What Is Your Mother Like?

Myka

She was going too fast. The Subaru was bucketing down the lane much faster than it should be, and every thump and rattle was a protest. I'm too old for this, it was saying, and you're too old to be having a meltdown. Helena had assured her that the gates would be open, but Myka had visions of airbags inflating and the Subaru's front end crumpling like an accordion because she was going much too fast and the brakes were too worn to stop the car in time . . . the brakes that she had been putting off replacing for the past several weeks. She glanced at Maddie, who had her forehead pressed against the passenger window. It was possible she was cataloguing everything she saw, trees, flowers, a startled rabbit; it was her daughter's tendency as it was her own, but Myka thought that today, at this moment, it was a maneuver to forestall a conversation about how - and why - two 11-year-old girls had apparently orchestrated a reunion between their mothers.

The gates were open. Myka eased up on the accelerator, and the Subaru, with a last ferocious rattle of outrage, glided through. She felt the tension ease from her shoulders, her neck, as the arms swung together, and she continued to slow the car down. Once they turned back onto the highway, she felt even better, and, keeping the speed precisely five miles above the limit, she felt the safety of the metropolitan sprawl envelope her. This she could negotiate. Granted, the other drivers were rude or distracted, the congestion horrible (even on the weekends anymore), and the shopping centers and housing developments on either side as uniform as if they had been taken from a factory conveyor belt, but there were still rules or, at the least, counteracting behaviors that you could adopt. Drive at a sane speed, stay in the right lane, don't be impatient to get to your destination, appreciate the fact that you don't live in the suburbs (although she and Tracy had grown up in an outer ring suburb, so, really, "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"). There had been no rules for the half-hour they had spent in Helena's house, no, not hers, not yet, the half-hour they had spent in Nate Robinson's mansion.

Her first realization that the universe was not operating according to its usual rules was that Helena - and she knew, on some level, she would be processing the fact for days that the woman she had seen and chatted with and whose iced tea she had sipped (her throat had been too tight for more than sips) was Helena - had looked wonderful. Gorgeous, and she would be - Myka didn't have to search for the birth date because she had never forgotten it - 42, yes, 42 on September 21. Women who were less than two months from their 42nd birthday shouldn't still look like they were under 30. Myka knew she didn't, and she was three years younger than Helena. That hair, that skin, that red bikini in combination with that hair, that skin. Myka wanted to squirm, and she wasn't sure how much of it was from frustration that anyone could look that good and how much of it was from frustration that Helena did.

Her second realization was that their meeting after all these years didn't have nearly the impact on Helena as it did on her. She had gaped, she had croaked out Helena's name, she had nearly fallen to the floor, and all the while Helena had maintained the distant friendliness with which she might have greeted a canvasser from the Democratic party, determined to be cordial but convinced that the canvasser had wandered far from her natural territory. I'm sorry, I might even recognize you, but I no longer speak your language. Maddie, with an adroitness that Myka wouldn't have credited her with a mere ten days ago, had volunteered to help Christina unpack so they could make plans for when they next were together. Christina's frown of annoyance had been momentary, and with a hopeful look in Myka's direction, she suggested, "Maybe at the art museum?" before rocketing back toward the stairs, Maddie close behind her. They had thundered up to the second floor, all but one of Christina's bags, her backpack, forgotten where they had been dropped in the hallway. Helena had smiled down at the bags and then turned the smile on Myka, one amused and knowing, probably amused because it was knowing. "They need to work on their subtlety, but not bad." She had tilted her head toward the patio. "Why don't you join me out there, and we can get caught up, just as they're expecting us to do."

In an uncharacteristic bit of recklessness, Myka cut across multiple lanes of traffic, although their exit wasn't for several miles, not until they were well within the city proper. She had felt hemmed in, and in this lane at this moment, now driving ten miles above the speed limit, she felt freer. And slightly dangerous, which might be all right when you were on the freeway by yourself, trying to rid your thoughts of the 30 minutes you had spent exchanging small talk with Helena - the woman with whom you had never once imagined swapping clichés about your lives, your jobs - but which wasn't all right when your daughter was in the car with you casting anxious looks at the speedometer. She was Myka Bering after all, someone who wasn't reckless or (slightly) dangerous, who had summed up the 18 years she and Helena had been apart as perfunctorily and as self-consciously as a first time user of an online dating site: university administrator, divorced mom, DIY enthusiast in her spare time. (She firmly believed that online dating sites should never replace the casual encounter at a bookstore, the ad hoc set-up by friends at a dinner party, since the reward of feeling that instant attraction as your eyes met more than outweighed the crushing social anxiety - and she should know, since the minute she had locked eyes with perennial senior Helena Wells . . . .)

