The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories

How It Works

8 8 8 8 8 I see them framed in a Gothic arch, two handsome women caught in mid-­ confrontation. It’s like something out of an old movie, a black-and-white weepie my mother saw as a kid, although she would deny it, In your dreams. That was way before my time. They sit with heads bent under slanting light, one blonde and one—the habit makes it hard to tell. They’re both women of a certain age, although Lydia is, face it, farther along in years and worldly experience than the abbess—I think. Mother Therese is younger, but who knows what she was up to back in her days as Terri Gordon, rising starlet? Both have the chiseled profiles, the entitled air of born stars. It’s about bony structure, although unlike her holy adversary, my mother has been surgically enhanced. Lydia spins out her life in terms of although. Weighing this against that, bent on making herself look better to the few people who matter in her odd, Lydia-centric world. My mother is the star of her own life, eternally searching for the right man to share the screen with her. And if she defies probabilities and forces this encounter with the abbess? If you’re that deep into this failure of the imagination, Mother, go for it. They are fighting for the soul of Gerard LaPierre. Mother Therese wants it for God, although if Gerard is to be believed, God already has it. My mother could care less about souls. She wants him for herself. I can’t wait to see the movie. Note to Mother: dood, it’s not a movie. Don’t call me mother. If anybody asks, we’re dear friends, and if they remark on the resemblance, yes, we’re related. We could be sisters, right? My mother’s newest acquisition told her that he just turned thirty, but he looks older to me. In fact, he told her a lot of things. Lydia’s new man has the same big, square head and blunt, handsome features as her comic book idol—what’s his name? Captain Marvel—and how long has it been since he flew? Right, Mother, these details date you without leaving a trace, and you don’t even know. This Gerard looks kind of like him, with the same blunt features and empty How It Works 146 k i t r e e d eyes, same dark hair like a backslash over the brow. He flashes the same bland, sweet smile. Instead of the cape with the lightning bolt, he arrives cloaked in a boyish, vulnerable air, unless that’s tragic inevitability. Practiced, engaging and needy in equal measure, he spins out his story, smiles, and waits. He is quite the storyteller. And what a story! Your heart goes out: poor guy. “My father was a black Irishman, that’s all Mam would say about him, even though I begged to know. He ran out on her as soon as she got pregnant and it made her angry and sad. She tried hard but was bitter every day of her mortal life. She tore up all his pictures but I guess I look like him, why else would she whip me the way she did? Poor little Jennie LaPierre, nobody to love her, no place to go and ugly to boot. Out of a clear sky she’d turn around and smack me for no reason, and I suppose that’s why. She was a hard woman, but she tried. God knows she tried. “In our part of Minnesota, Catholic girls didn’t get pregnant and if they did, God forbid, then they had the baby and either she married the guy or she went back to school and her parents brought it up, the town we lived in was that old-fashioned and remote. We lived so far out in the sticks that the only other option was St. Mary’s home for unwed mothers, and that’s where I lived until I came here. “See, my mother was a ward of the state. Even I would have to say she was never good looking, I guess she was pretty hard to place, so she landed with foster parents who didn’t care a fig about children and acted like she was a great burden. They didn’t want her, they did it for the sake of the monthly check from the state...