Soon after, she stopped by the realtor’s office once more and picked up a catalog of prefabricated homes. As soon as she got back to Grammy’s, she pulled me into the little bedroom we shared and handed it to me. I flipped through the glossy pages, which detailed three or four layouts and gave options for the colors and finishes of kitchen counters, bathroom fixtures, vinyl siding, and indoor and outdoor lighting. Every surface of the house represented possibility. After months of research and paperwork, her goal finally seemed within reach.
She took the catalog back from me and opened it to a page near the front. “We’ll have this one,” she said, pointing at the simplest floor plan, its boundaries detailed in delicate blue ink, the trajectories of its doors etched in perfectly curving lines. We were sitting close together on the twin bed; Grammy was out in the garden.
“This will be my room,” she said, pointing at the largest one, which seemed fair, since she was the grown-up. “And this can be yours. We’ll put your books and an extra TV in the third one, and a little pullout couch in case Glenice wants to come up and visit, or Gwen and Dave want to stay over.” By then I wasn’t looking at the blueprint anymore but at her face. She looked more lighthearted than I’d seen her in months, and seeing her happy was as exciting as the prospect of moving into our very own house, a brand-new house that no one else had ever lived in before, where we were in charge.
Mom and I studied the rest of the catalog together, and she asked me what I thought about colors and other options. I felt honored, like the house was as much mine as hers. I desperately wanted to add a bay window—it seemed the girls in the books I read were always sitting in bay windows, gazing out into pastures filled with calmly grazing horses. Of course, that option was too expensive. I had a knack for desperately wanting things we could never afford, which must have alternately frustrated Mom and broken her heart. But a wide picture window came standard with our house, and that seemed fancy enough. We settled on beige carpet for the living room and hallway, so we could use whatever colors we wanted for the curtains and furniture. But we picked fun colors for the bedroom carpets—seafoam green for mine, royal blue for hers, and rose for the spare room. For the exterior, we settled on white siding with black trim, cute and simple. In the next few days, I drew a picture of our house in colored pencils, based on the blue-and-white sketches from the catalog. I added a bright green lawn and a row of stately trees out front. When I showed it to Mom, I could tell she was truly happy. The next day, she went downtown to Renys and bought a frame for it.
* * *
This should have been a time of victory and the feeling of impending freedom. But just before we left Grammy’s, a shadow fell over us that would remain until Mom’s death.
One night, Mom went out dancing at Tommy’s, the dive bar that she and Linda liked, in Naples. She was a worrier, and she had a lot to worry about, but I think when she danced, she felt truly free. I was happy to see her go, dressed up in rhinestone jeans and a billowing white shirt with wide lapels. I wanted to send her out into whatever fun she could have.
A few hours later, I woke up alone and could hear Mom and Grammy talking in the kitchen. I shuffled down the hall, wanting to give Mom a hug and see if she’d tell me anything about her night. The light was on above the dining room table, low on the dimmer, glowing orange against the night-blackened windows. Grammy’s voice was high and quavery, full of that manic energy that always meant trouble. Her back was to me, and when she moved aside I saw that Mom’s face wasn’t right. Her hair was wild, and a purple bruise spread from her cheekbone up to her eyebrow. The eye was swollen and not open all the way, her lip split, her nose pushed off-center. The damage was all on one side—she looked half herself, half stranger. Her beautiful white blouse was askew. I stood there, speechless, while Grammy took pictures according to Mom’s instructions—one from the front, one from each side. Mom’s face was expressionless as she turned at right angles, making sure her mother could get the worst of the damage clearly in the frame. Grammy was shaking, but she complied, quieted down for once. The shutter snap echoed into the late-night silence of the house.
Mom took the camera back and I started to speak.
“What—”
“Sarah, I’m okay. I’ll explain later.”
Her tone left no room for protest. She slept on the living room couch that night, keeping herself away from me.
It was Teresa, Tom’s girlfriend, who had attacked her in the bar. Teresa had somehow become convinced that Mom wanted Tom back, after six years of bitter estrangement. Anyone in town would have known this was a delusion. While Mom had known about Teresa for years, this was the first I’d heard of her; I did not know then that it was her arrival in Tom’s life that had halted our visits. Mom described her to me: a tall, rugged brunette who would smile at me but not mean it. She told me to avoid anyone who seemed like they could be Teresa; if I was accidentally rude to someone else, that was okay.
Soon after, Mom had Teresa arrested for assault, those snapshots proving more useful than the ones she took of Tom getting out of Bruce’s work truck. A judge later ordered Teresa to pay for Mom’s medical bills, incurred the day after the attack, and also put her under a restraining order. This only worsened her anger, as Mom knew it would. But she wasn’t going to let Teresa push her around without consequences. And she really could not afford to pay the hospital.
Mom’s face healed soon enough, but her nose retained a slight bump from the break. I never got used to that bump; I felt uneasy when I caught it in profile. At the time, I didn’t understand why this tiny disfigurement bothered me, but now it’s clear. It was Mom’s beauty that Teresa hated, that convinced her that Mom could disrupt her relationship with Tom. It was her beauty that she’d attacked so viciously, that she’d tried to stamp out. That bump on Mom’s pretty face was a reminder that beauty wasn’t only power. It was also danger.
16
* * *
after
I would not see my mother laid in the ground. Her body was turned to fire and ash and pebbled bone with no one watching but a somber technician. I do not know what her urn looked like, but it matters little, because the family buried it. Her ashes weren’t scattered on a beach or a mountaintop; the funeral was hard enough. Her remains were buried beneath that pink, heart-shaped stone, cast into the darkness next to her stepfather, Ray, in the North Bridgton cemetery, less than a mile from her mother’s house.
Some days later, the police visited her grave and found a single black rose. After all these years, we still don’t know who left it, or what they could have meant by it. Black roses are the rarest of all, much more rare than peach ones, so it must have been silk or plastic. I like to think of it as a mourning gesture that accidentally slipped into poor taste, but I can’t help but feel like it was meant to be a mockery.
* * *