Helena had been more expansive, which was true to the Helena Myka remembered, describing post-graduate years of "poking about in the world's versions of Auntie's attic and a jumble sale, collecting all sorts of odd experiences" before going to work for Charles "in the proverbial mailroom, although, of course, Future Image has no mailroom because it has no mail." She had laughed the old, sardonic laugh Myka remembered. "Email is too old-fashioned, although Charles has been stymied in his pursuit of its successor. I believe he would prefer a window into his mind if he thought we could withstand the glimpses of his magnificence." She skated around the circumstances of Christina's birth, noting roguishly, "In the midst of trying to resolve a messy scandal on the set of an Italian melodrama, I created one of my own with a very handsome, but already spoken for, actor." Then after years of building Future Image's reputation, and cachet, "on this side of the Atlantic, I returned to London only to be banished to the hinterlands." Her smile was easy, her enjoyment in telling her tale obvious, but Myka had sensed her retreating. Maybe it was nothing more than Helena interrupting the course of her narrative to adjust the fit of her wrap or to offer Myka more iced tea, but this part of her life story felt, if it didn't sound, less polished. Myka had received the same impression when Helena spoke about Nate. She spoke of him admiringly, even gushingly, but the scaffolding of her story about how they met was raw, the wood green, the construction amateurish.

"I'm glad you're happy," Myka had said quietly, catching something surprised, even disappointed, in Helena's eyes. She had believed once upon a time that there was nothing that Helena could hide from her, the deep brown of those eyes as transparent to her as if they had been blue. But that had been 18 years ago, 18 lifetimes ago, rather, because that Helena, the one whose down-at-the-heels clothes and carelessly groomed mane of hair Myka could recall in detail, would never have found herself here, holding court poolside in this monument to male vanity. Not without a good dose of self-mockery, but that wouldn't be a prized quality in Nate Robinson's house.

Of course there was no keeping this news from Tracy, although Myka was tempted to exercise those soft skills from the dark side of the Force that were not her strength - dissembling, denying responsibility, lying, manipulating. Helena was a college romance that had ended years ago; other people would have put such an old love away, occasionally bringing it out to blow the dust off, but otherwise not giving it much thought. But not her, not Monster Memory Myka (which had been Sam's sometimes loving but more often sarcastic nickname for her), although that monster memory was puckishly selective. She couldn't remember what Sam had given her for their anniversaries, but she could remember every gift that Helena had given her; every scrap of paper that Helena had written an "I love you" on and then hidden in her backpack or a textbook as a surprise was stored somewhere in her memory. If she couldn't not say anything about seeing Helena again and if she couldn't drop it casually into conversation, then maybe she just should blurt it out - the shock, the disbelief, the dismay - and suffer her sister's endless, and merciless, teasing.

In the end, Myka was left to assume that she had presented a target too large since Tracy had been uncharacteristically restrained, refusing to indulge in the easiest gibes and jokes. Perhaps the fact that Tracy had also invited their mother over for her "welcome home" dinner for Maddie had had something to do with it. Jeannie Bering was a peacemaker by nature, and she had gotten plenty of practice in her marriage to their father, negotiating countless cease-fires between him and his eldest daughter in particular. She could sniff out an unkind remark before it was spoken, putting her hand on the arm of the prospective offender and, gently but inexorably, changing the subject.

That didn't stop Tracy from firing a broadside. "Wow," she said, avoiding the sofa and choosing one of the armchairs in the living room in which to sit down, baby Mulvaney (whose sex remained known only to the obstetrician) between the size of a bowling ball and a beach ball. "What's it been, 20 years or so since you last saw her?" She patted the chair's arms, reassuring herself that they would be there when she needed to get up. Then she smiled, very brightly, at her sister.

Twenty years . . . or so. Tracy was testing her, daring her to correct her down to the number of days. Myka's smile was noticeably dimmer. "A long time," she agreed. Their mother, still at the dining room table with Maddie, who was showing off the crafts she had made at camp (a basket woven from reeds, an acorn and dried berry necklace, bookends made from lake stones glued to blocks of wood), beatified them both with a loving glance that refused to acknowledge the aggression of their smiles.

