The First Husband

and we moved from Boston to Seattle. That time, it was Seattle. And, then, back.

“So we have a new man at the table tonight?” my mom said, settling in. “Did you train him to be so well mannered already? Or is he putting on a show to impress your mother?”

This was vintage Janet. Asking a seemingly innocuous question—one that didn’t ostensibly suggest what was beneath it—and there was usually a lot beneath it. We didn’t speak very often, but when we did my mother asked questions, critiqued in the form of an interested question, so that when you argued, she could say, “What? I was just asking.”

A prime example: when I decided to become a journalist, she offered, “That’s an surprising decision. Are you sure you want to be stuck behind a desk writing about how other people are exploring the world? What? I was just asking.” And the first time she met Nick: “He’s charming, I suppose, but very devoted to his career. Does that make it hard to maintain a relationship? What? I was just asking. . . .”

Yet there we all were, having dinner at Gjelina’s, passing around plates of flatbread, drinking too much wine, hearing the details of my mother’s plans to rest up on the Mexican coast at a hotel with infinity pools on the edge of cliffs—not the one I recommended in my last column.

At best it was okay—more honestly it was okay and stilted, okay and slow: the dinner of people trying to act like a family for a night, people who spent the rest of the year not having to act like a family at all.

Griffin was trying, but my mother barely let him try, turning away, cutting him off. It felt like she already voted against him and didn’t want any details to get in the way of her feeling good about that vote.

So when he went to the bathroom, I braced myself. I braced myself for what she was going to say, trying to imagine what her problem with him was. He was too thin, too serious, that his pound of blond hair made him look like a four-year-old.

Instead my mother turned to me, her eyes tight on my face. “So this is the new man in your life?” she said. Then: “He certainly does love you, doesn’t he?”

I looked up at her, bowled over in surprise. No, that doesn’t do it justice. I almost passed out.

“Excuse me?” I said.

She nodded. “It’s a lovely thing. A gift, really, when you see love like that. It doesn’t happen often.”

I had lost the power to speak.

“I can see it in his eyes,” she said. “Gil, can’t you?”

Gil could.

This was when my mother reached over and took my hand.

“I’m happy for you, baby,” she said, squeezing my thumb. “I’m happy for you and I’m happy, selfishly, for me. To get to see you so much . . . like yourself with someone.”

It was the single nicest thing she’d ever said to me.

Then, as if remembering herself, she got quiet.

“But shouldn’t he wear his hair shorter if he works in a kitchen?” she said. “I mean, is that even sanitary? Does he at least wear a hairnet?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Mom.”

“Shouldn’t you at least try to find out?” she said.

I shrugged, shaking my head.

“What? I was just asking.”

Apparently, she was still my mother.

That night, before we fell asleep, Griffin said, in the dark, “Your mother is lovely.”

I took my hands off my eyes, tried to see the outline of his face, the moon shining through the bedroom window, that California moon, on a perfect November night.

“My mother is many things, Griffin,” I said. “I’m not really sure lovely makes the cut.”

With Nick, this is the moment when I would have spun it, when I wouldn’t have wanted to walk up the edge of where I was so vulnerable. His family was so picture-perfect: his loving sister, his generous parents, their solid marriage. We would see them regularly, talk to them weekly. I never wanted Nick to know how loaded it was for me with my own family, even in the smallest increments. He didn’t seem to want to know that.

But Griffin was waiting. He was still waiting, apparently, for me to say something.