“Mom?” I said. She jumped and cried out, then put a hand over her heart and closed her eyes when she realized it was me. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head and wiping her nose. “Just reorganizing our photos before I go to bed. Now scoot, you need your rest.”
“No,” I said. I winced again as I slowly knelt. She looked like she wanted to snap all the albums closed, but she left them where they were. One was open to pictures of me, Mom, and Dad at the beach when I was three or four. I was running happily through flocks of seagulls, squealing in delight as I ran away from waves that seemed so large at the time. Another was open to me in preschool, with my shaggy little ringlets and my smile missing its teeth. The rest were open to my pages as well: a photo of me winning a spelling bee; graduating from elementary school; looking distracted at Rock City and Ruby Falls in Chattanooga the day we left Dad, up to the last pictures where I still looked like a boy.
“I miss him,” Mom whispered, her eyes cast to the side.
“Dad?” I said.
“No,” Mom said, and I heard her throat clenching. A tear streaked down her cheek, but it wasn’t followed by any others. “No, I miss my son.”
“Oh!” I said, dropping the page I was holding. “Oh.”
“I’m sorry,” Mom said, shaking her head and swallowing. “I’m sorry, really. I thought you were asleep.”
“I’m still me,” I said, trying to catch her eye again.
“It ain’t that simple,” Mom said, opening her watery eyes and returning them to me. “I know I’m supposed to say it is, but it ain’t. You look different, you act different, you sound different, your hands feel different when I touch ’em. Hell, you even smell different. Do you know how important smell can be, how the way your baby smells when you hold him gets locked in your head?”
I clenched my fingers. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You tried to kill yourself,” she said, rolling her eyes up to heaven and biting her knuckle. “Andrew Hardy was gonna die one way or the other, and one of the choices gave me a daughter in exchange while the other left me with no one.”
“I never thought of it that way,” I said. “I never thought about—”
“It ain’t your responsibility to comfort your parents,” she said, shaking her head. “’Least, not until I start needin’ my diapers changed.” She started closing the albums again. “And anyway this ain’t the first time I mourned my baby.” She took a shuddering breath.
“What do you mean?” I tried to help her stack the albums back up and put them away, but she slapped my hands and quickly did it herself.
“No strenuous activity!” she said, and then she lowered herself into an overstuffed chair by the bookshelf and closed her eyes again. “When you were a year old I looked at your baby pictures and cried. When you were three I looked at the pictures from when you were one and cried. When you went to kindergarten I looked back and cried. Kids constantly grow and change, and every time you blink they turn into something different and the kid you thought you had is just a memory.” She rubbed her face and sighed. “Five years from now you’ll be a grown woman graduatin’ college and I’ll look at photos of you now and grieve my teenage daughter.”
“So I shouldn’t feel guilty?”
“’Course you should!” she said with a broad smile. “You got any idea what you’ve done to me? Between the labor pain and the stretch marks and the loans I had to take out for this surgery, you’ve bled me dry!”
“I’ll make it up to you one day,” I said resolutely as I braced myself against the bookshelf and stood again.
“When you’re rich and famous?” Mom said, smiling now.
“Yup,” I said as I turned and headed back to the bathroom. I looked over my shoulder as I entered the hallway. “Rich, anyway. Famous is for chumps.” I got to the bathroom and yelled, “I love you, by the way!”
“Are you in the bathroom?” she called in response. I didn’t answer, but Mom quickly said, “Gross, Amanda,” anyway.
22
“Where are Layla and Anna?” I asked as I took my seat at our regular lunch table. I was lucky enough to have the same lunch period as all three girls on most days, and they always saved me a seat. For the first time in my life I actually looked forward to walking into the cafeteria.
“Homecoming committee,” Chloe replied through a mouthful of tater tots. She swallowed and gave me a bashful look. “Sorry. Manners.”
“It’s cool,” I said, pulling out my Tupperware. “I mean you were raised in a barn.”
“Whatever!” she said, lobbing a tater tot at me. It bounced off my collarbone before tumbling into the front of my shirt. “Deserved it,” she said. I fished the tater tot out of my bra and laughed.