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“Yes. Well, I’m here now. I’m trying. I’m willing to try harder, if you’d just—”
Beatrice dropped the vegetable peeler on the counter. “Do you know what I want? I want you to be my mum. I don’t want you to be my friend or my producer or a globe-trotting glamour celebrity who drops in unexpectedly and tries to, like, glom some feeling of intimate closeness in the three hours she can spare before she takes off again. You used to be my mum.”
“I haven’t stopped, Beatrice, I’ve—”
“You have. You started doing all this other stuff and didn’t leave any room for me. Do you know what it’s like to have your mother gearing up to climb the seven most dangerous mountains in the world? It’s the worst. The absolute worst. I know I’m supposed to be supportive and proud, and I try, but a lot of the time I just hate you for not being a proper mum who sends me packages and frets over whether my socks are clean.”
“I couldn’t—I can’t—”
“I know that, all right? I know you had to get away, I know you had some kind of midlife crisis, I just wish you hadn’t needed to get away from me. Why couldn’t you have rented some cottage nearby and, you know, gotten a job at an estate agent’s like every other mum?”
I was trying to find myself. I was trying to be a role model for the kind of woman I wanted you to be, the life I wanted you to reach for.
I was suffocating.
I was underwater, trying to figure out how not to drown.
They weren’t things she could say, even if they were true, and they couldn’t fix the fact that she’d left and her daughter hated her for it.
Children spent their whole lives getting ready to leave. They were born helpless, and every piece of competence they managed to attain took them one step closer to walking out the door forever. Rosemary had been watching her daughter leave for nineteen years, always trying to resist the impulse to keep her close, keep her helpless, keep her needing her mum so she wouldn’t ever really go.
No one told young women that being a mother meant constant, terrible heartbreak. No one ever said aloud that it meant doubting you were doing it right every single day, every time your child cried, every time she burned her finger or skinned her knee or ended up in hospital.
No one had told Rosemary that her failures would culminate, one stacked upon the other, until there was no way to get her daughter back.
The pasta pot on the stove boiled over with a wet, loud sizzle. Rosemary jumped to her feet.
“Fuck!” Beatrice opened and closed two drawers, wadd
ed a dishtowel in her hand to pull the pot off the heat. “Oh, motherfucking son of a bitch, ouch!”
“Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right, I burned my hand!” Beatrice adjusted the towel and yanked the pot off the stove, then dropped it to flail her fingers in the air, jumping up and down. “Ouch ouch ouch ouch.”
Rosemary moved to the tap and turned it to cold. “Here, run the water on it so it doesn’t blister.”
“I can’t, I have to check if this is done and sop up the stupid water—”
“I’ll take care of that. You take care of your hand.”
“I don’t want to take care of my hand. I want to fix this mess you made before Nancy gets back and sees it.”
“Bea—”
“Get out of my way.”
“Can’t you just let me do this one thing for you?”
“Oh, shit!” Beatrice zipped past her, and Rosemary turned to discover the dishtowel in flames. Beatrice picked it up by the corner and dropped it in the pasta pot. Overhead, the smoke alarm began blaring, and Rosemary covered her ears.
“Nancy’s going to have kittens.”
Rosemary stood, mute and useless, as Beatrice turned the flame off. Her daughter dragged a stool over and climbed it to silence the smoke alarm, dumped the pot with its burned towel in the sink, cleaned the cooktop. Finally, she stood with her back to Rosemary and let the cold water from the tap run over her injured hand.
Rosemary had never felt less like a mother or a friend.
She walked into the living room, where Kal sat with his phone in his palm. “Everything okay?” he asked.
