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“You have to admit, he was really special.”
“Yes, but maybe he was lucky to have me. Maybe he should have been more grateful for me.”
Mom lapses into silence, and I push a hand through my hair, feeling increasingly blue. This always happens when Mom and I get together. We can’t seem to speak the same language, and I don’t know why. Mom doesn’t have this problem with Jamie (he doesn’t talk) or Ashlee (she smiles at everything). Just me. I don’t want her hurt, and I don’t want to hurt her.
And I don’t want her to hurt me.
But this is also why I don’t call her, or ask her advice, or even try to confide in her. It’s impossible to take my problems to her. She doesn’t understand me, or what I need.
The cab pulls up in front of my apartment, and I pay the cabdriver, and Mom and I enter my apartment.
I show my mom around and offer her my bed, but she refuses, saying she’d be perfectly happy on the living room couch. I’ve got the start of a killer headache, and I’m in no mood to argue with her now. “I’m not putting you on the couch, Mom—”
“I prefer the couch. I sleep better there than in a big bed.”
“That’s silly.”
“I sleep on the couch all the time at home.”
“You do?”
She steps out of her shoes and lines them up perfectly straight between the couch and end table. “Yes. I do.”
Somehow she’s managed to sound righteous and defiant all at the same time, and I watch her adjusting the pillows on the couch.
“Why do you sleep better on the sofa?” I ask, picturing the old sofa with the faded pink and burgundy cabbage roses in the living room at home. I think the upholstery was once vaguely Laura Ashley-like, but that was the ’80s, and cabbage roses were everywhere for a while.
“It’s more comfortable.”
“But the sofa is small. It’s not even full-size!”
Mom shrugs and turns. “I don’t mind.” She’s unzipping her small suitcase and takes out her nightgown. “I’ll just watch a little TV and be asleep in no time.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. Just give me a blanket and I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll make the couch up properly.”
“No. A blanket’s all I need. I can use one of the pillows from the couch.”
I have a rather terrifying picture of how Mom lives at home. Dinners alone in front of the television, and then later she pulls the afghan from the back of the couch and covers herself, watching TV until she falls asleep.
It is such a lonely life, I think, and I wonder yet again why she stopped dating when, in the early years after Bastard Ted left, she went out a lot. Those were the years she did anything and everything to meet other singles. She even took up square dancing, heading out twice a week in the ugliest yellow-and-aqua-checked dresses with enormous starchy skirts beneath.
I look at her now, really look at her, and see the face that I’ve known forever, and it’s older; it’s changed. The skin is less taut; the circles beneath the eyes are permanent, shallow hollows of lavender; the corners of her eyes droop more. So do her lips. Her brown hair, once my exact shade, is faded and heavily laced with gray, and I think, this is what I’m going to look like in thirty years. This is me at fifty-five.
It scares me. I don’t want to look faded or rumpled; I don’t want to be so tired that I fail to color my hair, or so poor that I can’t buy clothes without a heavy polyester thread count.
This all sounds so petty, but I’m afraid of aging. Afraid of dying. Afraid of my own mortality. No one in fairy, tales really gets old; they just go to sleep—think of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White—but this is real life, and I’m twenty-five, a good third of the way through my life, and I don’t know if it’s going to get any better or easier. I don’t know if I’ll ever have more happiness than Mom did, and I don’t think Mom had a lot.
And my mom should have. She was a good girl, too.
Tears suddenly sting my eyes, and I turn away, close the shutters at the big bay window so the whole world doesn’t watch Mom watching TV on the couch.
And I’d hate Bastard Ted more if I thought he was truly happy in his little Orange County townhome. It’s all very nice that Ted’s so spiritual and in touch with his true essence, but what about his kids? What about us? Dads aren’t supposed to freak out on their families. Dads are supposed to be dads to their kids. Dads are supposed to be… good.
“You know where the bathroom is,” I say, double-checking the dead bolt on the front door, “and the kitchen. Help yourself, and if you need anything, ask.”
