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2
“Am I supposed to believe this?” I try to play it cool but inside I’m reeling. Mom’s never looked at me quite so intensely before, like she wants to pour out her mind to make me understand the conviction behind her words.
“You will be hurt, Jessa,” she informs me, her intonation strange and melancholic. Sorrow lies deep between her brows. “They will leave and you will be hurt. Like me.”
I’m shaking my head because if there’s one thing I know — if I were to give the blurry insight ofMadame Berenicethe time of day — I know for a fact that the chiefs won’t ever leave me. And — I just can’t believe I’m arguing with my mom over the thoughts of an old woman bored enough to don a jangly headscarf, call herself a fortune-teller and rip off grieving locals.
“You don’t get to waltz into my life again, when I never asked you to, and talk about shit you don’t understand.”
Mom narrows her eyes at me. “That language… you never spoke in front of me like that before.”
Releasing a sigh, I ask her, “Are we done? Is this why you came here? To impart the wisdom of a woman who calls herselfMadamefor tax reasons?”
Mom settles on the edge of a desk, looking resoundingly Not Done. “No. I’m worried about you.”
It’s what I’ve wanted. It’s what I’ve wanted someone to say for well over a year now. For someone to give a damn.
I glance over at the corner of the room, where the ceiling meets the back wall, and blink away the unwanted prickle of tears. I don’t want her to make me cry. It’d be a victory to her and I’ve already shed enough tears over our broken lives.
Mom doesn’t know. She doesn’t have a clue that I once decided to loop a ribbon around my neck and tighten it into a noose. That I’d been on the verge of hanging myself — of smothering out my life to smother out my pain. That, if I’d had my way, my mom would have walked in on her daughter dead so soon after the death of her husband.
Couldn’t do it, obviously — and I want to fall to my knees in gratitude for that one so-called failure, my biggest and best, because my life now is unrecognizable from then in every way. The bunker of pain I’d been trapped inside, its walls squeezing me every hour of every day, is destroyed. Any anguish I feel these days — well, at least I now have a magnificent castle to contain it all inside.
Fleeing to Lochkelvin had been, in its own way, a suicidal leap. The death of my American life as a new one rises. It had been a way out, my only other exit strategy — and I’d taken all the status and experience it offered with greedy hands.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” I tell Mom, and before this summer that would have been a lie. Before entwining myself with four captivating boys, each one lovable in their own prickly way, it would have been the kind of colossal fairytale fib that grows noses and curses families. “Everything’s good.”
She doesn’t seem convinced. Her arms fold across her chest, and her eyes are narrowed and beady. “You don’t have to wear your dance face around me.”
That’s the thing. It’s not even my dance face — that’s what makes it so great. This must be what genuine happiness looks and feels like — like dancing under a spotlight, all eyes on you, acing a complex move for the first time. Like changing your body to the most primal beat of music, pulsing with naked rhythm. Shape-shifting.
Shifting into joy is a new experience indeed, and if it weren’t for my mom interrupting me right now, the biggest, silliest smile would be spreading across my face like some happiness disease.
“Are you… Are you working?” I ask tentatively. Working, such a funny word. Meaning to operate as expected, and also to toil in drudgery for coins. Before I left, Mom had been doing neither.
“You’d know all this if you’d read my letters.”
I stare at her. “What letters? I never got any letters.”
“Now youarelying. But it’s fine. I see I’m as unwanted in the flesh as my letters clearly have been, since you never wrote—”
“No, really,” I insist, “I never received anything from you.”
She grows quiet then, as I mull over the whereabouts of these so-called letters. I don’t know. I have a sneaking suspicion she never actually sent anything — she may have written, okay, but I sure as hell haven’t received anything. And the price of international postage alone would have been too expensive for Mom, whose previous job had been a part-time gig at the checkouts of the local Speedee-Mart.
“I got my old job,” she eventually says. “They took me back.”
They took me backisn’t exactly a ringing endorsement regarding successful recruitment, though I can see Mom is grateful. “And how much did you have to beg for that?”
“Actually, they’ve been very understanding. More than you, in fact,” Mom adds, another little barb that makes me bristle. “I’ve been given more hours, now that I have… more time.”
“Great. Now you can be around alcohol the whole day. Yay.”
Mom says nothing, just examines me steadily. It’s almost like she expected this — or maybe she’s so shocked that it only seems that way. Being here with her is painful. I want to do nothing more than turn in on myself, to pluck at my blazer sleeve and wish for the chiefs to be here comforting me instead.
“You’ve turned into a real snob since studying here,” Mom points out, directed as an attack.
It doesn’t attack me, however. She’s not incorrect. When you’re around people used to the finer things in life, your standards are raised whether you want them to be or not. You compare. And you realize how divergent the lives of people the same age can be, all because they grew up with money and opportunities, while you had that one single opportunity that you managed to grab like a life raft.
