My mother called my father from the airport to tell him she wasn’t coming home, not that night or the next or the next. When he stopped talking over her, when he finally understood what she was saying, he put her on speakerphone.
“You better talk to Colleen, she’s standing right here.”
For a while, all we heard was the clip-clop of shoes rushing past, and I wondered if my mother was wearing the soft rubber sneakers she always used for work at the hospital or the blue stilettos she always wore when she went to her friend Stella’s for their monthly book club meetings.
“I’m taking a little vacation, baby. I’ll be home soon.” Her voice was tinny, crackling through the air. My father reached for my shoulder, squeezed it tight.
“Where are you going?” My mother kept a map in her closet with pins scattered across it—green were all the places she’d been, and red were the places she still wanted to go.
“France, maybe, I’m not sure yet.”
“When will you be back? Will you eat crepes?” We were learning to make crepes with strawberry jam in French Club, and I was the only sixth grader who could roll the crepes so that the jam didn’t squirt out the sides.
“Normally no, but for you yes,” and she laughed like she did whenever I asked what she was reading for book club.
My father scratched his stubbled face after she hung up, leaving us in the empty silence of our living room with only the patter of rain tapping at the windows, the clouds shadowing the couch my mother liked to keep covered in plastic.
“Colleen, go outside and play,” he said, his hand heavy on my shoulder.
When I opened our front door, the street was clotted with puddles, and the air in the house became loamy as rain sprayed into the foyer where my mother’s jean jacket hung, the one she always wore when she picked me up from school because she told me the other mothers liked it better when it covered her tattoos.
“Colleen,” my father poked his head from the kitchen, half an onion in his hand, “now.”
“Can’t I just help with dinner?”
My father shook his head. He turned and placed the onion on the cutting board, then I heard him rummaging in the cabinets, the clang of a pot as he set it down.
I tiptoed to my parents’ closet, where my mother had pinned the map near the old purses my grandmother had left her. The closet was stuffed with bright summer dresses with spaghetti straps, sheer batik-patterned coverups my mother liked to wear over her bikinis, jeans that fit her like a second skin, and worn caramel-colored sandals that still smelled like her feet. I ran my palm across the smooth tops of the red pins and tried to picture what France looked like and whether people there also expertly rolled crepes filled with strawberry jam. Once, my mother and I stood in here together, and she turned and lifted her shirt, showing me tattoos of every country she’d been to, like she was mapping a new world on her skin.
“What are you doing in here?”
My father’s body filled the closet doorway, a salted rim of a half-moon sweat stain on his shirt. He followed my fingers up to the map with its scattered pins.
“This stupid thing,” he said. “Your mother loves chasing whatever comes next. Nothing is ever enough for her.”
I reached out and squeezed his arm and wondered if it was wrong to always want something more.
He stepped to the map and began removing the pins delicately, tossing the green ones into a pouch he’d made lifting the hem of his shirt. I held out my puckered palm, and my father began dropping the red pins gently into it, each making a little tink as they landed. When he had placed the last red pin in my palm, he sidestepped past me and left. Alone with my mother’s abandoned things and a palmful of red pins, I decided I would save them for her, so we could add them back to the map when she got home. I folded my fingers over their sharp little points and squeezed my hand tight.