Page 76 of Kitten

“He seems like he’ll come around.”

This was the kind of uninformed assertion my mother liked to make. It was sweet. “You’ve never even met him.”

“I know that he cares about you,” she said. “If he didn’t, he would’ve already broken it off.”

“Lou said the same thing.”

“We’re similar, me and this Lou.”

“I don’t know about that.”

Outside, in the living room, Nicolo and Lou started singing a song in Italian.

“What about me?” my mother asked. “Don’t you want to hear about my life?”

“Tell me,” I said.

Her voice became shy. “I’ve repainted the walls.”

I swung my legs down and sat up on the bed. “You’re joking.”

“It took me a whole week.”

“What color?”

“You’ll just have to come back and see.”

“Is it all done? Can you save me one wall?”

“You can do your bedroom,” she said. “I haven’t touched that.”

“Is that it? You did everything else?”

“A whole bedroom’s not enough for you?”

I tried to picture this version of our house that I’d never seen. For my whole life, when I thought of my mother, I thought of red walls. It never occurred to me to repaint them. Much easier to think of my mother as static, her life small, my place in it large and animating and necessary. Much easier to think of mine the same way, attached to hers, neither of us free, but neither of us alone.

I looked again at my reflection in Lou’s vanity and thought about all the different ways people were unhappy.How elusive the way out of that unhappiness could be until suddenly, for one night or a second, it becomes clear. Memory of that first night in Holme, James and I discussing childhood over buttered scallops. What people really wanted was the ability to do something for themselves. Have whatever breakfast they wanted. A room of their own.

It was past midnight when our conversation ended. We had a lot to talk about, none of it anything we’d spoken about before. At the end of it my mother paused, then said, curt: “Thank you for calling me.” I felt touched, embarrassed, even, by the formality of her statement. I returned her thanks. Our words were clumsy, and they would be for a while, but at least they had been said.

The apartment had become very quiet. From the living room, music trickled, faint and slow. Lou’s and Nicolo’s sneakers had disappeared from the shoe rack. Sucked-out limes were scattered over the coffee table. Just below the far window, next to a stack of my things, my air mattress sat plumped and inflated, as if by magic.

A breeze crawled over my shoulder from somewhere I couldn’t see. They’d left the kitchen window open, probably to smoke. As I walked over to shut it, I thought I caught a glimmer of movement by the sink. In it, dishes shone. Greasy plates, my glass of water. A small bowl perched on the edge of the counter, full of milk, the surface trembling as if just licked.

Outside, the sky was a deep, real blue. I took a picture and sent it to James, along with the message:Blue.Things had changed between us. I hoped they hadn’t changed too much that they could not change again. Like describing afeeling or a color, there was no way to be sure, but you could try to figure it out, you could even get close.

On the windowsill, a family of ants marched over two kissing cigarette stubs. Four stories below, students funneled vodka into plastic water bottles. I stuck my head out and breathed in the thin November air, sweet and clipped with the scent of smoke and piss. Leaves shook, animated by an unseen wind, making no sound. A few blocks down, or maybe a whole neighborhood over, a dog barked and barked. The year would soon be over.

My phone buzzed. I pulled myself back into the kitchen. It was getting cold, but no matter how hard I tried, the window would not close.