Smoke River by Krista Foss Page A

she should fire the housekeeper, return to vacuuming and dusting, when she notices a shadow awkwardly sprawled across the ugly pink-brown wingback Mitch insisted on bringing home, giving a place of honour in the living room, after he moved his mother to a retirement home. There is a small aureole of electric light from an open cellphone, casting in silhouette her daughter’s small nose, her bottom lip protruding in a quiet exhale.
    “Stephanie?”
    The cellphone clicks off. Ella cranks the dimmer switch and the room brightens with clarified-butter light. Her sixteen-year-old daughter’s dark head, streaked with fluorescent pink, is bent over the phone in her lap as if in prayer. Ella has only to close her eyes to see the child Stephanie once was, a toddler blameless and soft as catkins, with black hair and lashes auguring future charms. How not to feel constantly disappointed? It was so easy to love the girl then.
    “What are you doing here in the dark?”
    Stephanie lifts reddened eyes to her mother, umbrae of dissolved mascara beneath them.
    Ella wishes her cramp of maternal protectiveness had lasted longer. But Stephanie’s perpetually wounded glance, the soft distension of those lips, only reminds her of the girl’s truancy from soccer camps and swim lessons, the pockets stuffed with Caramilk wrappers and emptied Frito-Lay bags. It makes her wonder where she went wrong. With Stephanie she’d started off cajoling, progressed to helpful suggestions, and ended up threatening, forcing protein shakes on her, withholding her allowance, and, on one horrible spring afternoon when Stephanie was twelve and not yet immune to her mother’s disapproval, demanding she jog. Stephanie’s flesh had shuddered, her chest had heaved with sobs and protests, until Ella was so rattled, so embarrassed, that she yelled,
You have nobody to blame but yourself, young lady,
before she ran ahead and out of sight; she could no longer be implicated in this thing her daughter was, so different, so far from her. When she returned alone, Mitch took the car to fetch Stephanie and found her on a side road, bawling. He refused to speak to Ella until she apologized to the child, who was by then buried under Hello Kitty pillows on her four-poster bed and wouldn’t acknowledge her mother’s forced contrition.
    Ella’s eyes alight on a wineglass on the end table beside the wing chair. “Stephie, what is this?” She grabs the glass, tips its floral liquid towards her chin, and sniffs. “Are you stealing our wine?”
    “Dad let me. He said I could have some. He even poured it.”
    Ella feels unsteady. The inadvisability of Mitch offering his depressive, overweight, underage daughter a glass of wine when she is alone at night catches in her throat like a fishbone. When it comes to Stephanie, her husband always takes the easy way out.
    Steph stares up at her. Is it a beseeching look? Ella wants to reach out to the girl, be the balm to her troubles, but the effort makes her rigid. Daughters are so eager to repel their mothers.
    “This” – she points at the glass – “is the last thing somebody like you should be indulging in.”
    With shaking hands, Ella quits the room. She doesn’t acknowledge the punctured sound her daughter makes.

    Stephanie, collapsed deeper in the chair, hears her phone finally
ping
.
    F ’ D UP. SORRY 4 NO REPLY . @ CRNR CLEARVIEW & WILDWOOD 15 MINS?
    She stands up and looks at herself in the reproduction baroque mirror over the mantle. Even with puffy eyes and a glaze of sweat, her face is quite pretty. At certain angles she could even be compared to her mother – a darker-haired, more voluptuous version.
    Stephanie hears the muffled voices of the television in the basement; her mother has uncharacteristically retreated there. Her father never leaves his office anymore. She goes to her bedroom, puts on a fresh T-shirt, reapplies her makeup, and leaves the house quietly, through the garage.
    Nate is waiting for her. He