Free The Silver Glove by Suzy McKee Charnas

nodded.
    â€œSo am I, darling,” she went on, “but a person can’t go around torturing herself all the time. It’s not healthy and it doesn’t help anything. So I’ve decreed a little diversion for myself.”
    â€œWhat kind of a diversion?” I said.
    Mom was lifting noodles out of the colander with a red plastic spoon that had square teeth around the edges, kind of like a claw. I looked away; I couldn’t watch.
    â€œThis may come as a shock, darling, but I’m going out. On a date.”
    â€œWho with?” I said.
    Bam , bam , bam , went my blood. Who else?
    â€œOh, you don’t know him,” she said lightly.
    She was lying to me. Knowing I couldn’t stand the man, she was lying to avoid an argument. I’d done it myself often enough to recognize the symptoms.
    â€œWhere’s this guy taking you, dressed like that?” I said. “The Village?”
    I could follow them, I was thinking, and protect her. Try to protect her, or something, but how? I kept wanting to cry, and wondering if Mom would notice if I did.
    â€œHe’s taking me ice-skating,” Mom said.
    There was this awful disconnection from what was really going on. I mean, my mom is not a flake. She would not go out on a date with anybody while her own mother, my Gran, was missing! Only if the Master of The Claw, Brightner the Creep, had put a spell on her.
    And Gran had charged me with keeping Mom away from him. How?
    I said, “We haven’t gone ice-skating in years.”
    Which was true. Mom took me a couple of times when I was younger, and then she lost interest.
    â€œAs a matter of fact,” she said, sitting down to eat with a sigh of satisfaction, “your father, may he freeze his little hairy earlobes off in Alaska or wherever the hell he is now, courted me on the ice of the Wollman Memorial Skating Rink in Central Park.”
    â€œHe did?” I was feeling really peculiar. There was no way that I could make my end of this conversation intelligent.
    â€œYes,” she said, helping herself to sauce and offering me the ladle. “If I am a little old to be the mother of a young teen, it’s because I was slow to marry, Valli, slow and careful. After all, I had the horrible example of your Gran and Malcolm to learn from.”
    What a time for stories about Grampa Malcolm! Or rather the story about Grampa Malcolm, the baker.
    Gran had been sent here from Scotland by her family to marry him, which she had done at a very young age. He had turned out to be the world’s laziest living human, and one fine day she had simply sent him packing. Eventually, after showing up occasionally at family gatherings for a few more years, he had retired to Florida and the family had lost track of him. Period.
    I am going crazy, I thought, because I am too tired to stay sane. And my mother has chosen this time to tell me the story of her life because she is under a spell that won’t let her see anything real that’s around her right now.
    â€œSo,” Mom said nostalgically, “there I was in my late twenties, beginning to think about the virtues of being single all my life and teaching English, when along came Jonathan Covington Marsh, your esteemed (at the time, because love is blind) father. He was a rising young commercial artist in a very successful advertising art studio.
    â€œHe had no money, though—he was paying off debts left by his worthless drunk of a father, clearing the family name by interminably emptying his own pockets. ‘Draining the Marsh,’ we used to call it. But we had a wonderful time together on next to nothing. In those days, you could still do that in New York.”
    She smiled. I squirmed. She poured some low-calorie dressing on the salad—another sure sign that she’s interested in somebody and therefore more than usually fierce about her diet.
    â€œOne way of spending a cheap evening together in the winter