I put down the phone and crawled into the empty bathtub and cried for about a year, or maybe ten minutes.
Sometimes, there was no victory in figuring out something important about yourself. There was only reality and clarity, which were not much fun at all.
Then I got out of the bathtub and called someone.
“Hello, Mom?” I said when she picked up.
The menu at Moose McIntyre’s was eighteen pages long. I’d never had the time to read the whole thing and appreciate how you could find falafel platters and chicken-and-waffle combos at the same restaurant.
Today, I had that time.
“Go there now and wait for me,” Mom had said on the phone. “I don’t want you home by yourself.”
“Okay,” I’d sobbed, so grateful for instructions. “Okay.” I’d said it at least eight times.
Now I was sitting in a corner booth by the window, nursing a coffee and waiting. Every time the door opened, I looked up nervously like I was on a first date.
With my mother.
On the twelfth time the door opened, it was her. I watched her scan the restaurant for me. I could see the worry and urgency on her face, and that made me feel good. Was that bad that it made me feel good?
Then she found me and moved quickly to the table. I stood up, stepped out of the booth. When she reached me, I fell against her. The first thing I noticed when she put her arms around me was that she felt smaller than I remembered. Maybe I’d just gotten bigger. Maybe it had been that long since I’d truly hugged her.
“I got your note,” I said into her shoulder. “You told me to call.”
I felt her stiffen for a moment, then she tightened her embrace. “You went looking for the box.”
I nodded, pinching my eyes shut.
“Come,” she said. “Sit.”
She shooed me back into the booth, then slid in beside me.
“What did you tell them at work?” I asked.
“Family emergency.”
“I’m sorry you went all the way down there and all the way back. You didn’t have to do that. It could have waited.”
Mom looked at me full-on. Her hands flat and firm on the table had moved the place mat so it was crooked. I wondered if she’d notice.
“Ari,” she said evenly. “I had to do that.”
I felt the tears come again but I bit down hard on my lip, willing them to stop.
“Do we have to call your doctor?”
“I don’t know. Please don’t be a nurse right now.”
She looked taken aback for a moment, then softened. “This was about Camden, right?”
“It’s kind of about everything.”
“But you got hurt.”
Before I could figure out a way to answer, a waitress came by with two glasses of water. Mom ordered a bowl of granola.
After the waitress left, Mom turned back to me and said, “Look, I know I can’t always protect you. I can only hope you have the skills to do it yourself.”
“Then why were you so against Camden’s friends when you hadn’t even met them?”
“I didn’t understand at first, either. The thing about driving ninety minutes to work and back each day is that you have a lot of alone time to think about stuff.” She paused. “Sometimes I think I took that job because of the alone time on the road.”
Mom seemed to drift off for a few moments, then finally checked back in. “What did I tell you about how your father and I met?”
“That you went to high school together.”
“That’s right. Well, I’ll tell you the rest of the story now. It’s relevant.” She wrapped one hand tight around her water glass, but didn’t drink. “We’d never really known each other growing up. Until the summer after high school was done, when we worked as counselors at the same day camp. We had, you know. A summer fling.”
The word fling felt creepy and wrong coming from my mother. I took a sip of my coffee and spent a long time gingerly placing the cup back in its saucer.
“Then summer ended,” Mom continued. “We went off to start college in different states. But then the next summer we were both back at the camp. . . .” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “And the next—”
I held up my hand. “I get the picture.” It was a gross picture.
Mom laughed a little, shook her head. “After we graduated, we both found ourselves back home. And back with each other. We started dating for real.” Now she picked up the water glass and jiggled it so the ice clinked. “For real was different from a summer fling. We had our ups and downs but we stuck with it. Stayed on the track, you know? Moving in together, then marriage. Then we had you and I wanted so dearly to make it work.”
“Why did you stop? Making it work, I mean.”
“This stuff is really hard for me to talk about.”
“You’re doing great,” I said.
Mom laughed. “Gee, thanks.” Then she got serious. “Okay, it was this. I found out that he’d been having a relationship with another woman. For a long time. So I kicked him out.”
“You always said he left.”