“He’s asleep.”
“Great.” Her smile starts to fade as she nods, and I stare at her, waiting, although I’m not sure for what. “I’m so glad you came,” she finally says.
“I felt like I should.”
She keeps nodding, a bit uncertainly, not sure what to make of my words. I’m not sure, either. My relationship with my mom was never super close; we didn’t do girly days together, or share our secrets, but I still thought it had been solid. She worked as a nurse throughout my childhood, and her erratic shifts meant she wasn’t always home, but when she was, she was there, dinner on the table, laundry folded, a kind of old-fashioned motherhood that didn’t involve quality time so much as basic, competent provision. I suppose that was in part because my father is a very old-fashioned man—a plumber by trade, expecting a dinner every night at six, his evenings in front of the TV with a beer or three all sacrosanct. He still made time for family—barbecues, occasional trips to the park, his attention rare and yet wonderful when I got it. I thought most fathers were like him; even now I think most probably are. Until my mother left, and I got in trouble, and my father turned into someone who didn’t seem to like me at all.
Now, nine years later, my mother and I have never really talked through the why or how, and I’m not sure how to start.
“I’m seeing a counselor,” I say abruptly, and my mother blinks.
“Oh. Okay. That’s good, I think?” She raises her eyebrows, her smile skirting off her face and then creeping back, like some shy animal that wants to be petted.
“Yes, it has been. It’s brought up a lot of issues for me—the way Dad was, the way you were.” The words lie there, heavy, immovable. I realize they sound accusing, but I didn’t mean them to be, at least not entirely. “How it all affected me, I mean.”
My mother keeps nodding, but more slowly now. “Yes. Yes. Of course it affected you.”
I draw a breath and force myself to continue. “And I guess what it’s made me realize, what I really want to know after all these years is why?”
My mother stares at me uncertainly. “Why?”
“Why did you leave the spring of my senior year? I mean, I get that you weren’t happy with Dad. I do understand that, and I can see why, in a way. But why then? Why couldn’t you have waited until I was at college? It would have made so much difference. You had to have known that, right?” My voice rises with each question, throbs with pain. My mother looks away without answering, her body seeming to sag and deflate. “And why,” I continue, louder now, “did you have to move to New Hampshire right away? Why did you have to cut yourself off so completely, like you didn’t even care anymore? Maybe you didn’t.”
“Of course I cared, Beth.” The words are quiet and intense.
“It didn’t look that way from where I was standing.”
“You were angry with me.”
“Of course I was—”
“You didn’t want to come with me,” my mother continues, her voice sharpening and then rising like mine. “I’m not saying I wasn’t to blame, I know I was. If I could have waited, I would have.”
“Could have?” I scoff. “You make it sound as if you had a gun to your head.”
“Not a gun, no,” she says quietly, and for a second it’s as if everything has tilted and slid, as if the very ground beneath me has trembled.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
My mother looks away. “It was a complicated, difficult situation.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything.”
“I know.”
“So?” She doesn’t reply and I blow out an impatient breath. “What’s the point of keeping secrets now? You know I haven’t talked to Dad in years.”
“What?” My mom looks shaken. “I didn’t know that.”
“How could you not know that?”
“You never told me. I assumed… I assumed you were still in touch. Quite regularly, in fact.”
I shake my head in disbelief. “Mom, he threw me out of the house after the DUI.”
“What?” My mother looks even more troubled, and I stare at her, trying to figure out why our narratives seem so different. “I thought you left of your own accord. To live with Dylan’s father.”
“Well, yes, but that was a couple of months later.”