Tracy's eyes strayed toward Maddie, and her expression changed. Myka looked at her daughter as well, but Maddie had suddenly become absorbed in explaining to her grandmother the proper care and handling of a glue gun. Some girls, she was saying, treated it like a six-shooter, sticking it in the pockets of their shorts and then yanking it out like they were the sheriff facing down a gunslinger at high noon. Some girls who did that ended up gluing their pockets shut. By the arch tone of her daughter's voice, Myka was pretty sure that Christina Wells had been one of those girls. "It must've come as a big surprise that Helena is the mother of Maddie's new best friend." Tracy sounded . . . was it sympathetic? Which earned them another beatifying glance from their mother.

"Mom almost fainted," Maddie helpfully provided. "It was a really big surprise. Really big," she repeated, unhelpfully.

"It was hot today, and I was dehydrated. Plus I run hypoglycemic, you know that, Trace." Myka heard her explanations tumbling over each other. "Once I was able to sit down and drink a glass of iced tea, I was fine."

"I imagine you and Helena had a lot of catching up to do. What has she been doing with herself?" Jeannie was reluctantly allowing Maddie to fasten the acorn and dried berry necklace around her throat.

A lot of catching up to do. Myka looked narrowly at her mother. When she and Sam had divorced, her mother had tried to console her by reminding her that there were a lot of fish in the sea. Not that she believed in labels and not that her social life in high school had given her parents much indication about the seas in which she would be interested in casting her line, so to speak, but she knew that her mother didn't mean fish of all varieties. Her relationship with Helena, her later, not-so-secret trysts with Laurel, the other - engaged - assistant in the provost's office, they had never truly registered with Jeannie. Unsure of how adamantly she wanted to dampen her mother's expectations, Myka had taken her mother's hands in hers and said, "I've tried, Mom, but I'm not really into that kind of fish." When she had started dating Michelle, Jeannie had murmured, "Ah, that's what you meant," but her understanding wasn't retrospective, apparently. Myka wasn't going to bother correcting her mother about Helena tonight. It didn't matter, anyway, what they had been to one another, they were virtually strangers at this point, so maybe "catching up" was the better term.

"She runs a public relations firm with her brother, and she's engaged to marry Nate Robinson."

Jeannie and Tracy exchanged glances, but it was Tracy who thinned her lips, as if readying herself for a fight, and said, "You mean the Nate Robinson who owns a global agribusiness conglomerate? The one who's a stalwart of the Republican party, not the old Republican party, but the new scary Republican party? The one who's almost singlehandedly responsible for the environmental disaster that this state's becoming?"

"The one and the same," Myka said, spreading her hands in an I-can't-believe-it-either gesture.

"Christina doesn't like him," Maddie said solemnly, standing back and appraising how her necklace looked on her grandmother.

"Just because he's taken political positions we don't agree with doesn't make him a bad man." Jeannie tried to sound chiding but failed.

"In this case, it sorta does, Mom," Tracy objected. "The runoff from his plants is killing our rivers and lakes, and he's fought every environmental regulation that the state legislature's tried to pass." She laughed sarcastically. "I could get it if he looked like Chris Hemsworth or The Rock, but he's a middle-aged tycoon who just happens to have a full head of hair." Pinning her gaze on Myka, she said, "I wouldn't have thought Helena was that shallow. It's not like you have to see her again, right?" Tracy gave vent to another sarcastic laugh. "You're hardly traveling in the same social circles."

There was the sound of marbles hitting the floor, and Maddie, who had just freed her grandmother of the necklace, was staring at the broken ends of the leather cord in her hands. Acorns were rolling under the dining room table. "But Mom, you were going to take me and Christina to the art museum, and Christina was thinking of asking her mom to come along," she protested, her complaint threatening to become a wail. "Don't ruin everything!"

Helena

It wasn't that she didn't enjoy a good painting, or several, but there was only so much brilliance she could take in at one time. ("You mean brilliance that's not your own," Charles snidely whispered in her mind.) Myka and Christina were practically nose to canvas with a Van Gogh, or as close as they could get considering that the portrait was ringed off and that a security guard was pacing with purpose only a few feet away. Christina's leaning over the rope marking the protected space had earned her a warning from the guard. Really, one more in the Wheat Fields series hardly seemed to merit the rebuke, let alone her daughter's enthusiasm.

