“Was that your honeymoon with Dad?”
“Uh-huh. The month after, we moved out to PRC Seven, because they had a two-bedroom unit available. And then everything started turning to crap.”
Mom has changed a lot since I left. I’m not used to her introspective side. Before I joined the military, I was convinced that my mother was just like all the other welfare drones in our PRC—glued to the Network screen all day and not giving much of a shit about anything but show schedules and ration day. Part of the reason why I didn’t try harder to get some leave time down on Earth was my conviction that my mother wouldn’t have anything interesting to say anyway.
“Did I mess things up for you? I mean, when I was born?”
She looks at me and shakes her head with a sad little smile.
“Oh, no, honey. I messed things up for myself. Your father helped a lot, too. But it was mostly me. Marrying your dad was just the wrong thing to do. But I was nineteen, and I didn’t know anything about anything.”
She drops her handful of snow and wipes her wet hand on the outside of her jacket. It’s cold out here in northern Vermont, and Mom’s jacket doesn’t look like it’s adequate for the climate, but she doesn’t seem to mind the cold.
“He said he was going to get into the service. Said he’d muster out after five or ten years, and we could take the money and buy a little house in the outskirts, away from the tenements. ‘Just a few years,’ he said.”
She shakes her head with a chuckle that doesn’t sound the least bit amused.
“Instead, he came home after two years. Kicked out for failure to follow orders. Not a dollar to his name. So he moved back into our unit, and the five or ten years in the tenement ended up twenty—five. I’m pretty sure I’ll live in that place until I die, just like your dad.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say, and I mean it. I’ve never felt so much sorrow for my mother in my life, and I’m ashamed when I realize it’s because I’ve never seen her as deserving of empathy. I simply never considered that my mother had a story of her own, and that she wasn’t an apathetic welfare rat just like all the rest of them.
“Don’t be,” Mom says. She reaches out and touches my cheek with her snow-cold hand. “At least you won’t be stuck here doing the same thing we did. And don’t think for a second that I’ve ever thought you were ‘messing things up for me.’ You’re the only good thing that came out of that marriage. You’re the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. Without you, I would have gone up on the roof of our old high-rise and jumped off it fifteen years ago.”
I remember all the times when I sent out my weekly messages to Mom a few days late, and the times when I skipped them altogether, and I feel a burning shame that makes the tears well up in my eyes. I take Mom’s hand off my cheek and place it between my own hands, to rub away the cold of the snow she was holding earlier.
“I’m sorry for being such a self-centered little shit all those years,” I say. “I guess I wasn’t much of a help to you.”
Mom smiles at me, and shrugs.
“Andrew, you were just a kid. That’s what teenagers are, don’t you know?”
We stand together like this for a little while, Mom with her hand between my hands, both of us enjoying the sedate sounds of Liberty Falls waking up all around us—hydrocars gliding past, soft music coming from a few of the shops opening, people talking to each other in low voices as they walk past the little green and into the transit station. It’s as if we have stepped off the train and into a different time and place altogether.
“You want to go and see if there’s a place that’ll feed us some breakfast on my fancy government ID?” I ask Mom, and she nods.
“I’m starving. This clean air is making me hungrier than I’ve been in forever.”
We walk down the sidewalk of Main Street in search of a government canteen, or at least an automated eatery that has the government logo among the accepted payment methods stickered to the front door.
As we walk down the street, a man steps out of a door twenty yards ahead of us. He’s wearing a white chef’s uniform, and he carries an old-fashioned blackboard and easel, which he sets up on the sidewalk in front of his door. We watch as he sits on his heels in front of the blackboard to write on it with a piece of green chalk. As we get closer, I can make out the first few lines he has written:
Eggs Benedict—CD150
Frittata—CD125
Lumberjack Hash Browns—CD175