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“I’ll provide for her, Mrs. Palmer,” Ryan had said with a thick catch in his voice, and I knew that my mother’s tears were scaring him, too.
My mother looked away for a long, long time; then at last, when my anxiety was a living, breathing presence that skittered up and down my skin, she stopped crying. “Well,” she said, valiantly attempting to smile, “I guess we’ve got plenty to do. Let’s get started.”
We didn’t know then that the wedding she was already planning would never come to pass, that I wouldn’t have eight girlfriends beside me in pink taffeta dresses and a church full of flowers. We didn’t know then that my mother had less than two months to live.
After the diagnosis, the wedding didn’t matter. Ryan and I got married in the small Episcopal church on Front Street, a hurried affair with only immediate family in attendance. Already my mother was getting weaker. Already my brother and I were donning the somber black look of orphaned children.
We learned quickly that life was different than we’d thought. The best quarterback in Mocipsee history was a long way from good enough for the big leagues. There was no professional sports contract—had we ever really been that naïve?—but there was an offer of college tuition from a small, nearby community college. Ryan got a degree in business and is now the district appliance manager for Wal-Mart. We have built a good life, Ryan and I. Not perhaps what we expected, but what can grow in the shallow ground of so many disappointments?
I see it in his eyes sometimes, the regret over lost boyhood dreams. He shows it quietly, in flashes of reflection on a Sunday afternoon, with the Seahawks playing on television. But I see. I know. And I ache for him.
Oh, he loves me and I love him, but still, on rare occasions, we allow ourselves to peek into the dark rooms of what might have been. We try to look away, but it can’t be done quickly enough. Ryan sees himself in Joe Montana, and he wonders secretly if he should have tried harder.
And me… well, when I peer into those unlit rooms, I see the shadow of a woman who never existed. The woman my mother wanted me to be. As I approach my third decade of life, I feel vaguely unformed, a work in progress.
I had three babies in five years. The first and second were accidents, and after that, I figured What the hell? My boobs already looked like air-to-ground missiles, and I’d forgotten what it felt like not to be nursing. We moved into a nice manufactured home on a wooded lot near the school, and in a fit of immaturity gave all the children “B” names. Bonnie, Bill, and Brad.
I stopped at three—afraid that the next would be Beethoven.
Looking back, of course, I wish I had thought it through better. Our last name is Bannerman, after all. But we were young….
Our oldest, Bonnie, is ten, and already she is beginning to frighten me. Any day she’s going to ask me about periods and dating and things that I want to remain irrelevant for another ten years. Billy is eight, a little athlete beginning to form the same dreams that fueled his daddy, and Brad, my baby, started kindergarten just three weeks ago.
Time goes too quickly.
This is the advice my mother should have given me from her hospital bed. Instead of vague, unknowable quips like “Be careful what you wish for,” she should have told me that time slides away on a hillside of loose shale and takes everything in its path—dreams, opportunities, hopes. And youth. It takes that fastest of all.
I do not feel young anymore. Sometimes when I pass the picture of my mother that hangs on the playroom wall, I stop. I stare at her face, wondering what she would look like now, all these years later. Would she still be coloring her hair to the sandy shade of her youth or would she have yielded to gray at last? Would she still wear those funny pink tennis shoes with the hearts and flowers on the white laces?
Her blue eyes stare back at me, holding the memories of my life. I remember when she used to wear her layered hair in a thin ponytail, tied up with a strand of fuzzy purple yarn; I remember the purple ceramic heart necklace she always wore, the one I made for her in the fourth grade. A big, lopsided heart with a thumbprint in the center. She wore it for years and years, and then lost it gardening one summer afternoon. She missed that necklace for the longest time. At the time, I thought it was silly, missing an ugly necklace, but now I understand. Time goes too quickly.
“Your thumb was so tiny,” she once said, reaching out of habit for the absent bit of ceramic. “How will I remember now how little you used to be?”
“Hey, Mom,” I say softly, touching the cool glass of the picture. I no longer wait to hear her ghostly voice—those innocent hoping days are gone. Instead, I turn away from the picture and get on with my day. I load the dishwasher and pick up a pile of toys; I pull wet clothes from the washer and cram them into the dryer, thumping the ON button. In less than an hour, I am expected at the bus stop to meet Brad, and there are a million things to do between now and then.
THE bus is late.
I glance at my watch again. It has stopped—nothing unusual about that, not for the $13.95 drugstore special with the plastic band—but the casual reminder that money is tight irritates me. A quick fingernail thump on the glass gets the tiny hands moving again. Not that it matters particularly. My internal “mommy clock” is more accurate than any man-made bit of wire and metal. The bus is late.
Beside me, our white German shepherd puppy, Rex, moans despairingly, a sound like the slow leak of air from a punctured tire; then he curls around my feet and closes his eyes to wait for the little boy who loves him. For the past three weeks this has been our routine, mine and this puppy who requires more supervision than a hyper-active toddler (at least children wear diapers) and who has insinuated himself into the consciousness of our family. Already we are beginning to wonder how we survived suburbia dogless. At least, Ryan and the kids are wondering. Me, I remember well, thank you very much. I remember when I didn’t have to keep an FBI security-level count of every shoe in the house; I remember when no one and nothing peed on the carpet. But then Rex bounds across the yard at me, tripping over his own too big paws, his pink tongue dangling from his mouth, and when he starts to lick my face and curls around my feet like a pair of familiar slippers, I am as lost as the rest of my family.
Every day at precisely 12:15 we leave the house together and head for the bus stop on the corner of Peabody and Cross Streets. The puppy drags me from tree to tree, so hard that already I wonder how it will be when he weighs one hundred pounds. Of course, by then I may weigh two hundred pounds, and I may drag him from ice cream shop to beauty parlor.
In the distance I hear the bus, rattling and wheezing over the pockmarked pavement of the street. Rex jumps to his feet and starts wagging his tail, winding the nylon leash around my legs.
“Rex, stop it,” I say with the tired resignation of a woman who has said this same thing to this dog before. Without waiting for Rex to stop, I gingerly extract myself from the makeshift cocoon and bend down to pet him. “Sit.” I try to sound like Ms. Woodhouse, authoritative and certain. I come off more as Pee-Wee Herman, and Rex ignores me.
The bus pulls up to the curb. I hear the shudder of the brakes and the whoosh-clank of the doors opening. Immediately, five- and six-year-olds stream down the steps and onto the sidewalk in a laughing, jostling, centipede of blue jeans and T-shirts.
As usual, Brad isn’t with them. He is always the last off the bus, my little talker.
Smiling, I head for the open door. “Hey, Claudine,” I say, peeking my head inside, “where’s—”
Claudine looks concerned. Her gloved fingers coil nervously around the big black steering wheel. “Brad wasn’t on the bus today. Was he supposed to be?”
“What? What?” The leash falls from my fingers and lands with a soft thump across my feet.
“Don’t panic, April,” Claudine says, although I can see that she is having to work to keep her voice even. I know that she is thinking of Calvin and Suki, her own kids. “He’s probably in the school office right now, trying to call you. That’s what happens most of the time.”
