Part 17 (1/2)

”I hope so too.” But I didn't tell her how long it had taken me to understand myself, how long and how many pharmaceuticals.

T.

he weekend was full of activities. Friday night was a casual dinner organized by the families of Jeremy and Cami's friends. It was an inexpensive, family-style Italian restaurant, and we gathered around long tables. It was noisy and fun, probably like Rose's Sunday-night suppers used to be. Then Sat.u.r.day was Cla.s.s Day, with departmental receptions, a cla.s.s picture, and an awards ceremony, followed by another dinner. We had a brunch to go to on Sunday morning; the actual graduation ceremony would be Sunday afternoon.

During Friday evening and all day Sat.u.r.day, the tone was exuberant. The graduates stood up and made toasts, telling wild stories about their drinking and their studying, about the embarra.s.sments they had suffered as freshmen and the antics that had nearly gotten them throw out of school. They also laughed about their student-loan debts. They drank toasts to their debts; they made up song parodies about their debts.

I glanced at Mike during the first of these songs. He was sitting forward, drumming his fingers on the table. When he noticed my gaze, he sat back, embarra.s.sed. Then I looked at Guy, and his expression was also private and intense.

These were two men whose offspring were graduating without debt, and they were deeply, silently proud. Neither Guy's big house in the Hamptons nor Mike's flashy little car meant to them what this did. They had been able to provide their children these educational opportunities.

I touched Mike's arm. ”You did good,” I whispered.

I would never have done that if Claudia had come.

Everything was easier, more fun, because Claudia wasn't around. I was Jeremy's mom; Mike was Jeremy's dad. Some of the people we were celebrating with probably had no idea that we were divorced.

During the recognition ceremony, Jeremy, to our surprise, got a big community-service award. Many pre-meds do their community service by working with kids who are in the hospital. Jeremy had instead planned activities for their siblings, culminating with a Games Day that pitted, in a noncompet.i.tive way, the siblings of the fourth-floor patients against the siblings of the fifth-floor patients. The professor giving the award cited how much that had done for the morale of the families and the patients.

Mike drew close to me and whispered, ”That has your name written all over it. Was it your idea?”

I nodded, and as we watched Jeremy walk up to get the award, Mike drew my hand through his arm. ”You did good too,” he said.

He would never have done that if Claudia had been there.

I had to wonder . . . what would things have been like if I hadn't moved, if he hadn't meet Claudia? Would we have gone on forever as we had the first three years, not together but not really apart either, with him thinking of our old house as his family home and me still making his favorite dishes on Sunday night?

It would have been easy, but it wouldn't have been good. Lurking beneath the comfort would have been too many unresolved issues, too much anger. I'd needed to get a place of my own; he'd needed a relations.h.i.+p with someone who was very different from me. Otherwise we would have simply been marching in place.

But we weren't doing that. We were moving forward. I was, I realized, not angry at him anymore.

I wasn't angry at Mike. This was amazing, incredible. It had probably happened gradually, but all of a sudden I felt as if it were the first day of spring, the wonderful day when you can go outside without a heavy coat.

What a relief it was, not to feel so negative about Mike, the man I had once loved, and to know that he now felt the same way about me. Jeremy was not the only one graduating this weekend. There ought to be diplomas for this too-”The Regents of the University of Marriage and Divorce hereby certify that you are no longer angry.”

T.

he cla.s.s dinner ended early, and Guy invited the other families back to the Zander-Browns' suite. The graduates had been planning to go out to bars afterward, but the lure of free liquor made them decide to come to the suite. Mike and I stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy snacks.

As we were ripping open the bags of chips, Guy said, ”And now our resident fun mom will get us started on a game.”

He was looking at me. I thought for a moment and suggested charades, something that would have been hard to make fun for Finney.

We divided into teams, and the game soon became extremely compet.i.tive, with people putting in obscure, lengthy t.i.tles. Our team, which had its share of English majors, offered up Letters to His Son by the Earl of Chesterfield on the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World, and the guy who got it pretended to vomit in hopes of getting the word hurl out of them as a soundalike for earl. And since he was a young man, and Annie was Annie, he chose her to pretend to throw up on.

”Not on me,” she squealed and shoved him aside. ”If you've got to hurl on anyone, do it on Darcy. She doesn't mind.”

As soon as she said ”hurl,” he pointed excitedly at her.

”Girl . . . curl . . . burl,” his team shouted. ”Earl.”

Rose was on my team, but the teams were big enough that she was sitting close enough to Annie to speak to her. ”When on earth did you *hurl' on Darcy?”

”Is it *earl'?” someone asked. The player nodded vigorously. ”It has to have *earl' in it.”

”Chesterfield's Letters,” someone else shrieked. ”He was an earl.”

”At Stone-Chase,” Annie said. ”During the Spring Fling, when-” she stopped.

”But you said it was twenty words,” complained one of the players. ”How can it be twenty words?”

The team started laboriously figuring out which words they knew and which they didn't. Rose leaned forward to speak to me. ”What is Annie talking about?”

”You need to let her tell you,” I said.

Annie was looking at us, worried. She got up. Her team was protesting that that t.i.tle couldn't have twenty words, and the English majors on our team were insisting that that was the real t.i.tle. No one noticed as Rose and I followed Annie into Annie's bedroom.

”You didn't tell her?” Annie asked.

I shook my head. ”Zack said that he promised you I wouldn't.”

”Yes, but-” Either she had forgotten the promise or had a.s.sumed that I wouldn't keep it.

”What's this all about?” Rose asked; her voice was stern.

Annie started hesitantly, then ended up telling the story of her misdeeds with some dignity.

Rose was almost speechless. ”You were so drunk that Zack called Darcy?”

Annie nodded.

”She might not have been as drunk as Zack thought,” I said. ”She did vomit, but she never pa.s.sed out. She was never nonresponsive.”

Rose ignored me. ”And that's why you wanted to stay for the extra day?”

Annie again nodded.

”Annie, we will not tolerate your lying to us.”

”I didn't lie,” she protested. ”I said that I wanted to stay because the girls I was with were really nice and I really liked the place-and that was true.”

”But you left out a lot. Darcy having to drive up there, your spending the night with her, Zack taking you to Baltimore . . . Annie, leaving aside the drinking, that's a huge imposition on other people.”

”I know,” Annie mumbled.

The door burst open. ”Annie! Annie!” It was one of her teammates. ”We got it, but we're filing a protest. Come on out.”