Better than Perfect. Melissa Kantor

were thicker somehow, or maybe just unhappier. The shades were pulled so low there was barely enough light to make out her shape on the bed.

      “Mom?” I asked into the darkness. And then I said it again, more sharply this time. “Mom?”

      There was a rustling of sheets, and one of my mother’s arms stretched up over her head. “Hi, honey,” she yawned.

      “Mom, I thought you were getting up when I left.” I tried to make my voice light, as if I were joking, not mad. Then I crossed the room, snapped up the shade, and opened the window.

      “What time is it?” she asked.

      I looked at her bedside clock. “Almost four.”

      “Sorry.” She covered her mouth and yawned again. “My back was killing me, so I took a muscle relaxant. It must have really knocked me out. Have you been home long?”

      Since June, I’d watched my mom—who used to know my schedule better than I did—try to fudge her way through conversations about my life. I’d first realized what she was doing when I came home after taking my SATs and she asked me how my morning had gone, clearly having no idea where I’d been. Over the summer she’d gotten cagier. She asked open-ended questions or offered up general statements that made it seem as if she was respecting my privacy when really she had no idea how I was spending my time.

      “I was at Sofia’s. We spent the day shooting smack and hacking into people’s bank accounts for cash.”

      “Ha-ha,” said my mom, and then she added, “How could you be a hacker? You can’t even remember the alarm code.” At least she was trying to be funny. I gave her a smile. A for effort.

      She shook her head and sat up against her pillows, reaching for a small bottle of pills on her bedside table. My mom had always taken medication—she had insomnia, so she sometimes took something to help her sleep. And whenever she had to do a presentation for this charity she was on the board of, she took something called a beta blocker so she wouldn’t (as she put it) “sweat through my dress and then pass out.” And her back bothered her sometimes, so she had a prescription for the muscle relaxant she’d apparently taken earlier.

      There had been bottles of pills in her bathroom for as long as I could remember. But now her nightstand sported a veritable pharmacy: She had drugs that were supposed to help her sleep and drugs that were supposed to help her wake up. There were drugs she was supposed to take to not feel anxious and drugs she was supposed to take to not feel sad. But no matter how many pills she took, there were still days like this one, where no matter what time I came home, she was in bed.

      “So where were you really?” she asked after swallowing a small blue pill.

      “Mom, you know where I was. I was saying good-bye to Jason. They’re leaving for France.” I glanced at the clock again. They weren’t even at the airport yet. I could throw some clothes in a bag, hop in my car, buy a plane ticket, and be holding Jason’s hand on the runway before the sun set.

      My mom rubbed her forehead. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m just so … fuzzy.” And then she squeezed her eyes tightly as her voice broke. “I’m sorry we’re not going on vacation this year.” A tear slid out from between her lids, and she bit her lip. “I’m so sorry about everything.”

      This happened on Bad Days. On Good Days, I’d come home and my mother would be full of plans for the future: She was going to go back to work. She was going to redo the house. We were going to go on a cruise at Christmas. Some of the things she talked about doing really sounded fun, and I’d eat dinner imagining my mother returning to her job as a consultant, which she’d done before I was born, or picturing her and Oliver and me on a flight to Seattle, where we’d board a ship bound for Alaska. Other times, her ideas were tedious, like when she’d show me a dozen swatches of blue fabric and ask which one I thought would be best for the couch.

      Still, anything was better than this. Bad Days just sucked.

      “Mom, it’s okay.” I crossed over to the bed, sat down, and put my arm over her shoulders. She patted my hand and sniffled while I looked around the room. Even with the shades and the window up, it felt like a prison. I pictured Oliver, who’d stayed up at Yale for the summer and who’d texted me yesterday that he was going camping with friends for the week. I wondered if my dad had canceled the reservation we’d made for the house in Maine that we rented every summer or if he was planning to go without us, to walk the familiar floors of the house by himself. I imagined Jason getting out of the car in the airport’s long-term parking lot, the sound of jet engines revving, assured he’d be thirty thousand feet up in the air soon.

      How come everyone had a get-out-of-jail-free card except me?

      I got to my feet. “Why don’t I make us a salad?” I said. “I’ll put lots of fruit in the way you like it.”

      “I don’t know if there’s much in the fridge,” said my mom. She looked at me apologetically, and I noticed how much gray there was in the roots of her hair. My parents had been a very good-looking couple. I’m not just saying that because they’re my parents. My mom’s hair was long and blond. (It had been naturally blond when she was younger, and as she got older and it got darker, she highlighted it.) She and my dad were in great shape, and they both wore expensive, designer clothes. My mom always liked it when I told her that one of my friends had said she was well-dressed or beautiful, which happened pretty regularly.

      Right now, though, with her strangely bisected hair and her wrinkled T-shirt and yoga pants, my mom wasn’t going to be getting compliments from my friends anytime soon. She just looked tired. Tired and a little bit old.

      “If there’s nothing in the fridge, we can order.” I didn’t want to look at her thinking about how old and tired she seemed, so I turned and went to the door. “I think you should take a shower and get dressed.”

      Because on Bad Days, I sounded like the mom.

      “You’re right, honey,” she said. I heard her pull a tissue from the box on her bedside table and blow her nose. “Kathy called before.”

      I turned around. “Really? That’s great. What’d she say?” Aunt Kathy was my mom’s younger sister, and one of my favorite people in the world. She and her husband lived outside Portland, Oregon, and I guess they were what you’d call hippies. They didn’t grow pot or homeschool their kids or anything, but they didn’t care about stuff like money or fancy cars. Kathy taught preschool and her husband was a doctor on an Indian reservation. My mom and my grandparents had all gone to Harvard (well, my grandmother had gone to Radcliffe), but my aunt had gone to Oregon State. I sometimes wondered if she felt bad about that—whenever we were at my grandparents’, there was always a lot of Harvard talk—but I’d never asked her.

      “Well …” My mom furrowed her brow, then quoted her sister: “She said, ‘I don’t like the way you sound. I’m coming out to New York next week.’”

      “Seriously? She’s coming to visit?” I felt a sense of relief so intense it startled me. “That’s awesome.”

      My mom laughed, then made a funny choking sound. She buried her nose in her tissue, but not before I saw her face crumple.

      “Mom, it’s gonna be okay,” I promised her. I could hear the irritation in my voice, and I wondered if she heard it too.

      “I know,” she squeaked. “I know, honey.” She took some tissues out of the dispenser, one after the other in rapid succession, then blew her nose. “I’ll be okay. Just let me shower and I’ll come down.”

      “I’ll see what we have to eat,” I said. I waited to close the door behind me until she flipped the covers off her legs and got out of bed.

      There was a blank rectangle on the wall immediately to the right of my parents’ bedroom door; I didn’t need to see the photo that had hung there to remember it. It was of my father, taken the day he and Oliver came home from their first father-son camping trip. My dad had a three-day growth of beard, and he was standing by the