I most certainly can’t say that he wasn’t speeding, as I told Keith last night, but that doesn’t really help matters. I tip my head back and drain the last of my coffee. At least I managed to get caffeine in my system in the five minutes it took my parents to show up at my doorstep. Besides that and telling Brenna to get dressed, I didn’t manage much else.
“I wonder if Jack is awake yet. He’ll be devastated when he sees the news.” Mom makes a beeline for the mug I just emptied and returns to the sink with it. She wasn’t inside for thirty seconds before she was running the tap for last night’s pile of dirty dishes. I’d like to think it’s solely because she realizes I’m incapable of washing them given my injury, but I know it has more to do with her psyche being unable to handle a mess. Mom is what most would call obsessive when it comes to tidiness. I think she actually has a mental condition, though it has never been diagnosed. I’ve caught her gaze drifting to a dozen different places in the past ten minutes, no doubt tallying the ways my standards are much too low for her. And my standards aren’t even that low, compared to Misty’s or even Lou’s. But I do have a five-year-old. That’s akin to housing a tornado most days.
Plus, in a house as small as mine, there’s no hiding a mess, short of stuffing it under a bed. It’s more a cottage than a house—a tiny four-room structure of seven hundred square feet, with a combined living room–dining room–kitchen as soon as you walk in and two bedrooms off the back, the bathroom sitting in between them. A front porch gives a little extra living space during warmer months, but being behind Rawley’s Pool Hall means that the view—a brick wall covered in graffiti and a Dumpster almost always overflowing—leaves much to be desired. Then again, that’s the reason we can afford the rent.
I spent months searching for a place while waiting for Brenna to be born. I looked in Belmont, and Davenport, and every other town within easy driving distance to the diner. Everywhere except Balsam. While I wasn’t going to Philly, I was adamant that I’d at least stay away from here.
Belmont turned out to be too expensive for me, and not everyone is keen on renting to a single eighteen-year-old pregnant girl. But I found two decent apartments within my price range in neighboring towns. Both times, the landlords seemed willing to rent to me. I filled out the paperwork and provided checks for first and last months’ rent. Then suddenly the apartments were unavailable. It didn’t take a genius to figure out they’d realized who I was and didn’t want the hassle that they assumed would come by renting to me.
I was beginning to think I’d be homeless, and then Lou walked me over to a booth one day to introduce me to a customer named Mr. Darby, who had a tiny white-clad cottage covered in creeper vines during the summer months for rent, not far from Main Street.
In Balsam.
It’s on the outskirts, away from the well-groomed downtown core, the area designed to appeal to both tourists and the wealthier residents, which Balsam has plenty of. This part of town is for the small minority like me—locals who don’t quite fit in with the rest of the aesthetics. I took the house because I had no choice. I took it figuring I’d find something else eventually.
I guess it’s fate in a way that I’m still here, because there are definite benefits to living a four-minute drive from my parents now that we’re on speaking terms again.
“We really should get going, unless you want to be sitting in the ER all day.” My mother’s gaze drifts over my T-shirt and plaid pajama pants with a look that says, “You weren’t going to go out in that, were you?”
“I’ll be ten minutes at most.”
“Brenna, would you please bring this to Grandpa.” My mom hands Brenna a glass of water, warning in a grave tone, “Two hands and go slow.”
Brenna takes the task seriously, her steps tiny, her eyes glued to the glass, all the way across the room to my dad, who watches her with a wide, genuine grin on his face.
I can’t help but smile on my way past them.
When I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t tell my parents. I wasn’t talking to them anyway, and it was just one more way their elder daughter had disappointed them. It’s not like I was going to move home. It made more sense to find my own apartment and apply for government assistance and Medicaid. As a single eighteen-year-old pregnant girl, I was pretty much a shoe-in for it.
I was about six months along and unable to hide my swollen belly behind an apron when they finally learned the news from a neighbor who had seen me at work. I’m not sure what infuriated my mother more: the fact that she heard they were going to be grandparents through third-party whispers or that she actually had to ask who the father was.
My mother showed up at Diamonds, berating me for yet again dragging the Wright family name through the mud.
There wasn’t much I could say to ease her anger, and I had no interest in doing so. With more than a touch of spite, I admitted that her first grandchild was conceived in the back of a Volkswagen van, thanks to countless Solo cups’ worth of beer and heartbreak. That I had no plans of including the father in our lives. That I could do this alone.
That she could leave because I considered myself an orphan.
That I hated her.
All I wanted to do was hurt her, after all. Just a fraction of how badly she had hurt me.
I didn’t hear from her again until after Brenna was born, when she showed up at Diamonds, demanding to see her granddaughter. I refused. I’d survived the hardest months of my life alone—with the help of Misty, Lou, and Keith—and I wasn’t going to give her what she wanted simply because she wanted it. I might have given my dad some leeway—he was just going along with whatever his wife insisted on—but they were a package deal, and if I’d inherited anything from my mother, it was her stubbornness.
She even showed up on my doorstep once. I called the cops. It was enough to make her never try that again, the experience too embarrassing in a town where souls thrive on gossip.
That was definitely a low point in our relationship.
I basically hid Brenna for years. From this town, from my parents. We’d play in our backyard on weekends and go to the park and library only during weekdays. I’d go to the grocery store on Monday mornings. I kept to myself and avoided anywhere I thought my mother might be. She’s a regimented person—weekly shopping, gas, library every Saturday morning—and she sticks close to home when she’s not working. Aside from the few times I passed one of their cars on the main street, I was successful.
My little brother, Jack, is the force that finally pulled us back together. He and Brenna, really. Almost six years younger than me, he was twelve when I left, and fourteen when he rode his bike to my house after school to see me for the first time, unbeknownst to my mother.