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“It sounds like he did the breaking up.” When Mom’s eyes flared wide open at that observation, Lyra added, “and I didn’t want you to break up with him. I wanted you to give a shit about what he did.”
“He made a pass at you. I know it’s not the first time a guy’s made a pass, Lyra.”
“It was the first and only time my mother’s boyfriend made a pass at me, yes!”
“But that’s my relationship. My business. You’ve been so ...”—in the place of a coherent word, Mom only grunted—"about what I do or don’t do inmyrelationship. Why’s that up to you?”
“That is completely unfair, Mother. You’re the one who hasn’t wanted to be around me. You’ll barely talk to me. If you’dtoldme you wanted to stay with him anyway, if you’dtoldme you didn’t want to talk to him about it, I’d have tried to understand, but instead you told me I was being dramatic and acted like I was an unwanted guest whenever I was around.”
“Because I could feel youjudgingme. I can’t stand all the toxicity. You told me this thing—that really wasn’t that big a deal. He was probably drunk, he’s handsy with everybody when he’s drunk—and then you just sat there judging me for not doing what you thought I should do. I will not be judged by my own daughter. Especially not when she thinks her granite lump of a father is a paragon of parenting.”
“Don’t talk about Pop like that.”
Mom threw herself back in the seat hard enough to make the front of the chair lift up. Brutus trotted over, ears perked up tall. He came to Lyra and nosed her.
“It’s okay, Brutie.” She stroked his head. “No trouble.”
“Of course Ben would buy a fucking wolf for a pet,” Mom muttered.
“You know we got him from a rescue. And he’s a good boy.”
“Hmpf.” Mom leaned forward, grabbed a cookie, and bit into it with rhetorical emphasis.
Was her mother having a mid-life crisis? A second one, counting the divorce? Because she was acting like a twenty-five-year-old Instagram diva, not a fifty-six-year old mother.
“If you’re mad at me, why are you here?” Lyra asked again. “You obviously don’t want to be, and you could have told me about Wade in a text. And I am not fighting you over a choice I made when I was fifteen years old. It was the right choice then, and I don’t regret it. It would be really cool if my mother, who was the only one who wanted the divorce and who is the one who left, would stop holding how the rest of us handled it against us.”
Mom stopped chewing and stared at Lyra. “You don’t know what it was like to be married to your father. It was like being married to that wolf. Everything has to be his way, everything has to be just so, and he won’t fucking listen, just says his own mind and then disengages. It was like being slowly choked to death for twenty years.”
Lyra didn’t want to be her mother’s confidante regarding her marriage to Pop. She shouldn’t have to be. There were best friends for that kind of thing. Not daughters.
But all she said was, “I’m sorry you were unhappy being married to him. I’ve never held your leaving against you”—when Mom audibly scoffed, Lyra ignored it—“and I want you to be happy. But that’s not what Pop’s like as a father.”
Another loud scoff, and this one was more deserved. It kind ofwashow Pop was as a father. But Lyra was his daughter, not his wife, so the dynamic between them was different. More functional. For one thing, she’d been raised by him, so her ideas about what love looked and felt like, how it was offered, were formed by the way he loved her. Mom had come to their marriage with her ideas about love already formed.
“I still don’t know what you want today, Mom.”
Her mother stared out over the back yard for a long time. Lyra could see her eyes moving, taking in the changes Lyra had made, which were much more noticeable out here. Born and raised on the San Diego coast, Mom had never enjoyed desert gardening. Lyra had known no other kind.
Understanding rushed into Lyra’s mind and skidded to a stop. They weren’t talking about two different men, or two different times in their lives. It was all the same thing: Mom was jealous of Lyra’s relationship with Pop. She was jealous that Lyra had taken over and made the househerdomain, and she was jealous that Lyra felt Pop’s love without needing it expressed in any way but his way.
That was why she’d reacted to the Wade thing like she had—Lyra had kicked a hole in a good thing Mom had thought she’d had—her most promising relationship since the divorce. And Lyra had yanked the curtain back and exposed it for a fraud.
When Mom finally spoke, she confirmed that epiphany in three words. “I’m alone, Lyra.”
Lyra had been wrong: therewascompetition between them. She simply hadn’t seen it, because she’d been winning.
It seemed so desperately sad that her mother was jealous that Lyra forgave her. She didn’t even need to make an effort; it just happened. Her bright, sunny, flouncy mom was so unhappy she envied Lyra’s tiny, nothing life, all because Lyra knew how to see, how tofeel, her father’s love.
In that forgiveness, she found an apology that was needed, whether it was warranted or not.
“I’m sorry you don’t have the life you want, Mama. I’m sorry I had any part in making you less happy.”
Her mother stared for a few seconds, her expression like cracking stone. Then the stone crumbled into tears.
Standing at once, Lyra went to her mother and folded her in her arms. Mom’s arms flew around her and latched on, and they stayed like that while years’ worth of tears fell.
Face down on the table, Lyra’s phone buzzed, indicating a call was coming in. Knowing it was the wrongest possible time to interrupt this moment with her mother, she ignored her phone; she’d call back later.