She was a bit of a philistine, she could admit it. She would generally prefer to attend a football match (or watch one on the telly since there were no good matches in the States) than go to an exhibit. Years ago that flash of reverse snobbery had been one of her attractions despite Myka's vehement claims otherwise. More than once Myka had dragged her off to a bedroom (not always their own) after a display of Guinness-fueled cheers, fist pumps, and choice British insults. But that had been many, many years ago, and the Myka with whom she had been recently reunited no longer seemed the type to appreciate British scatological references or a pint of good stout.

Maddie was wandering the gallery, her long, thin legs turning in slightly, her walk a replica of Myka's own somewhat pigeon-toed one. She had her mother's loose-limbed frame and slanting smile as well, although her coloring was different, her hair honey-blond and her eyes a blue a shade or two lighter than . . . than, well, one of the skies in one of these bloody boring paintings. As if she had heard Helena, Maddie spun around, rolling her eyes, hard, in the direction of Myka and Christina. They grinned at each other in perfect synchronization. Edging around the exhibit-goers, Helena tapped Myka on the shoulder. "I thought I'd take Maddie down to the sculpture garden. Is that all right with you?"

Myka was wearing glasses today, a surprisingly smart-looking pair, given what Helena had seen her wear in public when they were in college, oversized lenses encased in thick plastic the color of infected mucus. If she hadn't been so gobsmacked by Myka when she had first seen her, she would have used Myka's choice in eyewear as grounds for never asking her out. Myka's eyes looked a little bloodshot, which only intensified their green. Perhaps she hadn't slept well in anticipation of today? Silly thought, Helena admonished herself, although she had tossed and turned most of the night; she loved arrabiata sauce, but it didn't always agree with her. She knew the difference between heartburn and nerves, however, and it had been heartburn.

Myka glanced at her daughter, who was staring down at her feet as she moved them incrementally in a circle, the gallery a clock and Maddie the hand ticking off the seconds. "Sure. We'll meet up with you later."

"The cafeteria, perhaps?" Helena suggested. "A light lunch and then -"

"Back to the trenches?" Myka was smiling now.

Christina, as if she had just awakened, protested, "Mom, you can't be bored already. After this, there's Fauvism and . . . and the Surrealists and . . . ."

Helena smoothed her daughter's hair with a comforting hand. "I'm not bored, but we have to be careful about monopolizing Myka's and Maddie's time. When Maddie and I come back from the garden, we'll have lunch and then time for one more gallery or two." She emphasized Maddie's name, but Christina's eyes didn't flick over to her "new best friend." In fact, Maddie and Christina had paid surprisingly little attention to each other since they had met in the museum lobby. Helena was reminded of the times when she and Charles were children and, after a particularly fierce session of pushing each other or stealing the other's toys, they would quickly sit down next to each other and pretend they were playing a board game, raising innocent faces to their harried parents when they burst into the room. Best friends, indeed. She looked up to see Myka's eyes warm behind those really quite attractive glasses. They were a bit squarish, the kind Clark Kent might wear if it were 201- rather than 1955, but they lent Myka's nerdishness a doubleness, a suggestion that it was merely a disguise and not something hopelessly inborn. For a moment, Helena's mind wandered, and she imagined Myka tossing her glasses to the side and reaching for her, grabbing her by the lapels of her blouse . . . . She wasn't sure why she was heading in a certain direction with that image, but she needed to turn back from where it was leading her. She was in a crowded gallery with her daughter, her daughter's so-called best friend, and a woman she hadn't seen in 18 years. That wasn't completely true - Myka hadn't seen her in 18 years, but she had seen Myka -

"See you soon," she said, moving away and gesturing for Maddie to follow her. Once in the sculpture garden, Maddie wandered just as aimlessly but with an added uncertainty, approaching a sculpture as if she wanted to touch it and then backing away. Helena showed no such uncertainty, taking a seat on the bottom curve of a poured concrete . . . apostrophe. That was what she would call it because it looked like a giant apostrophe whereas the artist, she was sure, had given it a much more fanciful name.

"You're not supposed to sit there," Maddie gravely advised her.

"I don't see a sign telling me not to," Helena said with a smile that she couldn't expect Maddie to recognize although Maddie's mother would. Helena hadn't known how effective it was until she tried to cajole Myka into doing something transgressive, breaking the law or violating school policy or defying the pitiably narrow definition of what the Bering family considered acceptable behavior. Without that smile, Myka wouldn't have smoked a joint, climbed with her to the roof of the tallest building on campus, or fallen in love with her. At the thought of the last, Helena felt the magical power of her smile fail, and she resorted to patting the space next to her as an inducement to Maddie. "What's the worst that can happen? A security guard will see us and tell us to move."

