Home Safe Read Online Free Page B

these days, she sends the things right back home with her mother. Still, every now and then something slips through, and so Helen keeps trying.
    “I'm bringing you a candle,” she tells Tessa now.
    Silence.
    “From Anthropologie .”
    “Okay,” Tessa says.
    After she gets into her daughter's lobby, Helen takes off her coat and puts on the sweater, chatting with the doorman about the prospect of snow—a few inches have been forecast, but she and Walter agree that this means nothing. “Going up to see my girl?” Walter asks. He's an aging, rail-thin man, elegant in every way, and inordinately fond of Tessa. Once when she was on the way out, he commented on her wrinkled pants—this was when Tessa was between jobs and was on her way to an interview. “It doesn't matter,” Tessa told him, but he crossed his arms and blocked her way to the door until she agreed to go back up and make herself presentable. It irks Helen that she is called controlling when Walter, who interferes in Tessa's life almost as much as she, is regarded with bemused affection. When Helen once complained about this to Walter, he said, “Now, now; you know you're not going to treat your family like your friends!”
    In the shiny metal walls of the elevator, Helen regards herself: front, back, sides. Oh, this sweater is darling , its off-white crocheted trim on its round collar, its dusty pink color, its funky clear buttons with flowers painted on them. It is exactly the kind of thing Tessa would like.
    She knocks on her daughter's door, and when Tessa opens it, she says, “Okay. So here it is.” She hands her the candle, and Tessa sniffs it appreciatively. “Nice,” she says. “Thanks, Mom.”
    Tessa looks cute. She's wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, working in the same kind of outfit Helen used to work in, and her long blond hair is in a high ponytail. Helen is always trying to get her to curl her hair, but Tessa likes it straight.
    “So, I'll see you later,” Tessa says.
    She has not noticed the sweater and so Helen puts down her packages and straightens the collar, buttons one of the adorable buttons. “Do you want to come over for dinner Wednesday?”
    “Sure.”
    Helen pushes up one sleeve of the sweater. Then, slowly, the other.
    “Okay, so I guess I'd better get back to work,” Tessa says.
    “I just bought this sweater!” Helen blurts it out, much too loudly—the sound all but echoes off the walls. Then, in the absurd way that people do, she repeats it, in a lower voice.
    “Oh.” Tessa nods.
    “Do you like it?”
    “It's cute. On you.”
    “Do you want it?”
    Tessa leans her forehead against the doorjamb, closes her eyes.
    “Okay,” Helen says. “I'll see you.”
    After she retrieves her car, Helen makes her way down Michigan Avenue, where the traffic is not yet terrible. She moves easily past Millennium Park, thinks again about what it would be like to live in one of the condos across the street from here, sees herself as a well-dressed woman with a mastiff walking briskly toward her place, then decides, as she always does, that she must have her garden and the quiet of her neighborhood. Also she must have the young girls across her street who play outside on their lawn all summer. Last August she looked out her study window as the youngest, aged six, danced on the sidewalk in her bathing suit with a broom. She moved as gracefully as a young ballerina in her bare feet, her head thrown back, her face full of longing; it brought Helen such pleasure to watch her. Later, the girl sat on her front porch steps eating a Popsicle and shouting out “I grant you three wishes!” to every passerby, then giggling into her hand if they noticed her.
    It brought back to Helen one of her favorite memories of Tessa as a little girl. The summer her daughter turned four, she played exclusively with boys, although she did, in a nod toward femininity, wear her pink tutu every single day. One afternoon that summer, she came banging in