He shrugged. “She was my first girlfriend,” he said. “My first”—you could see the gears turning opposite-wise in his head, like only with great effort could he keep this from being vulgar—“my first, uh, everything.”
I nodded. No special effort needed. No bolts of lightning or hot sizzles of smoke. It was all so ordinary, and that was enough.
“Thanks, Pete. Thanks for driving.”
“Don’t thank me, I’m just the taxi service.”
I tried to think of something to say to make that seem less pitiful, but he spoke again before I could.
“I don’t mind. Really. Besides, you remind me so much of her, so if you need something, it’s like she needs something. And I kinda like that, y’ know?”
“I know, Pete.”
Now he was tilting his head, a hand over his eyes, squinting. People did that when they were making an effort to see a hint of her in me. Boys did. Boys did it all the time.
“I see what my bro sees in you. Saw in you, I mean. His loss.”
I blushed when he used the past tense.
“You shouldn’t tell your sister,” he said.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Just, yeah. Just be careful what you tell her.”
That’s the moment we were both startled by the pounding on the hood of the car. I looked out through the rains-pattered windshield, expecting to find the town crazy, Dov Everywhere, who’d been known to thump his sticks on cars if they parked in places he didn’t approve of. But the eyes searing through the glass didn’t belong to Dov. They were the pale, distant eyes of a woman. She was knocking on the hood with her bare hand.
I turned to Pete. “What do you think she wants?”
“You, obviously. She’s not my mother.”
I wanted to deny Sparrow, say Ruby was more a mother to me than she ever was, that the word was meaningless, that the word shouldn’t be legally binding, and biology didn’t mean I had to be civil, but I also felt a tad sorry for her and wanted to get her off the car and out of the rain. I hadn’t noticed until now that Pete had skidded to a stop just outside the Village Tavern. We were practically on her doorstep.
“Uh, I think she wants to talk to you,” he said, as she wasn’t showing any signs of going away. “Just go in with her. I’ll keep watch while I have a beer at the bar.”
Soon after that, I found myself sitting across from the woman Ruby and I begrudgingly called our mother.
Seeing her up close brought back patches of my childhood:
Standing over her in a sheetless bed while she slept thirteen hours straight. Poking her in a recliner upon finding her passed out bright and early on a school morning. Pelting her with raisins from the packet of trail mix, since Ruby and I didn’t eat raisins even if they’d been dipped in chocolate first. Watching her conk out in a car, while she was at the wheel and the car was still moving.
Most of my memories of our mom didn’t involve her being conscious.
She looked frailer than ever. Her hair must have weighed more than the rest of her. She took in a ragged breath and said, “She know you’re here?”
I shook my head. “No, but she’s going to text me back any minute and then I’ll have to go.”
“I just wanted to see you. Without her.”
“What for?”
“Because you’re my daughter,” she said, but she said it so robotically, I didn’t believe her. I looked around at the place instead of at her—the Village Tavern was as dark inside as I’d always pictured it, a low-lit room with sunken ceilings, lopsided wooden tables filling up the space and a long bar against one wall where Pete sat with his back to us, slurping a pint. I was far below twenty-one and shouldn’t have been allowed inside, but no one from behind the bar was coming over to kick me out. The only person who’d stop this reunion in its tracks was Ruby—and she wasn’t here.
This tavern was where our mother spent her time. Maybe the whole of the past two years Sparrow lived in this dark hole, forgetting what sunlight looked like and letting herself be forgotten. This was what happened when Ruby stopped paying attention. You may as well cease to exist.