Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-two
In lieu of talking to my mother, I do literally anything else.
I clean my oven. I steam my bridesmaid dress.
I check my tire pressure and get legitimately upset when not one tire needs to be refilled.
I toss my tire pressure gauge back into the glove compartment, where it will remain until the next difficult conversation that needs to be postponed.
Every minute of stalling is one minute closer to Gin and Rishi’s big day, the likes of which is riding on my ability to have an honest, vulnerable conversation with my mother.
The type of conversation I know needs to happen in person. I need to go back to the house.
Luckily, there are many more extremely important and time-sensitive things to do this Sunday morning.
I tweeze my eyebrows. I make the chicken thing from The New York Times.
After lunch, I carefully vet every item of clothing in my closet, trying to determine the right uniform for apologizing.
I decide on a sleeveless jumpsuit, the only bit of red in my wardrobe, like I’m borrowing a bit of Renee’s confidence.
Had this gone down just a few days sooner, Renee likely would’ve come with me today.
I can picture her beside me, pinkie looped into mine, but I crumple the image and tuck it away. Focus, Alice. One thing at a time.
The maps app says it’s twenty-five minutes to Home Avenue, and even with my sudden devotion to speed limits, I pull into the driveway just twenty-eight minutes later.
Much like my last visit, mine isn’t the only car in Mom’s driveway: Kurt’s silver Lexus still sits right where it was.
My stomach somersaults. I should’ve known I’d be running that risk, showing up unannounced, but too late now.
When I step up to the front door, I feel a little like I’m preparing to enter my own court hearing rather than my childhood home. My finger hovers over the doorbell, but I can’t make myself press it. Turns out, I don’t have to. The door creaks open before I can work up the courage.
“Hi.” Mom’s voice is short, but her thick, silver hair is longer than I’ve ever seen it. It must’ve been pulled up last time, or else I was too caught up in Kurt to notice.
“Hi, Mom.”
“You’re…here.”
“I am.” I give her a watery smile. There’s a screen door between us, a sieve that our conversation filters through.
“That’s…a surprise.” Mom’s thin brows leap up to her hairline, digging four distinct grooves in her forehead like well-planned rows of a garden.
“Well.” I splay my arms out in a pose that’s usually accompanied by a ta-da. Mom doesn’t look impressed. “Do you, uh…can I come in?”
Mom doesn’t say anything, but she does push open the screen door, and once I’m inside, I feel a little more welcome.
I haven’t been cut out of any of the family photos on the wall or anything, and if the cops are on their way to arrest me for crimes against my mother’s well-being, she doesn’t let on.
Instead, Mom digs back into the cupboard for my favorite mug—the yellow one that we stole from a coffee shop in Michigan when she and I road-tripped up to see Dad play a festival.
She doesn’t ask, just fills it most of the way with coffee and then dresses it up exactly right: a splash of oat milk and two packets of sweetener.
My heart stings like a scraped knee. It’s been so long, but Mom still knows me so well.
She makes herself a mug of tea, and we walk to the living room—she in a slow, deliberate march, I with a tentative shuffle. Mom sits on one end of the couch, and I opt for an armchair, leaving a coffee table’s width of distance between us. I’m not sure what to say, so I start again with “Hi.”
“Hi.” Mom doesn’t look unhappy, per se, but there’s a visible discomfort in how she’s situated on the couch, shrinking into the armrest like she’s hoping to slip between it and the cushion.
In my kindest, most even-tempered voice, I ask. “Where’s Kurt?”
“Upstairs.”
“He can come down, if he wants.”
Silence. Mom frowns and dunks her tea bag. “I wasn’t sure he’d be invited.”
“It’s not my house,” I remind her. “I don’t choose the guest list.” After a beat, I add, “How’s he doing?”
“He’s great. The band is excited about the show.” Mom dips her chin. “They’re hoping you’re still going to attend.”
“Of course I’m coming.” I’m offended she’d ever think otherwise.
“Well, we hadn’t heard from you, so we weren’t sure.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” I insist, but it stings to realize she has no reason to believe me.
How many times have I told her I would show up only to cancel at the last minute?
There’s a lump in my throat that the coffee can’t wash down, and I abruptly change the topic.
“I love what you’ve done with the living room. ”
Mom’s frown pulls her whole face toward the floor, but her eyes stay firmly on me. “I haven’t done anything to the living room.”
“Really? Didn’t there used to be something in the back corner? A plant or something?”
“Yeah,” Mom says flatly. “The Christmas tree.”
Right.
After Dad’s funeral, I stayed with Mom for three weeks.
I don’t remember whether we discussed it, but it just didn’t seem right for either of us to be alone.
Once I moved back home to my apartment, I still had built-in reasons to come back every month for a while—Mom’s birthday, then Dad’s, then Thanksgiving, all spent crying and reminiscing at Mom’s kitchen table.
Christmas was for fielding weepy phone calls from distant relatives while eating my weight in peppermint bark.
It was exhausting. Then it was New Year’s, and the world rang in a fresh year that Dad would never see, but it also was no longer the year my dad died, and it never would be again.
Mom wanted to keep up with the crying and reminiscing, but I didn’t.
It hurt too much. I had to look forward.
I had to focus on myself. But I’d left her there in the hurt, all by herself.
“I’m sorry.” I barely recognize the tender, shaky voice as my own.
