Free I Like You Just Fine When You're Not Around by Ann Garvin Page A

you’re out, and then came the wooden spoon. Her mother never hit her with it. It was like a wooden exclamation point she held in her hand for emphasis.
    Let her wait,
she remembered thinking, to show she could be independent. She would kick the inside of the tire hard, and flakes of black fluttered down from the sides.
Five, four, three, two, one
.
    “Here I am, Mama. I’m coming.” She would call this in just a minute, but first wanted to torture her mother a bit longer before she answered, make her wonder if she had run away or been eaten by Hothead, the neighbor’s pit bull.
    “Come on in here and get cleaned up. It’s time to start thinking about dinner,” her mother called. Softening, she added, “Grab your bike, Tig. We’re having your favorite dessert later.”
    Tig had stepped through the door, looking up as her mother reached out and cupped her chin. She loved her mother’s hands.
    Tig, the child, loved these times with her mother. Hallie was always so busy taking care of animals or fighting with Wendy that these times stuck out in Tig’s memory. She recalled looking up at her mother, moving only her eyes so as not to disturb her. The tiny lines at the corners of her mother’s eyes made them look like the soft sympathetic eyes of a whale, small and wise. Once, curled in her mother’s lap, she had commented on the wrinkles, meaning to say how beautiful they were. Her mother had not been pleased by the compliment and grumbled about getting older.
    Tig gazed up at her mother, saw that her mother’s eyes rested on the oak tree outside, but it was her mother’s mind where Tig longed to go. Unfortunately, there was a sign on her mother’s face that read
Keep Out
. Sitting with her this way was like riding in the passenger seat of a car and not being able to see over the dashboard. Finally, unable to remain quiet, Tig said, “Mama?”
    “Yes, Tig?” her mother said, without looking down at her.
    “Can you tell me about the day you first saw Daddy?”
    Her mother took a long breath and washed her hand over her face, like a washcloth wiping away the dust on the memory. “Oh, sweetie, you’ve heard this story a hundred times. Can’t I tell another?”
    “Please, Mama, I just like to hear it.” Tig put on her best pleading face as she gazed up.
    Resigned, her mother said, “I was sitting in a huge class at the university, a chemistry class. He had on one blue sock and one white sweat sock and the nerdiest glasses I had ever seen, black frames with scratches all over them.”
    She didn’t speak or move, thinking that if her mother forgot about her, she might go on to serve up another new piece of the pie.
    “I noticed he had really short nails,” her mother went on. “The kind you get from biting them right down to the nub. I kind of thought it made him look flawed and sensitive. I guess I was right about that.” She sighed and then said, “He had on an old brown sweater with worn cuffs and a tiny hole where the neckband met the shoulder seam. I told him I could sew it for him.”
    Her mother paused again and said in a new voice, the one she reserved for when the delivery boy dropped the newspaper just short of the stoop, or when the garbage men tossed the cans around, “I don’t mind telling you about your dad, but we should talk about who he really was, the real man behind the story. But, why? It’s just the three of us now,” she said with conviction.
    Tig remembered her discomfort with her mother’s change from reminiscent to practical. She remembered wriggling out of her mother’s arms, sliding onto the floor like Robin down the Batpole, throwing her arms up and skimming out of the wedding gown all in one motion, leaving the gathered luxury in the lap of her mother.
    “I can do a cartwheel. Do you want to see?” Tig had said as she pitched her body upside down just short of a plant resting on the windowsill. When her mother didn’t even yell at her, Tig brought up Wendy.
    “Wendy