"It doesn't seem very respectful," Maddie said doubtfully. "I mean, it's art. You don't treat it like furniture."

"What if it isn't art, not completely, anyway, unless we sit on it?" Helena looked up and raised an arm to touch the curve of concrete overhead. "Maybe the artist is inviting us to imagine what sitting on the inside of a wave or a crescent moon is like. Perhaps this is supposed to resemble the shell of a person's ear and we're supposed to imagine what she's hearing." Helena put a hand behind her own ear and closed her eyes, pretending to concentrate. "Come sit down," she intoned in the lowest register her voice could accommodate. "Did you hear it?" But Maddie's serious expression was even more pained, if possible. Helena attempted a higher, and scratchier, register, adopting the broadest accent she could summon. "Come, sit down with me, love. Rest your feet and have a cuppa." That earned her a smile, a disapproving, embarrassed here's-an-adult-making-a-fool-of-herself smile, but a smile all the same, and Maddie sat down beside her.

They were quiet and Helena enjoyed the breeze, the sun, and the faint hum of traffic. The sculptures were the least attractive feature of the sculpture garden, she thought, more than a few of them showing their age, the metal ones inconveniently flaking or rusting and the stone ones discoloring and crumbling at their edges. If they were clients of Future Image, she would advise them to get a makeover, first of all. Despite what nice people like Myka said, appearances mattered. You, asymmetrical column of metal trapezoids, have a thorough rust removal done and get some discreet repair work on those weathered corners. She wasn't yet to the point where she would have to consider a few tucks here and there, but she had recently started coloring her hair. And spend the money, she silently counseled the artworks, the whole point of a makeover is not to look made over. She was spending an atrocious amount of money to have her hair so artfully colored even she couldn't tell the difference between her natural color and the one her stylist created for her. Once people were no longer gawping in dismay at how you looked, you could work on all the other negative things you were signaling. Such as, she directed a glare at a sculpture of interlinked petals cast in ribbony loops last popular in the '70s, trendy catch-phrases outdated upon arrival, "flower power" indeed.

In the midst of her castigation, she remembered Myka turning away from the Van Gogh and it silenced her jeers. The barely tamed hair, which cried out for a stylist with a master plan; the ill-matched aqua polo shirt and forest green twill skirt; the horror of her shoes, which should have been slim sandals with a heel to show off those mile-long legs of hers but were, instead, Teva-like affairs designed for hiking mountain trails, they did nothing to lessen Helena's belief that Myka remained one of the most attractive women she had ever met.

"If you and my mom were, um, good friends, why has it been so long since you two talked?" Maddie had been looking nervously for a guard to materialize and order them off the sculpture, twisting and craning her neck, but she had straightened her slumped shoulders and was seriously, intently regarding her.

Too seriously. Definitely Myka's child. Maddie eyes might be blue instead of green but they were no less capable of seeing through all her many prevarications. But they were only prevarications if Helena knew what the truth was, and she didn't. She had known many things in her 20s that she had since been forced to unlearn, one of them being that bigger and better things were always around the corner. Sometimes they were right in front of you instead . . . . "An argument," Helena said finally. "It seemed important at the time but not so much now."

"You had a fight? And it's lasted longer than I've been alive?" Maddie asked incredulously.

"It's not as though we're still fighting," Helena said chidingly. Although wasn't this nearly 20-year silence of theirs the equivalent of each threatening to hold her breath until the other gave in? "We were young, and when you're young, things have a way of appearing larger than they are, and later . . . . Later, we were living different lives, and sometimes it's harder than it should be to ignore the years and the miles between you." Vague, puffy excuses, no wonder Maddie continued to look dissatisfied. Your mother's dreams were so concrete and detailed, whereas mine were hazy and evanescent. Your mother always had plans, always tended to flatten the world into a narrative in which she could identify the beginning and the end. No matter how the narrative would begin, it would always end the same way, Bering and Wells forever. I didn't want to read the world, I wanted to immerse myself in it. I didn't want an "end."

Helena smiled more to herself than at Maddie. As it turned out, Myka's view was closer to the truth, the world's wonders turning out to be limited and well-worn, but Maddie had the right to spout her own romantic nonsense and then cringe at the memory of it decades later. As Maddie continued to look at her inquiringly, Helena tipped her head toward the sculpture garden's exit. "Shall we see what the cafeteria is offering for lunch?" Her 24-year-old self had been a silly twit, but she wouldn't tell Maddie that either.

