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I take a deep breath. It’s short, it’s clear, it’s heartbreaking.
Isaac.
Buddy, your mother and I have been having a lot of problems. You won’t remember this, but we argue a lot. I don’t do enough for her. I don’t support her enough. I’m selfish. I don’t earn enough money. I like the bottle too much, buddy. I get a job but I can’t hold it down. Your mom yells at me ‘til she’s blue in the face. She’s working too but, kid, I keep drinking the money. I can’t help it.
If I stick around, this isn’t going to end well, for any of us, and you deserve to live a life without constant arguing in the background and without a drunk for a father. I hope, by the time you’re old enough to read this, your mother has moved on and found someone who really deserves her, because it ain’t me. The only good thing I’ve done in my life is give her you. She adores you, kid, and seeing you two together makes my heart swell. But when I enter the room, everything changes. You cower, she braces herself for a verbal battering. I don’t like my reflection in your faces. I’m too big of a coward to just walk away and hope you’ll find me when you’re all grown up. I don’t think I could face you. So I’m not going to give myself the chance, buddy, I’m sorry.
You’re going to do great things Isaac D’Amico. I’ll be watching from up high. Make sure you put on a good show. Live the life I drank away.
And always remember, I never left you, kid. I just left me.
I can’t speak.I sense my mother sitting next to me, putting an arm around my shoulders, pulling my face into her shoulder. I’m giant compared to her but she still manages to command me as though I’m a kid. I guess because I feel like a kid right now. I feel like the four-year-old who woke up one morning to find himself in his grandmother’s house, wondering for the first time of many why he’s never going to see his dad again.
“Why didn’t you give me this before?” I ask, wiping my face with the back of my hand.
She lets me go and hugs herself tightly. “I was selfish, Isaac, I’m sorry. I kept it for myself. I had always meant to give it to you, but the more time that passed, the harder it was to show you—you’d have known I’d had it all along.”
“Did he leave one for you too?”
She nods and tears roll down her face. “I burned it.”
“What?”
“I was so angry, Isaac.” Her voice is a whisper, a narrow, seething whisper. “He just left us both, just like that. I was twenty-five years-old and he’d left me alone with a four-year-old son. I had to find more work. I had to leave you with your grandmother while I went out to work all day and most nights. I saw you and my mother forming such a close bond and I hated it. I hated that you were growing closer to her than to me. So, I started staying out late, hanging out with guys in town I shouldn’t have. I got into drinking and taking some small-time drugs. But before I knew it, days, sometimes weeks, would pass and I hadn’t seen you.”
She sniffs and wipes her sleeve across her face, still staring out at the garden. “It killed me that you could carry on without me, so I just did it more and more, like I was trying to prove to myself I wasn’t worth anything to anyone. Then one day I showed up to this house. I was a little worse for wear—actually, I was a lot worse for wear. I’d been drinking all day, my clothes had gotten ripped from the motorcycle I’d been tearing around on with the latest guy. We’d had a fight so my makeup was all over my face. Mom told me to leave. She didn’t want you to see me like that. I said that if I left I would never come back. I know now it put my mother in an impossible position. She was trying to protect you, and in a way, by not letting you see me, she was trying to protect me too. But, I didn’t see it that way. I walked out and never came back. But it killed me, Isaac. Every day I was away from you, knowing you were getting bigger, making friends, doing so well in school, it killed me that I wasn’t a part of it. It killed me that I was hurting you by not being there. But I couldn’t come back. I promised my mother.”
We sit in silence for several minutes. It’s an insane amount of information to digest. “So, you didn’t leave me because you didn’t want to be saddled with a kid when you wanted to party instead?”
She almost chokes on tears. “No! God, Isaac. I partied because I felt like I was no longer needed. I was young and stupid. I should have known that you having such a strong bond with your grandmother could only be a good thing for all of us. But I didn’t see it that way. I was jealous and I rebelled. I was hurting so badly and I didn’t know how else to make the pain stop. Every time I thought about you, I felt as though my insides were falling out. It was easier to numb myself with drink and drugs. It was only when I stopped all of that I realized what I’d done, but it was too late. And then she passed.”
“Grandma?”
Mom nods. “We hadn’t spoken since that day I walked out. It had been twenty years. I can’t tell you how much I regret leaving, or how much I regret cutting all ties with you both. My life is just one giant regret. If it weren’t for the fact I gave birth to you, the world would have been better off had I never been born.”
It’s my turn to put my arm around her. I pull her close and let her cry it all out on my smelly two-day-old shirt. Despite the pain of reading that letter and hearing about what my mom and my grandmother lived through, I feel a million times lighter. I feel as though, for the first time in my life, I have answers. My grandmother couldn’t tell me any of this. It wasn’t her story to tell. She never talked badly about my mom and that meant never telling me the truth, so it was always in the back of my head that I deserved it somehow. I took whatever basic facts my grandmother had given me and read generously—or not so generously—through the lines, adding my own pitiful narrative. It was my fault my mother had left me. That if she couldn’t stick around for her only son, then I was, basically, unlovable.
We sat like that, without speaking, until the sun went down. I resolved, without saying anything, that I would rebuild this bridge. I wanted my mother back in my life. I wanted to get back the years we’d lost. There was no chance I would ever get my father back, or my grandmother. But my mother was still alive and atoning for mistakes she’d made years ago. She didn’t deserve to be disowned, and I wanted to know her. I wanted a mother.
* * *
I wakeup the following morning and my back is positively screaming at me. The floor of my grandmother’s house is not the most comfortable place to sleep. I clamber to my feet, still dressed in everything I wore to get here. Mom and I were so cried out by the end of the day I couldn’t bring myself to get my bag out of the truck so I just curled up on the floor of my old bedroom and fell asleep. As far as I know, my Mom is on the couch.
I tiptoe past her and hop into the truck. I return with a bag of groceries and busy myself making bacon, pancakes and a decent cup of coffee while she wakes up.
“What’s all this?” she asks when she walks into kitchen that probably hasn’t seen any action in years.
“Food!” I say brightly. “And I took the liberty of buying you some new plates and a few more mugs, since you appear to have virtually nothing.”
“Thanks,” she says, although I detect a grumble.
I dish out pancakes, top them with bacon and pour a liberal amount of maple syrup over them, then nod to the back yard. “Let’s eat.”
We sit and inhale the food as though we’ve been deprived for weeks. My mother might well have been.
“Are you working tonight? Do you need to sleep today?”
“I’ve already called in. I’d prefer to spend the day with you, if that’s ok?”
I smile to myself before shoveling the last piece of bacon into my mouth. “I was hoping you would.”
* * *
I drive backto Florida feeling like a completely different person. Aside from the relationship I’m going to rebuild with my mother, I know what I need to do when I get back to Starling Key. I know what I want to do, and it’s the total opposite of what everyone expects me to do. But fuck it. I never wanted a normal life. I want excitement, adrenaline, pace, change and Christ, I want passion—lots of it. Raw, authentic, unfiltered, unfilled and uninhibited passion. And I know exactly where to get it.
I can only hope it isn’t too late.
