CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was Fallfest, although it didn't look quite right. The air smelled too sweet—cinnamon and kettle corn and something burnt underneath. Every lightbulb on Main Street hummed like it was about to explode.
Dad was there, standing by the dunk tank in his best shirt, a ribbon already pinned to his chest. He shook hands with no one, laughing at a joke I couldn’t hear. Every time I blinked, he was greeting someone else. The faces kept changing, but his smile didn't.
“Ready, kiddo?” he asked, but he wasn’t talking to me—he was talking to his reflection in the dunk tank water.
I turned, and Mom’s bed was right there, between the cider stand and the hay bales. The covers were pulled to her chin. She was staring past me, toward the Ferris wheel spinning too fast, lights blurred into a single ring of gold.
“They’ll have apple cider this time,” I said, the words echoing like I’d said them a hundred times. “The hot kind.”
She didn’t respond. Her face sank deeper into the pillow until it was just fabric where her head should be.
I looked down and realized I was holding a paper cup of cider, but it was cracked, leaking between my fingers. I kept trying to fix it—pressing the seams together, holding it tighter—but the liquid kept spilling out, hot and sticky.
People started to notice. You’re so lucky to have a dad like him, they said, though their mouths didn’t move. Their voices were too bright, like the music on parade day. I nodded, because that’s what I was supposed to do, and smiled even though my teeth felt loose.
When I glanced back, Mom’s bed was gone. Dad’s chili ribbon hung from the Ferris wheel, flapping in the wind, barely holding on.
I reached for it, but my hands were slick with cider, and when I looked again, it wasn’t a ribbon anymore—it was just a thin red thread falling through my fingers, unraveling.
???
When I gasped awake, the first thing I noticed was the poster from my door that now sat rolled up and leaned against the wall. I gripped the bedsheets wet with sweat, chest heaving, staring at nothing until my mind slowly grasped reality again.
I couldn’t remember the last time I dreamt.
Shaking my head, I kicked my covers off and hastily turned my bedside lamp on. The clock read four o’clock in the morning. A headache pounded behind my eyes, as if reminding me that I fell apart in Teddy’s arms ten hours ago.
I peeled off my tank top and reached for a fresh t-shirt.
Sunrise only a couple hours away, I needed to clock some more time reading through my manuscript or staring at a blank page.
Truthfully, I had no idea what I thought I’d find.
Maybe I would discover the glaring issue that eluded me for months.
Or maybe I’d finally suck up my pride and call one of the agents I worked with.
Getting represented was as easy as unlocking my phone and picking from a handful of people that I knew would be happy to work with me. I didn’t want them to say yes because of a favor they owed me, though. I wanted them to love my story as much as I did.
And after getting rejected by my own firm, I wasn’t sure how much I loved it anymore.
Shrugging on a cardigan, I snatched my laptop from the nightstand and padded out to the kitchen. My stomach had been growling since the second I woke up.
I heard the clatter of pans before I saw her.
Standing in the warm glow of the cooktop light, wrapped in a fuzzy robe I hadn’t seen in years, my mother hummed quietly to herself as she fried an egg.
It was like being transported into a forgotten memory—worn around the edges and shoved into a shoebox, so faded that I could barely see it.
Instinctively, I wanted to retreat to my bedroom.
I didn’t know why I found myself setting my laptop down and taking a seat at the rickety dining table.
She turned slowly, as if she already knew I was there. “You’re up early, darlin’.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” I replied, hugging my cardigan tighter as my gaze flitted to the dark circles she normally hid well beneath a layer of concealer.
“Hungry?”
“Sure.” The word came out strangled. I couldn’t remember the last time she cooked something for me—not at the diner, but here. At home.
She cracked another couple eggs into the pan, leaning her hip on the stove and crossing her arms. Silver streaks of hair bundled sloppily atop her head caught in the light and cast a halo. “Heard you got dinner with your dad,” she said. The question was implied.
“Where were you?” I asked, rubbing the residual sleep from my eyes. They still burned from all the crying.
She seemed to study me for a minute before replying, “I’m sorry, darlin’. I saw you and I… just couldn’t do it.”
I bristled. “Do what?”
The spatula hung loose in her hand. “Fake it,” she said, barely audible above the crackling eggs. “I s’pose I didn’t remember how much it hurt until I saw him again. D’you know what I mean by that?”
I tried to dredge up whatever anger was left in my tank that hadn’t been spewed at my father.
As she looked at me, lips pressed in a thin line and shoulders slumped, I couldn’t help but realize that I knew exactly what she meant.
His words ricocheted through my mind like a bullet: “There are always two people in a relationship.”
He was right, but not in the way he intended.
