There’d never before been a woman president of the American Society of Hand Surgeons, and Martha was to be the first. She had not been elected: an aneurysm had ruptured in the president’s brain, and neither the vice president nor the chair wanted the job. As treasurer, Martha was third in line. She would be inducted in Omaha, at the annual meeting, where she’d give a little speech. She paid for her daughter Jules to fly from New England to Nebraska to join her.
The last time Martha traveled with her daughter was when she’d dropped her off at college. That was four years ago, when Jules was planning to study linguistics. The memory was disjointed: she had snarled at Martha in a Bed Bath & Beyond, then they’d eaten bowls of lukewarm mussels in a restaurant with checkered tablecloths. Now Jules was a senior and lived with five other girls in a hundred-year-old house the color of Pepto-Bismol. All the furniture in the pink house came from the girls’ parents. Martha had offered to buy them a modest television, but Jules wanted an apparatus that transformed tap water into seltzer. It confounded Martha, the things her daughter wanted. At some point the girl had transferred to the arts school and selected, as a course of study, Glass. ‘Glass,’ Martha said. ‘Like, the concept of it?’