Myka and Helena

After lunch, they had breezed through an exhibit of Annie Leibowitz photographs and passed through galleries housing art from the first 50 years of the 20th century with second looks only for Picasso and Pollock. The girls had decided they could forego the last 60-plus years and its various movements in favor of time spent in the museum's gift shop. Myka and Helena had gratefully assented, and though Myka didn't share in Michelle's outraged conviction that gift shops were yet another portent of the capitalist apocalypse, in which there would be no moment of existence that wasn't stamped with a bar code, she also had no desire to spend $15 on a mug displaying Mona Lisa with a broad grin and holding a coffee cup with the caption, "What if you were painted before you had your morning coffee?" Not that Rembrandt or Rubens wouldn't be down here hawking everything from t-shirts to golf umbrellas screenprinted with their art, but there was something contrary to the purpose of having visited a museum when you were deciding which would give you the better bang for your buck, a mouse pad with some version of Monet's Water Lilies or a pen with Klimt's The Kiss wrapped around its barrel. She put down the pen and confirmed with a sigh that Christina and Maddie were still flipping through the posters.

Helena was absorbed, or pretending to be absorbed, in a coffee table book of early Renaissance paintings. Occasionally she would flick strands of that hair, that hair, that hair, as black and inviting to the touch as . . . licorice . . . behind a shoulder, and Myka was once again struck by the unfairness that Helena should look, not as good as, but even better than the Helena of 18 years ago. Wearing slacks that hugged her hips better than skinny jeans, sandals with virtually stiletto heels, and a linen shirt unwilted by the heat, she was - she was beautiful. Myka couldn't help but look down at her sensible twill skirt and comfortable walking sandals and think she should have listened to Maddie, who had urged her to dress up. But it wasn't a date, it wasn't two old friends reconnecting as they enjoyed a few hundred masterpieces, it was two moms dragged along on their daughters' play date. Nothing to primp for, nothing to chew a thumbnail down to the quick in indecision about what would look best on her. After today, she might occasionally drop Maddie off at Nate's or whatever glossy-looking condo Helena lived in and nod in greeting through the car window and Helena might wave as she dropped off Christina, but there would be no resumption of -

"I think Christina has finally finished decorating her wall." Helena had put down the book and was walking toward her, gesturing toward their daughters. Christina's arms were full of rolled posters that she and Maddie had pulled from their numbered slots underneath the display. She spread her index and middle fingers in a vee and flashed them at Christina. "Two," she said, so there would be no mistake.

As Christina, with a loud huff of disappointment, turned back to the display, Helena noticed that Maddie held nothing - no posters, no box of notecards, no cleverly designed and inordinately expensive trinket. Of course she wouldn't; the Bering household would be one in which the value of an experience would be enshrined in the experience itself. If Myka or Maddie needed to relive the moment, she would rely on her memory of it, needing no snow globe or baseball cap to bring it to mind, "souvenir" for her solely the act of remembering. The Wellses, by contrast, would buy the entire store - Myka would expect no more of her. Helena hadn't forgotten the disbelief in Myka's eyes as she tried to fit the girl she had known with the mansion she found the woman living in, the Helena of 18 years ago with her disregard for all that money could buy (apart from a plane ticket to the next best place and a bag of weed), a different being entirely from the spa-toned chatelaine of a Midwestern palazzo. She also hadn't forgotten the moue Myka had failed to hide, after she had finished glossing over, rather amusingly she thought, the changes 18 years had brought and come to her engagement to Nate. It was as though she had announced her engagement to Pizarro or Cortes, taking a proprietary pride in his subjugation of native civilizations. It was one thing to be thought a philistine, another to be thought a genocidal despoiler.

"I like Christina," Myka said. Helena started, tracking Myka's gaze and finding it focused on her daughter. "I enjoyed going through the galleries with her. She has a lively mind."

"You should see how lively she is about inventing reasons for not doing her homework. If she were to put all that energy toward her classes, she'd have straight A's." Helena realized she sounded like a disgruntled middle-class mother worried that her child wasn't working hard enough to earn a scholarship, when, naturally, Nate, as Christina's future stepfather, would simply endow her way into the school of her choice. Wasn't that what Myka was thinking?

