture Jessica.
    And then she gets up. Her mother-madness is screaming so loudly she turns to see if someone else hears it and then remembers she’s in New York City, where people wear dogs on their heads and dance publicly in their underwear.
    After what would have been enough time to chain-smoke four cigarettes, Connie decides she simply has no choice. She waits on the sidewalk a few more seconds, frozen like a hunk of quartz, hoping that all the customers will come out of Diva’s so she can be alone with her daughter but then realizes that the woman she sees through the window could be in there for hours and then eighteen more women or men could follow in right behind her.
    She cannot put off this encounter any longer.
    One step inside of the store and Connie cannot breathe. The word “seduction” seeps into her mind, holds every inch of her brain in its sexy hands, and keeps her pinned against its lusty arms. She cannot move and lets out what Jessica will later tell her is a groan and, at that exact same moment, Connie catches the eye of her daughter who looks up from behind her desk to see who is having sex in her store before purchasing anything.
    “Oh my God,” Jessica shouts, grabbing the edges of her desk to steady herself. “Oh my God,” she repeats as if she can’t remember what she has just said.
    Connie does not want to stop looking at the off-white and