It feels silly to tell her that I don’t want to feel this—who would?
But I know that I don’t have a choice. I’m still learning how to feel, how to sit with a pain that I’m certain will kill me if I don’t run from it or numb it or pack it away.
All I can choke out is “It’s so hard, Mom. ”
“I know.” Mom’s eyes are glossy with tears. “It’s hard for me, too. To live here without your dad.”
I drop her gaze and fall right into a wave of nausea. Right. I got to walk away from the place where Dad died. Mom still has to wake up here every morning, to find a way to move through her day-to-day without him.
I choke out a question I don’t really want the answer to. “So does Kurt…live here now?”
Mom shakes her head no. “Kurt and I…” She steeples her fingers and rests them against her lower lip, and when her eyes flutter closed, she looks like she’s praying, asking God for the right thing to say.
She draws in a deep breath through her nose and says, “When you stopped by and surprised us…that’s not how we wanted you to find out. ”
“Of course not,” I say, although that does raise the question of how they did want me to find out, if they had concocted some kind of plan that would’ve made it feel cool and normal that my mother was dating her dead husband’s drummer.
Any method would’ve been less destructive, I’m sure, than the one I accidentally chose for myself, but none would’ve been painless.
I look down at my hands. “Can you just confirm something for me?”
“Of course.”
My eyes ricochet between Mom and the staircase. “This is all just…this is just the past few months right? Nothing like…before?”
“Oh heavens, I would never.” Mom leaps on her answer with reflexes I didn’t know she had.
She doesn’t sound offended so much as it seems like this might be the first time the thought has occurred to her.
“I wouldn’t…oh, Alice, no. It’s not like that at all.
” Her eyes crinkle with a sad smile as she shakes her head.
“I’m lonely, Alice. I miss your father. I miss him so, so much.
” Her voice frays, and a prickle inches up my throat.
This is part of it. The reason I haven’t been home in so long.
I hate seeing my mother cry, and I’m sick of crying myself.
Mom starts again. “Kurt misses him, too. He lost one of his best friends. He understands what I’m going through because he’s going through it, too.
Something very similar at least. And it’s…
it’s good for us to have each other. Does that make sense? ”
“Yeah.” I blot the tears with the side of my hand. “I’m glad you have that. I’m glad you’re not alone.”
“You need to understand—I’d been losing your father for a very, very long time,” Mom goes on. “Long before he was actually gone. I did everything I could to support him. I was with him until the bitter end. But, God, was it bitter.”
“I know,” I remind her. “I was there, too.”
“You were, I know you were. But there was plenty we didn’t let you see, Alice.”
I frown. What does that mean?
Her gaze drops into her tea. “That summer we sent you to band camp instead of bringing you to the Outpost? Remember?” She looks up. I nod. “We tried to have an intervention. The whole band had agreed to make it a sober house for the summer, but it…he wasn’t willing.”
My heart boomerangs, my voice low and thin. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t want you to see your father that way.”
“So…you lied?” Something withers in my chest.
“No, honey, no.” Mom’s voice is thick with a hurt I haven’t heard since last year.
Likely because I haven’t been around to hear it.
“I knew I’d tell you someday, but you were so young then.
We wanted to protect you. But, of course, in the end…
” She shakes her head with a sputtering sigh.
“There was no preventing you from seeing him like that.” She closes her eyes.
“Oh, Alice. You don’t know. You don’t know the nights I spent calling ambulances or staying up wondering if he was going to make it home safe. ”
The world sways and tilts around me, my reality warping in real time. “I had no idea.”
“I didn’t want you to,” Mom says. “But it’s just…it’s been so lonely for so long. And if not for Kurt these last few months…I couldn’t do this alone.”
I break like an egg, the tears coming all at once. I peel myself out of the armchair, and Mom throws out her arms. She’s crying now, too, and I bury my face in Mom’s long silver hair. I let myself just be her daughter.
“I’m sorry,” I squeak out. “For all of it. I don’t want you to be alone.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Mom says. “And I’m not alone, sweetie, I’m not alone. I’m so glad you’re here. I love you.”
“I love you.”
We stay like this for a good long while, taking turns crying and apologizing.
I’m sorry that I blew off rescheduling dinner, but she knows it was an accident.
She’s sorry that she wasn’t clear about needing to talk to me about something in person, but I know she was trying to keep from driving me further away.
She wanted me home, and now I am, even if just for the evening.
And it is still home, even after all these months. Even if Dad isn’t here.
I’m not sure how much time passes before a long, drawn-out creak echoes from the staircase, the sound of one hesitant step. It’s the sound a question mark would make if it could speak.
“Kurt, honey?” Mom sits up, dabbing at her nose with her sleeve. I do the same with mine, composing myself enough to be perceived.
“You can come down,” I call out, and Mom looks at me with so much gratitude. More than I deserve, considering the question I have yet to ask. A few more creaks of the stairs later, I summon enough courage to say “I actually need to talk to both of you. I kind of have a favor to ask.”
Mom grunts a laugh and rolls her eyes. “So that’s why you’re here. I should’ve known.”
My pulse charges ahead. “It’s not just—”
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding.” Mom lays a hand on my knee with a smile that doubles as an apology. Kurt appears just behind her, looking cautious but hopeful. “What do you need?” Mom asks.
I pinch one red button on the front of my jumpsuit. “It’s not really for me,” I admit. “It’s for the bride.”