The Pursuit of Happiness - Softcover

The day my mother dies is a Thursday in mid-June and Loretta's scolding me for leaving my cell phone on the kitchen table. If it were my own family's twenty-first-century kitchen table, there wouldn't be a problem. But the kitchen table where my stuff is right now happens to be in a restored colonial-era farmhouse. Anachronisms are a big, bad no-no at Morrisville Historic Village and employees like me are expected to know better than to leave such modernisms lying around.

It's a day like any other at work. Mary and I complain about our itchy Early American clothing and the ninety-degree weather; if colonial women actually wore as many layers as we do, we joke, they must have stank to the high heavens. Loretta bakes corn bread to show off the authentic brick oven and swats visitors' hands when they reach out for a taste. "Not enough for our guests," she sings. "I'm sure you understand." It'd be breaking character to say "health code" or "lawsuit"; she winks deliberately instead.

Mary and I feed the ducks in the pond out back and give tours of the house, pretending not to know anything about modern-day life. ("George Bush? Who's he? The cobbler up the road?") We explain the origins of the phrase "sleep tight" to packs of camp kids and detail the long-ago tragedies of the families that once called the farmhouse home. James, the lanky blond who works in the carpenter's shop, wanders over for a chat. He leans over the half-cut front door, his sloping shoulders silhouetted against blazing daylight, as I sit in a rocker in the darkened front hall drinking warm Coke from a clay mug. He says, "If Will tells me 'measure twice, cut once,' one more time I'm not responsible for my actions." He just graduated from a different high school, in the next town over, and is going to Princeton come fall. He surfs and always has a book in his pocket and that's about all I know about him at the moment. It will be another few weeks before he'll start carving me things out of wood -- a duck, a name plate, a Ferris wheel -- and a couple more before he'll say "wow" after we kiss.

Loretta hollers from the kitchen; she has a chore for me to do. I spill soapy water on my burlap skirt while emptying the metal bucket off the back porch. "If you don't rush so much, you won't get it on yourself," she instructs, and I say, "Thanks, Mom" without thinking. Immediately, I feel guilty. It's like I've already begun to replace her.

Mrs. Rudolph, the village head honcho, comes to the kitchen door a full hour before my shift ends and catches my eye. "Someone's here to take you home, Betsy." She has a perpetual redness to her nose, an unfortunate fact considering her name.

I slip into the nursery and unpeel my work clothes, hanging them over the side of the wooden crib before shoving them in my backpack in place of the shorts, T-shirt, and Sketchers I've put on. When I return to the kitchen, Mrs. Rudolph is still waiting for me and my stomach clenches. Escorts are never good. I know that it's happened, that she's gone. Thank God I went to see her last night.

Mary ditches colonial-speak and says, "Call me?"

The fact that no one chides her modern usage means trouble for sure.

Mrs. Rudolph and I walk through the village in silence, crossing the busy street that carelessly cuts through it, and I realize it's unpleasantly hot -- Early American clothes or not. I'm mad that Mrs. Rudolph knows something I don't -- rather, that she's actually been told -- but I don't ask her what she knows. I don't even ask my Aunt Patty and Uncle Jim, who've been sent to bring me home; they're an aunt and uncle I rarely see so their mere presence confirms the level of crisis. I sit in their oversize backseat, my thighs sticking to the tan leather, and wait for Patty to start smoking. She's fidgeting -- I know she wants one -- but she doesn't give in. I could tell her it's okay, that I know the difference between breast cancer and lung cancer -- that I could probably use a smoke myself -- but I decide to let her sweat.

It feels like revenge. I just don't know what for.

I get out of the car in front of my house, and my aunt and uncle hang back. I grew up inside this house -- a three-story white Victorian, with a big wraparound porch -- and it has never, ever looked so menacing. I almost don't want to go inside but I do. When my eyes adjust, I see the grandparents I have left -- my dad's parents -- loitering in the kitchen. My father's at the top of the stairs and beckons me with his eyes.

We sit on my bed and he tells me what I already know. Together we cry and await my brother's arrival. Ben's younger than I am -- fourteen years old -- and he's been summoned from basketball camp. He joins us in my room a while later and the three of us cry and cry.

I call Brandon, who I've been dating for six months; he's my first bona fide boyfriend. In minutes he's at the front door, his car parked poorly on the street -- a solid two feet from the curb. He wouldn't have his license if he parked like that during his road test.

