Missing Pieces by Joy Fielding Page B

thermometer. “It’s eighty-three degrees. How can you stand it?”
    “Older people feel the cold more,” our mother said.
    I took off my jacket, threw it across the back of the beige chair.
    “What are you doing?” Jo Lynn said, scooping it up again, handing it back. “We’re not staying.”
    “We can stay a few minutes.”
    “Of course you’ll stay,” our mother insisted. “We’ll have some cake.”
    “Not a chance,” Jo Lynn said. “You trying to poison us like you did old Mr. Emerson?”
    Our mother was already on her way to the tiny galley kitchen, opening the fridge, removing a slightly lopsided angel food cake. “Oh, Jo Lynn,” she said. “There you go again, kidding on the square.”
    “What’s that?” I asked, coming up behind her, spying a large bottle of dishwashing detergent on the refrigerator’s top shelf. “Mom, what’s this doing in the fridge?”
    Jo Lynn was immediately at our side. “God, Mom, is that what you’ve been cooking with?”
    “Of course not,” our mother scoffed, removing the detergentfrom the fridge, putting it by the side of the sink. “Don’t you ever make mistakes?”
    “Something’s very wrong,” I said as we were driving home. “She’s losing it.”
    Jo Lynn waved dismissive fingers in the air. “She got confused.”
    I invited Jo Lynn over for dinner and was grateful when she said no. She wanted to relax and get a good night’s sleep, she said, so she’d look fresh for tomorrow’s day in court. It was important that Colin have attractive people around him to boost his morale. Besides, his attorneys might try to contact her, and she didn’t want to miss their call.
    “Whatever,” I said, dropping her off at her low-rise apartment near Blue Heron Drive, watching till she was safely through the lobby’s front door. My sister was pining for a serial killer and my mother kept dishwashing detergent in the refrigerator. Interesting family is right, I thought, recalling Robert’s words, squirming in my seat as I turned the car back toward 1-95.
    Now, I am not anything like my sister. I am mature, levelheaded, not given to flights of fancy. If anything, I am too firmly grounded in reality. I have a clear understanding of my strengths and weaknesses; I’ve come to terms with my foibles and insecurities. I am decidedly unsentimental; I am definitely not a romantic. So, what did it mean that I was suddenly, inexplicably, overwhelmingly, desperate for a man I hadn’t seen in over thirty years, a shallow jock who’d wooed me, then dumped me when I wouldn’t put out? Why couldn’t I get his sly smile out of my mind? “You’re very beautiful,” he’d said, the facile phrase repeating itself over and over in my head, attaching itself to Dwight Yoakam’s country twang. Station WKEY, I realized, wondering when I’d changed the dial.
    In fact, it doesn’t require a great deal of psychoanalyzingto figure out my state of mind: I was getting older; my life with Larry had settled into a comfortable groove; I’d seen flashes of my own mortality in the face of my mother; my sister was driving me nuts. Robert Crowe was a harking back to my youth, my innocence, a reminder that my whole life lay before me. Plus, of course, he was a symbol of all that was desirable but unattainable, the one who got away.
    Jo Lynn was right. I’d wanted to sleep with him very badly when I was seventeen. I’d been severely tempted on more than one occasion to throw caution to the wind, along with my morals and every article of clothing on me. I’m not sure what stopped me, other than the certainty that once I gave in, he would undoubtedly lose interest and move on. Well, he’d lost interest and moved on anyway. Then he’d moved away altogether and I never even had the chance to change my mind.
    I’d lied earlier when I told Jo Lynn I hadn’t thought about him in years. The truth was that I thought about him more often than I cared to admit, more often than I’d even