Under the Influence by Joyce Maynard Page B

on the mouse pad of his PlayStation as I tried to engage him in something that might pass for conversation.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œWhatever.”
    â€œHave you had a chance to try out the new camera yet?” I asked him. “I was thinking that maybe, if we had a little more time together, we could go do one of our photography expeditions like how we used to in the old days. If you spent the night over here, maybe.”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œWe could make popcorn after and watch movies on the couch.”
    Silence on the other end. Then Cheri’s voice, calling to say it was bedtime. Just seven o’clock, but Dwight and Cheri believed in early bedtimes.
    When I put down the receiver, I usually cried. Those were the moments I most wanted a drink. I fixed myself a cup of tea instead. All I ever had to do, when I was tempted, was think about the one thing that mattered: getting Ollie back. Not just physically under the same roof with me again, though that was a big enough challenge. The hardest part was getting my son to trust me again. Or simply to know me. Or to let me know him. It was the loneliest feeling in the world.
    And then there were the Havillands. I sometimes said that Ava and Swift were like my family. But they were not like my family—not my family, the real one—in any way imaginable, which was what I loved about them. Other than having Ollie, I had lived my life—with the brief exception of that handful of years when Dwight’s family appeared to have taken me in as one of their own—like a stray dog or an orphan, and after my son left, that’s more or less who I was once again.
    â€œI was wondering whose name you keep in your wallet,” Ava asked me one time.
    At first I didn’t understand.
    â€œOn that card you’re always supposed to keep there, in with your driver’s license,” she said. “Where it says, ‘The person to call in the event of an emergency is . . .’ Whose name do you carry around with you?”
    I didn’t have a card like that, I told her. Or rather, the card that had come with my wallet, years before, had never been filled in. Not even when I was married.
    There had been Alice once, of course. But even before she disappeared from my life she wasn’t the type to make a big thing of our friendship. She was just sort of there.
    â€œNow you can put our number there,” Ava said. She reached for my purse and took out my wallet, and in her elegant script—using the special pen she favored—wrote her name on the back of the card, alongside her cell phone and home numbers.
    â€œMaybe we should just adopt you,” Ava said. “Like Lillian and Sammy and Rocco.”
    Some people might have been offended by this, but with Ava there was no better compliment than to find yourself compared to one of her dogs.

21.
    A fter Ava and Swift came into my life, and I sent Jeff the bank manager packing, I had stopped checking out my Match.com e-mails with recommended dating prospects. I seldom even opened the occasional messages that came my way from men who’d seen my profile, suggesting we meet for a drink.
    There was a time when I had yearned for the attention of a man, but the urgency I once felt to find someone with whom I might share my deepest sorrows and joys had diminished once my new friends appeared. If I did find a man, it was hard to imagine where I’d even find the time to see him, I was so occupied with affairs on Folger Lane. Or—even less likely—how would I ever find someone whose company compared with that of the Havillands? Above all there was this: If I ever managed to get my son back, I’d have even less time for a man.
    But a few weeks after we met, Ava decided I needed a boyfriend, and that finding him would be her project. She made me upgrade my dating profile with a