“I do know what you mean,” I murmured. Staring at my cuticles, I added, “Sometimes it’s easy to forget that it hurt you too.”
I didn’t know she was crying until she sniffled. My chair scraped across the floor as I stood, but she waved a hand and dabbed her eyes with her sleeve. I froze, stuck in an awkward limbo, realizing with a pang of nausea that I never even saw her cry after he left.
“You don’t need to be feelin’ sorry for me,” she said. “You’re my child, Margaret. My only child. And I failed you.”
Tears stung the corners of my eyes. I tried to force it down, but the dam was broken, and suddenly it felt much easier to cry than it had in years.
My mother crumpled in on herself. She sobbed silently, the kind that wracked her spine and rattled the stove. It was like staring at a mirror image of myself—holding it all inside while being crushed by every tiny perception of failure. Deep down, I was no better than her. We were exactly the same.
“You did the best you could,” I whispered, voice breaking. Then I repeated it louder.
She ran two hands over her reddened face and shook her head. “No. I was never there for you—you know that. It was bad before he left, and even worse afterward. It’s just… never mind. There’s no excuse, darlin’.”
“What is it?” I asked, wiping a couple wet trails from my cheeks and leaning against the table.
We both smelled the burning eggs simultaneously. She pushed the pan away and turned off the burner, shoulders shaking noiselessly.
I took a step forward. “Are you okay?”
When she turned, a wheezing laugh fell from her lips. It was dry and throaty, rattling through her chest as if she’d only just dusted it off after a decade in storage. A smile twitched onto my mouth even as the tears continued to stream.
“I own a diner,” she explained through gasps, “And I can’t hardly cook anythin’.”
We broke out into a laugh together, doubled over, faces wet and eyes red.
To anyone else, we probably looked like a pair of women swiftly losing their minds beside a pan of burnt eggs.
For the first time, I wasn’t thinking about the mistakes I’ve made, or how puffy my face would be, or everything I needed to do that day.
“Well,” my mother said, sniffing as she sobered. “I can make us some pancakes.”
“With the mix?”
She grinned and reached into the cabinet above the fridge.
Long ago—when I was really little, and things were better between my parents—when we’d all have breakfast together on Saturday mornings.
My mother made pancakes from the box and my father would cut fruit and fry bacon while he entertained her with stories about his week.
The memory only came in bits and pieces—his animated expressions, the warm glow of fluorescent lights, my mother’s tinkling laugh, the pop of grease.
Sometimes I wondered if it was more of a mirage than reality.
We worked on breakfast in silence, occasionally sharing a giggle when we forgot the oil in our first batch and burned the next. The charred eggs sat on the corner of the stove, glistening, reminding me of the one question that lingered on the tip of my tongue.
I waited until we sat across from each other at the kitchen table.
“What did you mean?” I asked, rubbing the silver of my fork with my cardigan until it gleamed. “It sounded like you were about to say something earlier. About dad.”
My mother finished chewing before she sighed and sank back into her chair. “I never wanted to come between you and your father. I never had one, y’know? I thought that, above anythin’ else, your relationship should be protected.”
“So you never talked about the divorce,” I concluded miserably. I didn’t think I ever asked, either. The thought sent an unpleasant twinge of guilt to my stomach.
“Yeah,” she replied, adjusting her plate until it was centered on the placemat. “Your father’s a complicated man, darlin’. He was so much different when we first got married—but then again, so was I.”
“How so?” I prodded.
“He was… well, we were young, didn’t know any better.” She smiled sadly and cleared her throat. “But that’s all done and dusted, ain’t it?”
“Mom, please,” I murmured, the name tasting foreign. “What was he like?”
She cleared her throat, seeming to think of an argument before dropping her chin into her hands in apparent acquiescence.
“Your father has a way of makin’ someone feel like they’re the most important person in the world.
He was just so darn charmin’—gifts, compliments, romantic gestures.
We got married quick and had you fast, y’know.
Thought I was just so in love with him that it was a whirlwind. ”
I swallowed the lump in my throat and waited for her to continue as she dragged in a breath.
“Then one day… it all stopped. I figured it was somethin’ I did. Nearly drove myself mad tryin’ to figure out what I’d done.” She paused and rubbed her eyes. “I ain’t tryin’ to place blame, sweetheart, I promise. I know it was no excuse. But I didn’t know who I was for a while after that.”
She started crying again, swiping in vain at the rivers streaking down her cheeks.
I felt a piece of my heart break. Not for my bleak childhood or my unstable future, but for my mother, who was as much of a person as I was.
“You’re going to make your pancakes soggy,” I mumbled with a tiny grin.
And when she laughed, it sounded like music.