“Do you want some more pain meds? How long has it been?”
“I’m fine, Hazelnut.” She pats my knee reassuringly, but then breaks into a coughing fit. When she recovers, she asks me how my date was with Cosmos.
The coffeemaker beeps before I can answer, and I’m grateful for the excuse to get up and move. “It was fine.”
“Fine is how you describe a trip to the post office without incident, not a date with a sexy doctor who’s clearly into you.”
“It was good. I meant good.” Some of it was, at least. Some of it wasverygood. The way he looked up at me with hooded eyes and wet lips when we were in his bedroom. The sweet way he kissed me goodnight when he dropped me off, lingering because he didn’t want to say goodbye.
“If it was so good, why are you so jumpy?”
“I’m not jumpy.”
“You’re as tense as a coiled spring and almost broke my favorite mug. Now, tell me what really happened.” Mom coughs into her elbow. I stop what I’m doing and look at her, worried. But she waves a hand dismissively through the air. “I’m fine. Answer the question.”
I pour two mugs of coffee, one for each of us, giving myself a moment to think about how to answer. I’ve never kept things from Mom before, but I’m not sure how she’ll respond if I tell her Cosmos and I can stop time. Will she believe me? What will I do if she doesn’t?
“It was good. Really. But his family is… a lot.” I pour a splash of milk into Mom’s mug.
“Julia is lovely,” Mom says. “Was she there?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think she’s thrilled that we started things up so quickly.” I set the mugs on the coffee table and join Mom on the couch.
She curls her feet under her in a position that mirrors my own. I know she’s waiting for me to say more, but she doesn’t press. Which is good. I need a minute to decide how to put my thoughts into words.
Mom picks up her mug and blows on her coffee.We both stare out the window, watching the sun slowly brighten the sky from royal purple to robin’s egg blue. Watching the sunrise has always been our thing. After the divorce and the move, early morning sunrises became our ritual. The thing we did together that was stable and sure. Even when I moved out and lived with Kane, whenever one of us needed a little hope, we’d call and sit on the phone together while watching the sunrise.
Emily Dickinson called hope‘the thing with feathers.’She was comparing hope to a bird that never stopped singing. But I wonder if she also knew how flighty hope can be. How it always seems a little out of reach.
“How do you know if someone really likes you?” I ask, breaking the silence.
Mom sits up a little straighter, studying me. “You don’t. Not really. Not unless they tell you.”
“I mean, if they’ve told you, how do you know they really like you… for you?”
“You trust them,” she shrugs.
“And what if they end up being like Jerky Jeremy?”
“Your dad is absolutely singular, Hazelnut. The world couldn’t handle two of him.” She says it with the kind of humor that comes long after a wound has scabbed over. I wish I could approach the situation with that kind of healing, but I can’t seem to think of my dad with any sort of objective distance.
The way his words echo in my head more than any others proves how much I can’t get over thosewounds. I always cared more about what he thought of me than anyone else.
He was the steady, sane one. I was Nutter. And Mom was emotional—unless he was really upset with her, and then she was‘unbalanced.’He was the first and last word, the one who held the measuring stick. And even though I always felt like I came up short, I still believed his measure was the one to live up to.
Then, everything imploded. It was senior year of high school. I’d left an assignment at home that I needed to turn in. So instead of eating lunch, I went home to get it. I never did turn in that assignment. I walked into the kitchen to find my dad and his secretary with their pants down—literally. It was the most horrifying cliché I’ve ever witnessed. The most confusing betrayal I’d ever felt.
Until I found out that it wasn’t a momentary lapse, like he’d originally claimed.
After the divorce, he begged me to come visit. His mom, my only grandma, was really sick, and she wanted to see me before she died, so I went. I was still angry, but I was hopeful, too. Maybe we could repair things, start over.
His old secretary was with him when he picked me up from the airport. She acted like we were best friends and yapped away the entire drive to the hospital, flashing a diamond ring with every gesture she made. That night she told me their whole torrid history. She thought it would help me understand. The gist of it was that Dad had lied to me. They’d been having an affair for over a decade. They had itall planned out that Jeremy would wait to divorce Mom until after I graduated, because he didn’t want me to grow up in a broken home.
Neither of them realized how much more damage it did to have my perception of reality turned on its head as a fragile teenager. Even thinking about it now, my blood pumps through my veins with a furious heat.
“I’m serious, Mom. I can’t go through something like that.”
She looks at me over the edge of her mug and takes a long sip. Then another. “Do you remember when you were learning to sew, and you kept pricking your finger? You were so frustrated because your stitches weren’t perfectly straight, and you kept getting hurt. You wanted to quit, but I made you stick with it until you’d finished the whole dress.”
