Free Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer Page A

about it.
    I wanted them to eat. I wanted them to hurry so I could pretend to be busy cleaning up. I hadn’t stopped smiling. No one said a thing and I was actually grateful for that. For once, I appreciated it.
    “You never should have left him,” Lou said, all dreamy, picking out all the pepperoncini and making a decorative little clump of them in the middle of the table. I put them in a saucer and she glared at me.
    “I know,” my mother said, and she swirled a piece of basil around her plate until I finished my pasta. “I definitely shouldn’t have left.”
    The phone rang. I jumped up and then felt stupid. Blot didn’t have my phone number.
    “Expecting someone?” Lou said, and I said, “No.” I made buckteeth at her. She made them back and then picked up. It was obvious from her smirk that it was Jorge, the married man Aunt Lou sometimes went away with. Sometimes he didn’t call for three weeks, and Lou went back on her diet for real, got a wax, and bought ninety-seven pairs of shoes.
    She covered the mouthpiece and rolled her eyes. “So needy,” she said, and walked into the other room. Yeah, right.
    It was the perfect time then. I should have gotten my sneakers and left. My mother put up her feet on Lou’s chair. She hadn’t had any pasta, and she was on her fourth glass of wine. It had plumped up her cheeks. Her mascara was in little black pepper flakes around her eyes. She let her head fall onto the back of the chair and she breathed out like she was making imaginary smoke rings.
    Now.
    “Oh,” I said. “Crap. I have to pick up homework from school before the weekend. If I keep up with it, I can still get grades for this semester. Principal Hidalgo said she’d leave it with the guard.”
    Such a lie. Such a big huge lie that no one would notice.
    I put on my sneakers and my coat and I was just about to leave when my mother said, “Come, Lorca. Just come here for a second.”
    Then, very casually, like it wasn’t the point of everything, she said, “Oh, you can go. You don’t have to stay here with me.”
    I went back to the table and sat down. She didn’t budge. My coat was bunched under me. Her head was still back. When her neck was long and stretched like this, I could see the structure of it, the evidence of lack of sun and air, skin like rungs on a ladder, covered in the slightest layer of dust. She was quiet.
    “Let me tell you something,” she said. She hadn’t had a bite of her dinner. I’d even curled the pasta into a little linguine nest in the center of each bowl. My mother’s was still perfect and round and cold. The sauce had darkened.
    “This is delish,” she said. “But it needs red wine. I tell you because I love you and you should know for the future.”
    She went on about deglazing and how it brings out the earthy taste of the onions and never use wine you wouldn’t drink yourself and a young, robust wine is what you use in red sauces, nothing fortified or dry, for example.
    I was sweating in my coat. My stomach was starting to itch. I should have worn an undershirt. I was thirsty. I reminded myself to remind myself to smell my armpits before I went. With her head back like this, every time she took a sip of the wine, her throat looked like a snake that was swallowing a mouse. She wanted to talk about Aurelio some more. She wasn’t looking at me. Whenever she talked about other men, I thought of my father. I didn’t hate him. There was never a second that I hated him. Sometimes the phone rang and I’d pick up and it was quiet on the other end except for what sounded like rustling trees, which I knew was absurd. It was just the way I imagined him. If no one else was home, I’d say, “Dad. Dad?” But no one ever said anything back. When I called *69, it said the number was blocked. There were a billion other people it could have been, though I’d put us on the Do Not Call list, so it probably wasn’t just anyone.
    “Your father was never like that,” she was