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Okay, so she obviously knows what happened between us.
“Hey,” Jared asks me at lunch. “What’s with you today?”
“Nothing.”
“You seem crankier than usual,” Timothy adds.
I just shrug, and they both stare at me.
“You aren’t getting sick, are you?” Jared asks, worried. “Because we need you at the game on Saturday.”
“I’m not getting sick. I’ll be there.”
“Don’t skip practice today,” he adds.
“I won’t.”
Somehow, I survive all of my classes, a grueling football practice, and then I hit the road. My mom lives pretty close to cam
pus, but somehow, I never get over to see her. It might be because she doesn’t want to see me or maybe I’m just nervous about what she’d have to say to me. Either way, I roll up to her place at dusk and park in the oversized driveway.
The house looks terrible.
Somehow, despite everything that happened, my mother managed to hang onto my childhood home. I really have no idea how. Her father must have given her money or bought it outright from my father’s estate. It’s one of those things we never talk about.
The home has lost its luster, though. Years of neglect and depression have destroyed the once-beautiful mansion. Now there are no servants and no visitors. I haven’t been home in a very long time, and I’m a little caught off-guard by the overgrown grass on the front lawn and the unruly vines that are now climbing up the sides of the house. There’s a pothole in the driveway and the siding on the house looks like it needs to be replaced.
All in all, it looks like something out of a horror movie.
I half expect to have a zombie jump out at me as I get out of the car and walk up the once-beautiful walkway to the house. I climb up the steps to the porch and try to shake the feeling of dread that’s welling up inside of me. There’s a strange sense of danger mixed with disgust inside of me.
What has my mother been doing?
I knock on the door. It’s my childhood home and perhaps I should feel comfortable just walking inside, but I don’t. This place hasn’t felt like “home” in a very long time and I’m not about to make a mistake or irritate my mother by just walking into her home.
I know she’s here.
She’s always here.
Still, I knock three more times before I finally hear rustling sounds coming from inside the house. Eventually, I hear a lock turn and the door squeaks open.
She stands there looking up at me, and suddenly, my mother looks so very old. It’s been a lifetime since I’ve seen her: an eternity.
It’s been ages.
“Mother,” I say.
“Gavin.”
“May I come in?”
She looks at me curiously for a moment, as though she can’t quite believe that I’m here. Either that, or she doesn’t want me here, but I’m not sure which it is. My mother is a very strange woman: prim and proper to a fault.
“You may,” she steps aside and waits for me to come in. She clings to the door like it’s a lifeboat and then she shuts it behind me. She walks silently to the adjoining sitting room, and I follow her.
The room looks exactly the way I remember it, albeit a bit dustier. There’s less furniture now. I wonder if she had to sell some of it to pay her bills. Some of the paintings are gone: most of them, in fact. Strange. I feel like I’m visiting the remnant of a place I used to know and love.
I sit down on one of the dusty settees and my mother sits across from me. She folds her hands in her lap and looks at me, waiting for me to tell her why I’ve come.
