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“Why not?”
“Because he’s also the most capricious person I know, and that’s saying something.”
“Yeah, it is,” she tells me with a rueful laugh. “So what’s wrong with capricious?”
There are a million things I want to say, a million things I’ve swallowed down with her a million times through the years. What’s the use of saying them? I always tell myself. It won’t change anything because she won’t change.
But maybe her changing isn’t really the point. Maybe it’s enough to just tell her how I feel for once. Maybe…
“I can’t live every day wondering if he’s ever going to walk through my door again—or if watching him walk away to climb a mountain or jump off a cliff is going to be the last thing I see of him. I spent my whole childhood like that, I can’t—I won’t—spend the rest of my life like that, too.”
My mom looks stricken. “Did you really feel like that? Like every time I left something was going to happen to me?”
“No,” I tell her as the wine turns sour in my stomach. “I wasn’t afraid something would happen to you. But I was afraid you wouldn’t come back for me.”
I don’t even know I’m going to say the words before they come out of my mouth, but then they’re there, hanging between us. And for the first time, I realize just how true they are. How many times she took off and left me when I was a kid—for a weekend or a week, sometimes even a month.
It wasn’t just that she took me away from everything I cared about over and over again, packing us up in the middle of the night and running away from whatever problem she’d created that time. It’s that sometimes she didn’t pack me up. Sometimes she just left, with a friend or a “friend” and only remembered to come get me when the excitement of her latest adventure wore off.
The words hang in the air between us as my stomach roils and pitches. I wait for her to say something—to disagree with me, to agree with me, to apologize. Something. But she just sits there watching me, a thoughtful look on her face.
It’s the last straw in days of last straws, the last straw in weeks of having to cover for her, to fix her mistakes, to make miracles happen where there are none.
Except Shawn, a little voice whispers in the back of my head. In his own way, he was a miracle and I just let him walk away.
My stomach revolts, and I make a wild dash for the bathroom. I barely get there in time.
I don’t know how long I stay there on my knees, vomiting into the toilet. But when I’m finally done, I barely have the energy to push back from it and half-sit, half-lay, slumped against the wall.
My mom doesn’t follow me—she’s never been that kind of mom—and I’m grateful for that fact. Grateful for the fact that I have a few minutes to get myself, and my head, together before I have to face her again. Before I have to listen to her excuses.
When I finally make it out of the bathroom, she’s not sitting on the couch where I left her. Instead, she’s in the kitchen, scrambling eggs. It’s a bit of an alarming sight, considering I started cooking for us at seven, after she nearly burned the house down when she got distracted.
“I know what yo
u’re thinking,” she says without turning around. “But even I can scramble a couple eggs without causing a disaster.”
History has proven otherwise, but once again I don’t have it in me to argue.
Eventually, I do what she says, sitting because I no longer have the energy to stand.
As soon as I do, she slides a plate of eggs and toast in front of me. “Eat,” she urges. “It’ll settle the mess in your stomach.”
I’m not so sure, but two days of wine and ice cream haven’t done me any good, and my now empty stomach is twisting in on itself. Worst-case scenario I end up back in the bathroom on my knees.
“I’m not going to apologize,” she says as I take my first careful bite of toast.
I make a noise in the back of my throat. Like that’s a surprise? She’s never apologized to me in her life. For anything.
“I lived my life the way I wanted to live it. Maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong, probably it was somewhere in between. But it was my life and I grabbed on to it with both hands. Probably because I was terrified I’d end up like my mother, married at eighteen to a man who didn’t understand me, stuck in a town as suffocating as it was small.”
It’s the first time she’s spoken about my grandparents in years, and I can’t help listening, can’t help wanting her to say more about them.
But she just shakes her head as she sits down across the table from me with her own plate. “Here’s the thing, though,” she tells me quietly. “And you probably don’t want to hear it, but I’m going to say it anyway. You’ve spent your whole life doing the same thing as me. It may look different, with your accounting degree and your townhouse and your determination to keep your feet on the ground.
“That doesn’t mean you aren’t running, Sage. Because you are. You’ve spent your whole life running from your feelings, running from your fears. Don’t you ever wonder what it would be like if you ever stopped?”
Chapter 23
