Chapter 11
When I get home, Mom’s sitting at the kitchen table, the overhead light flickering onto her face.
“Jesus Christ, you scared me,” I say. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean ‘what am I doing here?’ I’m that bad of a mother that you think I can’t be home to take care of my daughter?”
“No, no. You just…scared me.”
“Sweetheart, why don’t you take a seat?”
I pull up the drop-leaf and sit across from Mom, getting a closer look at her. Splotchy eyes, crumpled tissue, dirty Safeway apron still around her neck from her shift. An empty bottle of wine tipped over on the countertop behind her, the dregs pooling out like a crime scene.
“Well,” she says, clearing her throat to stave off a voice-crack. “He broke up with me.”
I look at her, rings under her eyes that read more forty-five than thirty-four.
They’re the kind of dark circles that are made worse by stress and lack of sleep but that originate from good old-fashioned genes, which is probably why hints of them are already starting to creep onto my face. At least she’s got good lips.
“Tony broke up with me,” she repeats, scratching the back of her hand where her spray tan has already started to wear off. The lemon verbena is a double-edged sword.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“It’s alright. It’s not your fault, sweetie,” she says. “God, I just—I really thought he was the one.”
I didn’t. Mom hasn’t aged out of her habit of falling in love with unavailable men.
She creates and nurses a fantasy in her mind of what the guy could be, what the two of them could be together, instead of living in the reality of what he is, what they are.
Then when she’s broken up with, she’s blindsided and sent into such a spiral that she can’t get out of bed for weeks.
A part of me likes the company. Sometimes we’ll plow through a couple seasons of a reality show, The Bachelor or Amazing Race or Survivor.
Lots of Top Chef. Once I even got her out of bed long enough to face off in a grilled-cheese quickfire challenge.
I let her win even though the sun-dried tomatoes she used had expired.
But those are the good versions. There are also the bad versions.
The ones where she stares at a wall four hours a day, won’t touch the Campbell’s chicken noodle soup I heat up for her.
Mats her hair up so bad I have to cut the knots out with dull scissors.
Loses ten pounds. And her job. No matter how much I want her company, I don’t want it like that.
And then the only thing that gets her up and running again, that gets her to be an active participant in her life, that gets her to apply for a new, somehow even lower-paying job than the last one, is a shiny new man.
This is her boom-and-bust cycle. And it always starts with her thinking she’s found “the one.”
“That’s too bad, Ma,” I say.
“Oh it’s way worse than ‘too bad,’ honey. It’s awful. Fucking awful. Just callin’ a spade a spade,” she says, then she leans forward on her elbows and presses the inner corners of her eyebrows with her thumbs, trying to alleviate her oncoming migraine.
“Ugh, why, Waldo? Why am I like this?”
I don’t know how to answer her. I don’t know why she is the way she is.
Is it hereditary, like the bags under her eyes?
Or is it something that can be traced back to her own childhood, to her parents’ shortcomings and her kid-brain internalization of them?
Something she could adjust with a series of therapy sessions that she can’t afford?
“Shit, I’m sorry,” she says, hands in the air, exasperated with herself. “I don’t mean to put this on you. It’s unfair of me, as your mother. Unfair to you. Ulch, don’t wind up like me, Waldo.”
She blows her raw, red nose into her overly soiled tissue, making it work harder than it needs to, punishing it, refusing to grab a fresh one. “Whatever you do, don’t wind up like me.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. I know exactly what she means. I also know she likes to explain it to me.
“Don’t let men run your life. Ruin your life, I should say.
” (Blows nose.) “Don’t let ’em distract you.
” (Blows nose.) “You’ve got a good brain and a good heart and men will take both and mess ’em up real bad and you’ll wind up working at Safeway double-bagging groceries and asking people to click a goddamn green button a hundred times a day.
Don’t fall for their traps, no matter how blue their eyes are.
They could be fucking cerulean, it don’t matter.
” (Blows nose.) “Ugh, you shouldn’t have to see your mother like this.
I should be stronger than this. Better than this. I wish I was better than this.”
“You’re doin’ great, Mom.”
“You don’t gotta say that, sweetheart.”
“I know.”
“I guess I am trying my best,” she says instantly, her offhanded delivery betrayed by her reassurance-seeking eyes.
“Of course you are,” I say, as much to convince myself as to convince her. She has been raising me alone all this time. Sure, “raising” is a loose term, but doesn’t the fact that she stayed count for something? She’s the one who stayed. That’s not nothing.
“I’m gonna be around a lot more, sweetheart. Alright? A lot more,” she says, and then her face lights up as if she’s got a new idea. Only it’s not a new idea. It’s the same idea she has every time a man moves on from her. “You know what we should do, Waldo? You know what we’ve gotta do?”
She always swears we have to take a road trip to Seward because we took one once when I was four and apparently we fished and laughed and went barefoot in a glacial stream.
Apparently we ate pimento cheese sandwiches and went on a walk in a rich neighborhood and pointed to all the two-story houses we swore we’d live in someday.
Apparently it’s Mom’s favorite memory of us together. I don’t remember it.
“Road trip to Seward?” I guess.
“How’d you know?” she asks, seeming so genuinely surprised that I wonder if she is. If breakups are blackouts for her, and as soon as she’s through them she has no recollection of the ideas she pitched, the promises she made.
“You know, if there’s one blessing in all of this it’s that it’s helping me set my priorities straight,” she says. “You’re my priority. Always have been, even if there are times it doesn’t seem like it. Times I fail as a mother. I’m not gonna fail again. I’m gonna be better.”
And then she looks at me—her green eyes coated in a knowing glaze, an awareness of all her shortcomings combined with a real desire to change—and I can’t help but believe her.
“I know, Mom,” I say. “I know you are.”