Free Little Known Facts: A Novel by Christine Sneed Page B

understandable that you’d want to know what happened.”
    I don’t answer, waiting for him to say more.
    “What did you call for, Lucy?” he says.
    I bristle. I don’t like it when he uses my first name because it sometimes sounds like he’s spitting it out. “To apologize,” I say.
    “Okay, thanks. Apology accepted.”
    “Maybe you could apologize to me too.”
    He laughs in a short, caustic burst. “Are you serious?”
    I’m botching this now as badly as I botched the visit. It’s almost as if I’m observing someone who looks exactly like me, and I want to shake her and tell her to stop. But I’m also so angry that my head is aching, something I’ve been ignoring since leaving his place three hours earlier. “Never mind. Forget I said that.”
    “I have to go now,” he says, flatly. “I have someone on the other line.”
    Before I have a chance to respond, he hangs up. In the few seconds of silence before the beeping begins, I pretend he’s still there. “I know you’re unhappy,” I say, “but that doesn’t mean you have the right to treat other people like trash.”
    It has always been a little disorienting that my personal and professional lives are defined by serious disparities. At the hospital or in the clinic where I take appointments, I am the brisk, competent Dr. Ivins who almost always commands other people’s respect. Outside of work, of course, it’s very different—I am only another driver on the car-choked highways, another impatient person in line at the grocery store; I am someone’s mother, tolerable to my children most of the time but still a cross to bear. I am also a famous man’s ex-wife, the one he left for someone younger and less educated. I have a bad temper; I have fears and grave insecurities. I want always to be right, to have the last word, to be respected and obeyed without question. Some days it takes all of my self-discipline to force myself out of the house. Some days I am almost speechless from regret or loneliness or anger over nothing that I can clearly articulate. Some days I eat nothing but cookies for breakfast and potato chips for lunch. Too often, I get more satisfaction than I should from other people’s disappointments. It is hard to dispute the evidence that we are a race defined to a significant degree by our pettiness, by how vicious our desire is to keep track, to compare, to win.
    My phone doesn’t ring for the rest of the night, and although there are people I could call, I don’t. Thirty years ago, my children hadn’t yet been born, nor did I know for sure that I would become a mother. Renn and I were twenty-two, in love, talented in our different ways. A movie star had just become our president. We assumed that we were bound for greatness too, and one of us, I guess, really was. Our children, we assumed—still assume—might also be bound for greatness. It is possible that Billy’s unhappiness will end tomorrow. That he will find something to do with his life that fills him with joyful suspense. I’m still going to order him those cooking magazines. He will probably throw them away, but maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll look through one of them and decide that he wants to open a restaurant or wait tables or chop vegetables for a while, maybe long enough for it to become a career. If he wants to run marathons, he can. If he wants to brood and resent me and the rest of the world, I can put up with this for a little while longer, but after a point, it will have to stop, or else these feelings will define his life, and the thought of this bothers me greatly.
    Because his life
is
extraordinary. He has already had so many experiences most of us will never have. He has met some of the most interesting people in the world, and on more than one occasion he has shaken the hands of the leaders of foreign countries, those who invited his father to dine in their mansions while he was in their countries promoting his movies. Billy has seen the Nile, the