Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me Read Online Free Page A

parking lot of Donleavy’s, wiping my nose with the cuff of my sweater? I tried to remember who I was: a producer of independent films, a baker of berry pies, an occasional runner, the world’s only adult lover of the knock-knock joke. A sometimes skier. A collector of funny ashtrays. The wife of Lyle. The mother of Stella. Brooke Stellamom.
    Mary Rose considered me from beneath her bangs. Artemis. That’s the goddess I was thinking of. The virgin goddess of the hunt. The no-time-for-nonsense goddess.
    Mary Rose was not one of those women who believed housekeeping extended to tidying up conversations, filling in all the awkward moments with decorative remarks. “You and Lyle should come with me to the Barons’ for Thanksgiving. I don’t think Ward would mind my asking you.”
    I said it sounded like fun! I said I’d ask Lyle and give her a call tomorrow. I hopped in the Volvo (pumpkin-colored, formerly owned by someone with a thing for incontinent cats and vanillascented air fresheners), buckled up, gave a goofy wave, and sped off, the Volvo fish-tailing as I hit a patch of soggy maple leaves. Ihave a peculiar habit. The more bizarre a situation is, the more I’m compelled to pretend it’s as normal as can be.
    Mary Rose and the Barons? Audra and Big Hank Baron were among Mary Rose’s biggest clients. I was also related to them in some convoluted fashion which, I’m embarrassed to say, I never remember accurately. I think my grandfather, who had a stroke at the age of fifty-six and didn’t speak for the next twenty years, is Audra Baron’s uncle. Before the stroke, my mother had also been unsure exactly how the Barons were related to us, and after the stroke she was too shy to ask Poppo to scrawl, on his little blackboard, the answer to the question: how are we related to the woman with the hair who threw herself on your chest and wept? I forgot.
    The Barons owned one of those West Hills mansions whose grounds boasted 200 year-old trees. They had a foundation (the family, not the house, although obviously the house did too). They had hospital wings named after them. Why would Mary Rose be having Thanksgiving there? I don’t think Ward would mind my asking you … What was that about? Audra and Hank’s son, Ward, was one of those good-looking men—shoulders, jaw, a serious nose that takes your breath away—whose best qualities are visible at one hundred paces. Women see him, meet him, and know this instantly. But they are waylaid by his giddy jokes (“What’s the last thing that goes through a bug’s mind before he hits the windshield? His butt!”), thinking, hoping, that a third-grade sense of humor is an indicator of wit and character.
    I decided that Audra and Big Hank were probably out of town, and Ward was having one of his parties. I remember having heard that he was living at home while his houseboat, moored ten miles west of our city in an anchorage full of artists, filmmakers, and nuts with money, was being refurbished.
    It turned out to be nothing like that at all.
    THE BARONS LIVED high in the West Hills on a ridge of rudely verdant forest. The house itself was a local curiosity; built in the 1920s with money pilfered from the government by the owner ofour region’s largest shipyard, it was a three-story Mediterranean villa with raked concrete walls and a terra-cotta tile roof. From the front windows there was a view of three mountains, two rivers, and our lovely downtown.
    The only other time I’d had Thanksgiving at the Barons’ was during the filming of my first movie, Romeo’s Dagger, ten years earlier, when Audra was infused with the extravagant feelings of connectedness that always go with making a movie, then dissipate the morning after the wrap party quicker than a throat full of helium sucked from a balloon. Since then, I had seen very little of them, although I occasionally ran into Audra around