My mom loved Vera. She loved the entire Delane family. We’d been neighbors growing up. Well, my parents and Hank were still neighbors. It was only Vera, Vann and me that had moved on.
For her—someone that valued a hard work ethic— Vera’s dad, Hank Delane, was everything a man should be. He loved his dead wife fiercely and honored her memory by sticking around and doing right by their kids. He worked as hard as possible to provide a good life for them and see that they were well taken care of.
Because of him, Vera and Vann had also learned to work hard. My mom saw them owning their own businesses and doing well for themselves as a tribute to the father that raised them. As a kid, she’d encouraged me to spend as much time over at their house as possible. And now as a grown-up, she pushed me to be as much like Vera and Vann as possible.
And if you hadn’t picked up on it by now, she did not think I was doing a very good job of emulating them. Something she blamed on my dad.
It didn’t matter how many times I told her that I worked for a great company or that I could pay all my bills or even that I had a benefits package—which, by the way, was more than Vera could say until recently.
She took my interest in painting as a sign that I was two days away from giving my life over to the bottle and quitting everything I’d worked so hard to achieve.
Art was just an outlet for the lazy deadbeat in me.
Because obviously there was a lazy deadbeat living inside me, listlessly scratching at my interior walls in a half-hearted attempt to slump its way out. “Get out of my way, Work Ethic!” it would yell from the couch of my heart, throwing empty two liters of Diet Coke at my brain all while scratching its hairy butt. “I can’t see the TV, Retirement Plan!”
Then it would yawn, revealing Dorito-stained teeth and grumble, “Okay, fine. I give up,” before it’s head dropped back and it started snoring loudly.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be here all week.
“Molly,” my mom snapped.
“I’m listening,” I answered quickly, half wondering if my daydreaming hadn’t accidentally turned into real dreaming. There was a line of drool down my chin. A good indication that I might have fallen asleep for a second.
“Your father wants to know when you’re coming home for dinner.”
I shoved my face into the pillow and breathed until my pillowcase was hot and smelled like morning breath. I loved my parents. I really did. And they loved me. At least I hoped they did. But family dinners were always stressful.
Deciding it would be better to get it over with rather than drag it out for the next month or ten years or whatever, I said, “I’m free this weekend.”
“Tomorrow then.” My mom turned her head from the speaker to cough. When she returned she sounded older than she had before. I knew she was tired, but this version of her first thing on a Saturday made her sound worn out. “I’ll make your favorite.”
My heart softened with her gesture. She could be sharp-tongued and impatient, but she was gold on the inside. Pure gold.
“Thank you, Mama.”
She chuckled at my endearment. I only called her mama when I wanted something so it had become a kind of joke to us. “All right, Molly. You’re awake now, so go make the most out of today.”
“Love you.”
There was a slight hesitation because she grappled with expressing emotion. Finally, she admitted, “Love you, too.”
I hung up the phone with her and flopped back on my pillow. My mother was the person I loved most in this world. She was also the person that had messed me up the most.
I tried to console myself by believing that was the norm. Most moms meant well. That didn’t mean their children weren’t loaded with baggage that they had to carry for the rest of their lives.
Right?
Was I crazy to think that maybe, just possibly, my mom had overburdened me?
I’d tried to talk to Vera about this before, but she hadn’t had a mom growing up. She looked at my family the same way I looked at hers—with longing and subtle feelings of wishful what ifs.
Sure, through her eyes, I had two parents and family dinners every night. She saw my mom take me shopping and help me sort through drama at school. She had been there for my first period and given me the most awkward sex talk in the history of sex talks. She’d gotten her nails done with me once in awhile, if it was summer and she didn’t have to work in the lunchroom.
But from my first-hand perspective, I also knew family dinners came with a price. And I often wondered if it would be better with only one parent if that meant you didn’t have to listen to two parents fighting all the time. She took me shopping, but only bought me outfits she deemed appropriate and mature enough. She’d spent many nights talking to me about friends from school, as in which ones to hang out with, which ones had potential, and which ones I should avoid at any cost lest I end up catching their deadbeat tendencies. She’d handed me a box of tampons and told me that I could now get pregnant. And that if I ever came home knocked up, she would never speak to me again. And yes, I’d sat through the sex talk with her, but I walked away feeling more confused than ever.
I was also fairly confident that my parents had only had sex the one time and that I was magically conceived in the accidental process.
Getting our nails done now was mainly me forcing her to do it in a desperate effort to get my mother to relax. Because I was terrified she was going to give herself a heart attack, or an ulcer, or a wart on the tip of her nose or something.
One of the great things about Vera being my best friend was that she was a constant reminder of how grateful I should be to have a mom. And I was. But there were parts to my mother that drove me absolutely crazy.
I already knew family dinner tomorrow night would be one of those things.
Stretching my fingers, I ignored the urge to head to my studio to paint. My mother’s voice still lingered in the air and I didn’t want to taint my sacred space by inviting her negative energy. I would likely lose some fingers as they sporadically fell off my body thanks to her intense hatred for all things creative.
No, instead, I abandoned my bed and my phone and did the honorable, mature thing. I took a shower and scrubbed all the booze bleeding from my pores.
God, I smelled like tequila.
I blamed Wyatt, the shot master.
When I got out of the shower, my phone was alight with notifications. It was like a buzzing Christmas tree. I sprawled on my bed again, wrapped in a towel, my still drying hair dripping onto my shoulders and the comforter.
I checked all my socials first, liking the silly pictures from last night that I had been tagged in and smiling at the fun that had been had. Then I switched over to my emails, deleting shopping coupons and car maintenance ads in favor of checking in on work just to prove my mother wrong.