I watch my mom out of the corner of my eye when she’s not looking and I see—really see—what these years with Roy have cost her. Gray hairs, wrinkles, a permanent downturn of the mouth. I see some of myself in that weariness and it scares me. I think about how Roy doesn’t discriminate between treating me like shit and treating her like shit. He’s very even Steven about that. I imagine what it’d be like to be married to someone like him, to live my life flinching every time that person came near. I wonder if that would make me mean sometimes, if I’d be obsessed with invisible dust and forget what it was like to be young.
When I was little, Mom used to turn on the Supremes and sing along as she cleaned and she’d bake cookies in the middle of the night, just because. We’d eat them for breakfast. One time, when I was in sixth grade, she called me out of school to go ice-skating. She once spent an entire month sewing the perfect Snow White Halloween costume for me.
Somehow, in the past five years, that mom disappeared. Little by little, she floated away, a leaf on the breeze.
Now, the air between us is heavy: it’s been too long since we’ve laughed together, talked. How do you relearn love?
“Thanks for this,” I say, pointing to my dinner.
It’s very rare to get a treat like this from my mom. Roy controls her money, so she never has the cash for extras like dinner out with her daughter. She nods, spearing a piece of tofu with one chopstick. She pops it into her mouth, swallows.
I laugh a little and she looks up. “What?” she says with a small half smile. “It’s easier to use them this way.”
I hold up my chopsticks. “Don’t you remember Karate Kid?”
It was my go-to movie when I was little. I must have watched it at least three hundred times, no joke.
“That scene where he has to catch a fly with the chopsticks?”
I nod. “Yeah. You just need practice.” I hold up my hands like Mr. Miyagi, the karate instructor. “Wax on,” I say, making a circular motion with my right hand. “Wax off,” I say, making the same motion with my left hand.
She laughs. “God, I used to have to put that movie on for you every day.”
“I know.” I pause. “We should watch it sometime. Together.”
She smiles. “That’d be nice.”
Neither of us says what we’re thinking, but I bet it’s the same thing: we will never get a chance to do that, will we? I can’t imagine having a movie night with my mom under Roy’s roof. But it’s a nice thought, sitting beside her with a bowl of kettle corn between us.
“I’m sorry about the other day,” she says, with difficulty. “Things … got out of hand. And I don’t want you to move out. But … I don’t have a lot of control,” she says, “over … the situation. With your stepfather.”
“It’s okay. I’ll have fun at Nat’s.”
Her mom’s going to be away at a summer camp she works at until the end of August, so it’ll be just me, Nat, and Lys. Funny how things work out. I get kicked to the curb and it results in what is probably going to be the best summer of my life.
“Plus,” I add, because I can’t resist a little dig, “she doesn’t want me to pay rent. So I’ll be able to buy some of the stuff I need for school.”
“Oh.” Mom nods, takes a sip of her iced tea. She looks unbearably sad. “That’s … that’s very nice of Linda.”
We eat in silence for a bit. An old eighties power ballad comes on—the Police’s “Every Breath You Take.” For the first time, I actually hear the words.
“This song isn’t romantic at all,” I say. I’ve heard it a million times but I’m only just now getting it. “He’s a total creepy stalker.”
Every breath you take, every move you make … I’ll be watching you.
Sound familiar, Gav?
I snort. “Gavin could have written this crap.”
Mom raises her eyebrows. “I thought things were maybe not going well.…”
Then TALK to me about it! I want to scream. If there wasn’t this wall between my mom and me, would you and I still be together? If I wasn’t so desperate to escape my house, would I have let myself go on dates where I knew you’d probably treat me like shit, but that were still better than a night in with the stepfather from hell? Because sometimes—a lot of the time—you’ve been the lesser of two evils. That’s not true love. Not even close to it.
I want the real deal.
“Yeah, not so much,” I say. “He’s—we’re just growing apart, I think. He’s not very nice.”
“Honey…” Mom bites her lip, looks away. “Trust me, you don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t treat you well.”
I nod. “I mean, honestly, I don’t know that we’ll stay together.”
This semblance of closeness gives me such a warm, unexpectedly cozy feeling. I grab onto that. I want to make it last. So the floodgates open and all this stuff I haven’t told her bursts out. I tell her as much as I can about you and me without admitting to sex and sneaking out and other rule breakage. I tell her you’re suffocating me.
She takes a sip of her tea, then bursts into tears.
“Mom!” I reach over, put a hand on her arm.
“I’m sorry,” she wails as she tries to hold in the sobs.
“Here,” I say, handing her the little pack of tissues in my purse.
“Thanks, honey.”
She wipes her eyes, blows her nose. For a minute, she looks like this little girl I saw in the mall last week who was lost. Lip trembling, eyes full of panic, she walked in a daze, trying not to cry. Then she sat down right where she was and sobbed. It was the saddest thing I’d seen in my life.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
She takes in a shuddering breath. “I’m just so sorry things have worked out this way.” A wistful expression crosses her face. “Do you remember the purple house?”
Now I’m having trouble keeping the tears in. I nod and at the same time, almost as if by silent agreement:
“Ewww, the purple house!”
The words are magic and they work through me, burning away all the pent-up bitterness I’ve had toward her. I’m still angry, still hurt, but the words remind me of the bond we have. Even a giant can’t break it.
“I’m sorry, too,” I say. It’s forgiveness, as much as I can give at this point. I take her hand and squeeze it.
She doesn’t let go.
THIRTY-FOUR
Natalie loops her arm through mine and rests her head on my shoulder. “I love this time of year,” she says.
Spring. It’s all about new beginnings, but I feel like autumn inside. Tomorrow is our closing night, and it’s bringing me down. When I have a show to work on, I spend less time at home. Now it’s back to long afternoons filled with chores and yelling. It’s also April, which means we’ll be finding out what colleges we got into any day now. How could I have not applied to NYU?
“So, what’s happening with Sadie’s?” she asks.
The Sadie Hawkins dance is next week. The girls ask the guys and all the couples wear matching clothes.
I shake my head. “It’s a no-go for me. Gav has a show that night.”
Natalie stops, dropping my arm. “Dude. Senior year. You promised.”
I did. Nat, Lys, and I said we would do every senior activity together and now I’m breaking that promise.
“My boyfriend can’t come,” I say. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Um. How about go?” She gets a sneaky look in her eye. “Gideon doesn’t have a date yet. I have a feeling he wouldn’t mind going with you at all.”
I bump my hip against hers. “Stop it, you.”
“Okay, but seriously,” she says. “Fly solo. I’ll ditch Kyle and dance with you all night, I promise.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t go. And it totally sucks because I really want to.”