Then the wry smile appeared, the one Helena used to trace with her fingertips, the lips pulling up diagonally, as if Myka didn't quite trust her initial response, couldn't fully allow the line of her mouth to relax. There was always a rain cloud threatening the sun, a lump of coal waiting to be found at the bottom of a Christmas stocking; disappointment always attended joy. "Reminds me of someone I knew," she said quietly.

"'Showing up is half the grade,'" Helena said, laughing softly, lightly, "that's what you used to tell me."

"When I'd come back from class and find you listening to CDs or watching soap operas," Myka reminded her in mock admonishment.

"Sometimes you were responsible for me failing to show up for an exam, remember?" Helena's tone was teasing, but her eyes suddenly seemed enormous and Myka thought she might lose herself in them if she didn't look away.

"Okay, Mom, I have my two," Christina said with aggrieved emphasis, holding her posters out to Helena. "How am I going to learn if I have only two?"

The eyes closed and then very slowly started to open, presenting an irritated, albeit thickly lashed, line directed at her daughter. "Don't make me reduce it to one," Helena warned her.

The posters purchased, they left the gift shop and drifted toward the museum's entrance, conversation trailing off as each realized the outing was coming to an end. Separate cars, separate routes home, separate lives. Already Maddie and Myka were drawing away from Helena and Christina. They had had to check bags and umbrellas (there had been a 40% chance of rain in the forecast when Myka had checked that morning) in the coat room. "I think we'll leave you here," Helena said, too breezily. "Nate's due back today after three weeks of inspecting farms in southeast Asia, so - "

"You'll want to get things ready to welcome him home," Myka said, her smile no longer endearingly slanted but horizontal, too wide, in fact, a little too obliging.

"This was a wonderful suggestion, Myka. I'm so glad we had another opportunity to reconnect." Helena wanted to stop herself, but she couldn't. She sounded like she did when she was walking a no-longer-prospective client out of her office: genial, appreciative, but unshakably convinced that "this one" was not for them. She didn't want the afternoon to end like this, but she didn't know how to bridge an 18-year divide with a 9-month love affair. That was all they had had. She was a businesswoman - a successful one - she was engaged to be married; she was no longer the ne'er-do-well Wells, the one who preferred to slam back a pint or two than complete assignments, who skipped classes and failed courses, who proposed a summer of vagabonding through Spain to the nerdiest, most delicious girl she had ever met. She was someone else now.

And Myka understood, she felt the same, Helena could see it in her face, hear it in her voice. "Over the years, I'd wonder what had become of you, wonder if you were happy." Myka held up her arms and dropped them. "I have my answer. You look great, you look happy. It was so good to spend time together like this."

Maddie

It had been going to end like that, with the both of them saying all those "so nice to see you again" things that even she knew, at just 11, no one really meant. Her feet hurt from standing on the unaccommodating marble floors, her head ached from the overload of color and imagery and ideas, her stomach complained at the burden of the chicken quesadillas she had eaten for lunch. She had been ready for a victory nap after spending the past few hours closely observing her mom and Helena because, while their exchanges might have been stilted and tentative, the glances they had darted at each other all afternoon had expressed the interest and curiosity that their words hadn't. Maddie noticed how her mom's eyes had widened when they met the Wellses at the museum's main entrance, Helena's hair lifting in the breeze and then falling in charming disarray over her shoulders, the slim body multiplied in the bank of glass doors, the wicked smile, as they approached, making of their visiting a museum a daring escapade. Seeing that smile, Maddie wouldn't have been surprised had Helena said, "The alarms have been turned off and the guards locked in the basement. Grab as much art as you can and then let's fly." She hadn't said anything like that, naturally. Instead she had said, "Lovely day, isn't it? The kind you'd like to paint if you could."

Her mom had taken off her sunglasses and was poking the temple pieces into her hair, apparently trying to rest the glasses on her head, but she kept poking and making her hair messier, and all the while she wore the same dumbstruck, walked-into-a-wall expression that had glazed over her face when she had seen Helena coming in from the pool. Helena had simply been slyer about revealing how fascinated she was. Maddie couldn't miss how often Helena's eyes had strayed toward her mother as they strolled through the galleries. They started, unpromisingly, with Myka's feet - Maddie had thought when her mother put the sandals on that they were exactly the wrong ones to wear to this place, with that skirt, in front of this woman - and Helena would imperceptibly shake her head to rid herself of the image. Then the eyes would move up and fix on Myka's legs. Maddie's dad had sometimes told her mom, "I fell in love with your legs before I fell in love with you" in happier times. Maddie could hardly remember those times, and, though it was weird and a sign that she was way overinvested in a relationship that had ended (supposedly) years before she was born, she didn't find it difficult to imagine Helena whispering that to her mom in one of the galleries.

