It’s sunny when I open my eyes. I am in my own living room, lying on the sofa. Across my body is my familiar, cozy afghan—also my mother’s pattern, of course, but this one purple and blue, colors I chose. Aslan is curled alongside my stomach.
To my surprise, my mother is sitting in the armchair to my right. Her knitting needles click quietly; it looks like she’s making a baby sweater. Blue, for a boy. “Hi,” I say. “What are you doing here?”
She looks up and smiles. “Well, good morning, sunshine.” She turns her wrist and glances at her watch. “Actually, good afternoon. It’s almost two.”
“Oh, good heavens.” I throw off the afghan and sit up. Aslan, disrupted by my sudden movement, also rises. He arches his back and then settles down at the end of the sofa, where he has a good view of my mother’s flashing knitting needles. “How could I have slept so long?”
Mother shrugs. “Frieda rang us when you didn’t come in to the shop by eleven. She had called here several times, and there was no answer. So she asked us to swing by.” She frowns. “Your door was unlocked, Kitty. That’s not safe, you know, not for a woman living alone. It near about gave me a heart attack, when I saw you lying on the davenport. Dad and I thought perhaps you’d been strangled by a burglar and left for dead.”
I grimace. “Yikes, I’m sorry. I guess I was sleeping really hard.” I rub my eyes. “I suppose I fell asleep reading, after you and Dad left last night.”
“I suppose you did, all right. You must have been exhausted. When your father and I saw how soundly you were sleeping, we decided not to disturb you. We telephoned Frieda and explained the situation. She said it was all right, that you should take the day off and rest. Then your father left; he wanted to get the brakes checked on the car, said that the car sitting idle in the garage while we were away had not been good for it. The brakes weren’t responding quite right to his foot . . .” She shrugs again. “In any case, you slept right through all that. So I just settled down here, and I’ve been knitting and waiting for you to wake up.”
It is exactly like my mother to have the foresight to grab her knitting bag when she has been called to her adult daughter’s home to check whether she’s dead or alive.
“You were sleeping so deeply. It’s like you weren’t even in there,” she says, tapping my forehead teasingly with one of her needles.
I duck away, smiling. “Who are you making that for?”
She looks down at her work. “My neighbor Rose’s daughter,” she tells me. “You know Rose and Harry; they’re the couple that moved in to the Freemans’ old place, around the same time you moved over here. Their girl, Sally is her name, she’s expecting in January.” She shrugs. “Now, Rose insists it’s a boy. Sally already has a girl, so Rose says this one has to be a boy.” My mother winks at me. “But I’m making a pink one, too, just in case.”
I wink back. “Good thinking, Mother.” I look out the window. “You don’t always get one of each.”
My mother shakes her head. “Now, that is certainly true,” she says, not meeting my eyes. And I know she must be thinking of my brothers, those three babies who never breathed a single breath of life.
“Mother.” I turn to face her, tucking my legs under the afghan. She looks up at me. “Are you ever . . . does it ever bother you . . .” I hesitate, then go on. “That I didn’t marry and have children?”
My mother casts her glance back to the needles in her hands. “Now, that’s not a fair question,” she tells me. “Bother me? What a strange way to put it.” She finishes a row and looks up, meeting my eyes. “Did I want you to marry and have children? Of course I did. What mother doesn’t want that for her daughter? But am I ‘bothered’ that it didn’t happen? Well, that’s just silly. I want you to be happy, and you seem . . .” She starts the next row. “You and Frieda . . . you both seem happy.”
I laugh aloud. “Talk about a strange way to put it!” I stretch my arms, releasing the tension in my shoulders. “Frieda and I aren’t lovers, Mother.”
Her face reddens. “No, of course not. I didn’t mean . . . that wasn’t what I meant, Kitty.”
“Some women are, you know,” I say playfully.
“I know that, too, darling. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“But not Frieda and me. That’s simply not the way we feel about each other.” This discussion has taken a surprising turn, and now I find that I am the one to blush. My mother and I have always been able to speak openly with one another, but I think I can say with assurance that in the thirty-five-odd years I’ve known how to verbalize my thoughts, she and I have never discussed lesbianism, on either a personal or a purely social science level.
“Well.” Thoughtfully, she puts down her needles. “You and Frieda are true companions. That’s not easy to find, you know. Some people search their entire lives for it. Some people—many people, really—marry, and don’t get that with their husbands or wives.”
This makes me wonder about Lars and myself. Do we have that, in the other world? Are we “true companions,” as my mother puts it? I believe we are, actually. He seems to read me so well, like he’s known me forever. The way that Frieda does, in this life.
Who do I lean on in that other life, if not on Lars? Certainly, I lean on him more than any other person. Without Lars, how would I manage Michael? If the memories that return to me in my dream life are any indication, it’s clear that I have done, and continue to do, a poor job of parenting Michael. And it would be all the poorer if it were not for Lars.
But suddenly I realize who else I must lean on, in that world.
My parents, of course. They are my champions there.
Mine, and—more importantly—Michael’s.
Another memory comes to me, or maybe something I’m making up in my head. Who knows anymore? In either case, I can see us in my mind’s eye: my children, myself, and my mother.
We are at the library. It’s the Decker Branch Library, the one that’s within walking distance from my duplex and from Sisters’. Is there no library closer to Southern Hills? There is so much new construction out that way; you’d think there would be a library. But perhaps one has not been built yet. Or perhaps one has been built, but in that life, I prefer the old-time library in my former neighborhood.
We are in the children’s section, and it’s story hour. All of us—Mother, Mitch, Missy, Michael, and myself—are sitting cross-legged on the carpeting. A number of other mothers and their children are settled in to listen, too. The children all seem similar in age to mine, perhaps three or four.