Instead, she said casually, “He’s fine, just fine. Up to his usual tricks, healing people and such.” She added, for emphasis, “We’re better than ever.”

“What have you two been up to? What does he think of the city? What does he think of the Great Northwest?”

Her mother was always asking things about Hudson. How did he like his eggs, and did he hold Vicky’s hand in public, and what was his opinion on folk music? As if she and Hudson formed one singular organism, sharing hearts and livers and limbs. What did her mother know, anyway? She had her own problems with men.

“Why do you care so much about Hudson?” Vicky asked, stepping across the aged linoleum. It was pine needle green and lay blistered and peeling under her feet. As soon as a footstep flattened one bubble another swelled nearby, as if her walls contained a boiling green sea. She placed the empty tuna can in the sink and filled it with cold water. “Why all the questions?

She expected her mother to respond with something sad, an archetypal. Please succeed where I failed, or that sort of thing. Her mother, after all, had her own problems with men.

Instead she asked, “He’s important to you, isn’t he?”

Vicky didn’t answer. Maya was exhausting her with all these questions, and she was still hungry. Her mother asked more questions, endlessly, senselessly, and Vicky searched her refrigerator: Miracle Whip Light, half a can of dried and pebbly corn niblets, a disheartened stalk of Romaine lettuce, its veins striped orangey-brown. Where was Hudson when you needed him?  He bought protein shakes and organic eggs, he bought contact paper for kitchen cabinets and drawers. He kept desk supplies in rectangular plastic desk inserts, the rubber bands in their own cell, the pens, the highlighters, the staples.

“I’m going to go now, Mom.” She had interrupted another question, something having to do with, as always, nothing at all.

“Okay, okay. I can take a hint. You want to desert your dear old mother, fine by me.”

“You’re not old,” Vicky said. “And Hudson’s calling on the other line.”

But he wasn’t really. Last June, not long after arriving in Seattle, they had broken up.

 

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