And maybe there would be a time for that actually to happen - if she did something now. Because she liked Helena or, at least, was open to liking her. She had to admire someone who casually sat on a sculpture and claimed there was no sign that said she couldn't when, in fact, there was a sign right where they had entered the sculpture garden that said "Please do not sit or climb on art." Helena didn't break rules, Maddie thought, she pretended they didn't exist, which was cooler. Michelle talked a lot about breaking rules, but there had to be meetings and proclamations and banners. It didn't involve grinning and adopting old lady voices, really bad old lady voices. Helena might be a hundred times cooler than her mom, but she was also, down deep, a dork. It was possible that Helena and her mom really were meant for each other, but if they left the museum without saying something more than their "so nice's" and "so good's," they would never know, she would never know.

Loudly, she said, "Christina, did you talk to your mom about the pool party?" She had been too loud, her desperate question sounding even more desperate echoing off the marble columns. A security guard frowned at her.

Christina had been holding her rolled-up posters like light sabers, drawing them across her body in sweeping arcs. "Uh, wha-?"

Did she always have to carry the load? "What we were talking about earlier," Maddie answered with forced patience, "hanging out at Nate's pool with your friends and my friends." Friend, singular, limited to Sophie.

"Oh, yeah," Christina said with a sheepishness that sounded perfectly sincere. She turned to her mother. "Next weekend, Mom, would that be okay? And if Nate could get the pool guys to clean it before then, even better."

Maddie stared at her with grudging respect. She almost believed that Christina had forgotten to mention the party, and the party hadn't existed, even in concept, a few seconds ago. There was no grudging respect in Helena's expression, only disbelief. She smiled a smile so thin that Maddie imagined it leaving its recipient with a thousand tiny cuts, small and incredibly painful like paper cuts, and she shuddered at the thought that such a smile might ever possibly be turned on her. Helena's vampire smile seemed friendly in comparison. "First, it's not our pool, it's Nate's. Second, he and I will be in New York next weekend while you'll be staying with Gigi. Third, which brings me back to my first point, you don't get to set the pool cleaning schedule."

Maddie observed that her mom was biting her bottom lip in an effort not to laugh. Christina shrugged. "The weekend after, then? That would be enough time for the pool guys to come out and clean the pool, don't you think?"

Helena groaned, finally saying, "We'll talk more about this when we get home. But you're not selling me on the prospect of spending a Saturday afternoon chaperoning a gaggle of middle-schoolers doing cannonballs into the pool."

Myka offered a little shrug of her own and a slanted smile. "I'll help chaperone, if that's an inducement."

Christina

Her mom was going on and on about being considerate and respectful and a lot of other things she should be doing that ended in -ful. Her mom was acting like she had said no, but there was going to be a pool party. Christina didn't know why Maddie's mom had volunteered to help out, but as her mom was saying all that stuff about it being Nate's pool, Maddie's mom had gotten a look on her face as if she hadn't known Helena Wells was such a riot.

She had enjoyed the museum a lot more this time around. Before, when it had been just her and her mom, her mom had gotten bored and restless and tried to sneak calls on her phone, although she always got called out by the guards. Myka studied the paintings with her, like she was just as interested in trying to figure out how the artist had achieved a certain effect. She asked questions too, sometimes too many, like Maddie: Why the Post-Impressionists? What painting would you take home? Which artist would you like to have met? But Myka seemed to want to hear her answers.

"I like Myka," she said suddenly. She adored Gigi, but if it had been her and Gigi at the museum, Gigi would have been bored and restless like her mom, except she would have been busy scoping out all the other museum-goers she thought were hot. For the first time, her Uncle Charles's comparison of her mom and Gigi to two piranhas in a fishbowl truly made sense. "I like Myka," she repeated. Her mom stopped midstream, something about not taking whatever, whatever, whatever for granted. Then, just to be clear because sometimes her mom was kind of slow about picking up on things, Christina said, "I like Myka. I don't like Nate."

Message delivered. She closed her eyes, slumping in the seat and letting her mom drone on. It was a long drive back to Nate's house. She recalled the still lifes she had seen and imagined how she might compose one. She really wasn't into vegetables or fruit, so she would have to come up with other stuff to put in a fancy bowl, maybe a yogurt parfait, she liked those . . . .