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Linda nods her head but doesn’t say anything else. Maybe it’s progress, maybe not, but at the very least, I feel just slightly less like the enemy.
Nevertheless, my desire to make this work grows stronger, my discomfort with the extended silence palpable.
“I’ve never been inside a home that looks as carefully put together and designed as that guesthouse,” I say, deciding to stay on that same topic since it seems to put Linda at ease.
Who knows? Maybe if I talk for long enough, I’ll say something she likes and she can chime in.
“Sure, you see them on HGTV and every so often you’ll step into a house where the kitchen has been partially redone or the bathroom has been updated, but that entire place is just…breathtaking. I especially love the chandelier in the living room and the clawfoot tub in the bathroom. That mixture of modern and antique feels soothing. It’s very homey, which is a weird thing for me to feel because I never had that whole home thing, you know? Mom and I bounced around a lot, and the places weren’t nearly as nice, but my idea of home is mostly just where my mom is. So for me to feel at home when visiting anywhere without her is definitely new for me.”
I take a sip of my water, my mind thinking about where I can lead the conversation next, but when I take stock of the table, I see Linda’s expression has returned to that angry, scowly thing from earlier.
“As I’m sure you can understand,” Linda says, her voice like acid, “I would appreciate you not bringing up your…mother in my home.”
My brow furrows and my hackles rise up. Excuse me?
“No, I don’t understand. What does she have to do with anything? She’s my mom.”
Linda’s jaw tenses.
“Calm down, honey,” Ken says to Linda, his voice low but with a thin layer of pleading in there.
“I will not calm down,” she hisses.
My entire body goes on alert in response to the venom in her voice, and I know without a doubt that any attempt at having a friendly dinner—while laughable in the first place—is officially nonexistent.
“What’s the problem?” I ask, feeling both like I should let the topic drop and also like I shouldn’t let it go.
My mother is the most important person in the world to me, and while I might not be someone who instigates fights with others—in fact, it’s the exact opposite of the type of person I am—I have no intentions of allowing Linda to say shit.
“The problem,” Linda mutters through gritted teeth, her anger shifting from Ken over to me, “is that I think it’s ill-mannered for you to bring up your tramp of a mother at the dinner table.”
I don’t know if it’s possible, but it feels like my entire body bristles at her words, like I’m a dog catching the scent of something dangerous. My mouth gapes, my body tenses, my hands clench into fists around my silverware.
“Linda,” Ken says. But he doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t tell his wife she’s a bitch or put a fucking muzzle on her for calling my mother a tramp.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I seethe. “Did you really just say that to me?”
“Don’t curse in my home. It’s inappropriate, though I doubt your mother ever taught you proper manners.”
I drop my silverware with loud clanks onto my plate, the clattering sound still not enough to overtake the tension in the room.
“What the hell is your problem?”
“My problem is you—you and your mother. I don’t know why you’ve suddenly decided to pop up in our lives, but I wish you’d leave and go crawl back into the hole you came from.”
“Linda.” This time, Ken shows a little more disgust at his wife’s words, though in my opinion, it’s too little too late.
“We didn’t do anything to you,” I say, my voice beginning to rise with the level of my anger. “All I did was reach out to the father who abandoned me and my mother, who seemed to love us one day and left us the next. I don’t deserve your anger when I did nothing wrong.”
“You’re right,” she says, and my shoulders almost deflate at her words. “You did nothing wrong. Your mother, on the other hand, is a homewrecking whore, so forgive me for not wanting to discuss anything that has to do with her sniffing around what’s mine.”
Shock ripples through my body in long waves.
“What are you talking about?” I say.
But I know. I know before she even tries to say anything else.
Every memory I’ve pushed to the back of my mind, anything at all that had Ken in it, comes flooding back to the forefront, and it’s easy to sort through because there’s almost nothing there.
