THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2010

I drop my swim bag on the floor as soon as I enter the house. In the kitchen, Pretzels—curled up on her rug in front of the refrigerator, strategically situated so that warm air from the vent blows on her and she’s in place to snap up any morsel that might fall from the heavens—doesn’t budge when I enter. We adopted Pretzels when Aubrey was five and always asking when I was going to get her a sister. A big sister, not a little one like Sharalynn Mahan’s mother brought home. A big sister who would come fully equipped with all her own Polly Pockets and be ready to play from day one. Aubrey was the one who noticed that our new mostly golden retriever puppy’s coat was the same color as pretzels.

I get down on my hands and knees next to the sweet old girl and coo, “Hey, Pretz. Hey, girl, you need to pee?” Since she’s almost totally deaf, it startles her if she’s touched while sleeping. So I increase the volume of my cooing gently until she opens her filmy eyes and is transfixed by joy at the sight of my face with all its treasured food-bowl associations.

“Come on, sweet girl.” I loop both hands around her belly and hoist her up, causing a release of one of the paint-stripping clouds of gas that is her signature move these days. The doggie door she’s used for the past dozen years has started to confuse and scare her, so I slide the patio door open and she totters out.

Pretzels pokes her nose around in the grass. As I wait for her to snuffle up an odor that will remind her why she’s outside, I glance around behind me at what the real estate agent had called the “great room” when she invited Martin and me to imagine the entertaining we’d be doing beneath its twelve-foot ceiling. Had I hosted even one dinner party? One?

At the moment every horizontal surface is stacked with extra-long twin sheets; towels; long underwear; two pairs of flannel pajama bottoms, one plaid, one printed with a cow-jumping-over-the-moon pattern; warm socks; turquoise mittens with a matching knit cap; a forest green rain jacket; a first-aid kit; collapsible storage boxes; a small sewing kit; three boxes of peanut-butter-cookie LUNA bars; vitamins; Midol; Advil; Theraflu; two tubes of triple antibiotic ointment. Everything a girl leaving home for college might possibly need.

I’ve listened to other moms talk about their daughters having hysterical meltdowns in the middle of Bed Bath & Beyond because the store was out of the precise Tommy Hilfiger “Biscayne” comforter set they had their hearts set on and they’d already been to five other stores. I experienced no histrionics whatsoever with Aubrey because I did all the shopping by myself. By late summer, when dorm shopping kicked off, and Target filled up with mothers piloting shopping carts and holding lists followed either by a mortified young man praying for invisibility or a young woman tossing in extra hair products, Aubrey would no longer even talk to me about Peninsula. I stopped pushing on shower caddies; we had the much larger issue of Tyler Moldenhauer.

So I took over outfitting Aubrey for college without her help just as if she were going off to sleepaway camp. But instead of buying bug spray and writing her name in her shorts with a laundry marker, I procured a coffeemaker and researched surge protectors. With each washcloth I purchased, I felt as if I were greasing the skids, paving the path of least resistance. I know that if I can only drag Aubrey to the bank to get the money, the wheels of college will be in motion and they will simply carry Aubrey away from Parkhaven. I visualize putting my daughter on the plane, happily paying extra for suitcases filled with shoe organizers and bottles of hand sanitizer.

Continuing my visualization exercise, I imagine the great room empty, Aubrey’s bedroom empty, my nest empty, and though it is what I most desire I am stricken with grief at the prospect. I grab my laptop and contact the source of all wisdom: Shri Googlenami. My screen saver comes up. It shows a cartoon baby assuming some favorite breast-feeding positions: the Pop and Spray, the Look-see, the Combo Sleepy with a Toe Grab, the Pounce, the Super Distract with a Twist.

I try to Google “empty nest syndrome,” but my left ring finger keeps hitting the x instead of the s so it comes out “empty next syndrome.” I finally, laboriously, fix two fingers and both eyes on the keyboard, type in n-e-s-t, and a jillion entries fill the screen. There are the posters who wail, “Who will I be when I’m not Jason/Caitlyn/Whitney/Brandon’s mom anymore?” Or they advise, “Look on the bright side: You and your husband can have sex anytime you want. Anywhere you want!” Since there is no husband or any other sex-having candidate in the picture, that bright side is noticeably dim. And because I’ve had to work—fortunately at work I love—I never had the luxury of baking my entire identity into the homeroom mom cupcakes I brought to school. So that’s not exactly relevant either.

Though I’m not hungry, worry and regret drive me to the kitchen for comfort. Pretzels is curled up, guarding the refrigerator. “Pretz, honey, you’re gonna have to move.” Pretzels grumbles; she already moved once today. “Okay, hang on.” I haul her and her rug a few feet to the right and she grumbles a bit more. On the refrigerator door, held up by a daisy magnet from the Realtor who sold us this house—“We Make Your Dreams Bloom!”—is a list that reads:

I add, “• get a meningitis shot!!”

Inside the refrigerator, tucked behind the white Styrofoam boxes of takeout that haven’t aged enough yet for me to toss them without guilt, is one lone can of Diet Cherry 7UP. This causes me to burst instantly into tears because I fear that this is the last can of my child’s favorite soft drink that I will ever buy. Before Aubrey began spending all her time with Tyler, I couldn’t keep the stuff in the house. She even used to drink it with breakfast sometimes. In fact, now that I think about it, she had a can the morning she got heatstroke.

A week later, after she’d missed band camp entirely and set off on the first day of her senior year, there was something different about her. First of all, she’d worn a skirt. She’d never worn a skirt to school before. But it was more than that. There was something about her as she set off for the first day of her last year of high school; she was beautiful in such a defined and settled way. I saw that her beauty would age but never change again as it had when she was growing up. Had I told her how beautiful she was?

Yes, I had. I remember saying those exact words to her on the day she started her senior year.