"I'm going out," I shout to the house.

Brandon hugs me limply on the front porch. His eyes are perpetually sad to begin with, just by design; now they look something else, too. Sad and maybe a little bit scared. Like this is more than he bargained for. He doesn't say anything and I say, "Let's get out of here."

In the car, he says, "Where to?" and I say, "The wall." It's a concrete wall at the end of a wooded street that dead-ends at the beach. We go there to watch the waves and to fool around -- sometimes just to talk. We've been going there less and less lately. I'm not sure why.

I step out of the car at the wall and am immediately grateful for the shore breeze. It's cooler by the water than anywhere else I've been all day. We hop our butts up onto the scratchy concrete and spin around so our legs dangle down over the sand. I wonder why I'm not crying and figure I'm now officially in shock. Brandon says, "I'm so sorry," and I just nod and stare at the water. We supposedly knew she was going to die but I guess you never believe it until it happens...and maybe not even then.

I want Brandon to say something more. Something insightful and comforting, something that will crush the feelings I'm having about his complete inadequacy as a boyfriend. I don't know what I expect from him, but I know that it's more than this. He takes my hand, which is a start, but when I look up at him, he's got nothing for me. "Why don't you say something?" I ask.

"I -- " He sighs. "God. I don't...I don't know what to say."

I know that I should say something reassuring. Like "that's okay," or "just being here is enough." But it's not okay. It's not enough. I'm already wondering whether I'll ever see him the same way again, whether I'll ever feel my stomach flip at the sight of him -- or anyone -- and that makes me mad. She's gone and now everything's going to be different.

I pick a swell of ocean in the distance and try to track its progress to shore. When it finally crests and crashes on the beach, I turn to Brandon and say, "I should get home. My dad and Ben'll be worried."

We go home a different way, past the junior high I went to. Even though I'm only going into my senior year of high school I suddenly feel ancient, like junior high was a lifetime ago. Like I've aged twenty years in the space of an hour.

Brandon pulls up in front of the house. "Call you later?"

"Yeah," I say. "Sure." But I'm not sure I care whether he does.

Then, a blur of memories: Picking out a casket. Streams of people hugging me, squeezing my hand. Someone -- a grandparent? an aunt? -- saying it's for the best, she's at peace, my father can move on now, me storming out of the room. Deciding what dress to bury my mother in, feeling guilty for loving its deep pink-brown silk so much that I want to keep it, and shopping for something to wear to the funeral myself.

My Aunt Kay, the mother of two boys, takes me to the mall. She's already stepping up to the challenge my mother, her sister, apparently presented her -- of looking after me in whatever mysterious feminine ways my father can't. And amidst the racks of tank tops and capris in The Gap, I run into Missy Vetter from school.

"Is that your mom?" she asks when she sees the blonde woman hovering near me. I hiss, "My mother's dead" before disappearing into a fitting room alone. I've got a long, blue floral skirt and a white cotton shirt with three-quarter sleeves hooked over my finger on plastic hangers. My mother, I was sure, would have insisted I was too young to wear black, even on her account.

My phone beeps a text message at me. "How R U?" Mary wants to know. And I want so desperately right then to be able to text back "gr8," to have my life be normal again.

People crawl out of the woodwork for these things, turns out. Cousins I never knew my father had pop up in every corner. Girls I barely know from school turn up at the wake, like it's the social event of the summer. Brandon is there, too, of course. I bring him up to the casket with me at one point -- kneel in front of my mother's dead body with an arm slung around his shoulders. I think I'm giving him an opportunity to redeem himself, to say something insightful or meaningful, but he doesn't. He mostly seems to avoid looking at my mother, and who can blame him? I keep stealing glimpses at her myself, trying to figure out why she looks so different, but I can only conclude that the difference is that she's dead. I watch Brandon later, as Lauren Janey -- barely an acquaintance from school -- flips her hair in his vicinity. I think, Flirting at a wake. Nice.

I nearly die myself when I see Danny Mose's car pull into the cemetery. I'm standing with my family, sweating through the new clothes that I'll never wear again and, I imagine, getting sunburn. I think the priest has already started saying whatever it is he's saying when I see the car -- a red sportscar -- pull up. Danny gets out, with Meaghan Armstrong trailing behind him, and they hurry over to join the con...