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“And the house?” she pushes. “You don’t answer my questions when I ask. And I know it’s because you don’t want to burden me.”
“I tell you anything you want to kn—” But I stop my argument when she only raises a challenging brow.We both know when I’m lying.“Fine. The house is having a little mold trouble, and the furnace gave out.”
Her smile falls, which is exactly the reason I don’t tell her this stuff.
“I have a friend though, at school, and her boyfriend fixes furnaces for a living. I help her study and take notes when she misses class. In exchange, he’s coming around this afternoon to fix whatever the issue is.”
Mom studies me for a long beat. She searches for the lie—all of it. It’s all a lie. I don’t have a friend at school, and even if I did, no one is gonna fix someone else’s shit for free—but I’m no longer nine or ten, and my lies are more to protect her now than they are to protect me.
Maybe her instincts tell her I’m talking out my ass. But my usual giveaways—the fidgeting hands, the shifty eyes—no longer betray me. I keep myself under control and smile to let her relax. “Everything’s okay, ya know? The house is great. It’s still a house, Mom. And it’s still a roof over our heads. It’s mortgage free,” I add, purely to remind her she’s amazing. She’s resourceful. She’s the best mother a girl could hope for. And though she started with nothing, she’s now the owner of an ugly duplex with a bad furnace, minimal insulation, and crackhead neighbors.
It’s more than other people get in their lifetime.
“How’s Nolan?”
Her unexpected question makes me bark out a laugh loud enough that Brenda is sure to hear me in the hall. “Nolan?” I repeat the name of my cheating ex-boyfriend as though to confirm I heard her right. “Jesus,” I bring myself under control, though my chest continues to bubble with mirth. “We broke up, Mom. Last year.”
“I know.” She slides her dry tongue over her drier lips, but she smiles anyway. “I was only asking. Wondering if maybe you’ve reached out to him or anything.”
“God, no.” I release her hand and lean across to grab the water pitcher Brenda would have placed in here hours ago. Tipping it, I fill the glass to the left and stop when it’s half full. I set the pitcher down and grab a straw, then lean forward in my seat and place the end by Mom’s lips. “Take a sip,” I coach. “Just a little bit.”
And when she does as I ask, I allow the vise wrapped around my heart to release fractionally. “I don’t reach out to cheating assholes. It’s a one-strike system around here.”
She releases the straw between her lips and swallows the ball of liquid, so I watch it move along her throat and disappear into her stomach. “You’re your mother’s daughter,” she rasps. “And I reached out to your father a million times over the years. Even when I told you I didn’t. I wouldn’t judge you if you wanted to talk things through with Nolan.”
“No?” I set her glass on the bedside table and rest my elbows on the side of her bed so we’re closer. So she could touch me if she wanted to. “I would judge me, though. And I’d rather be alone than with a liar and a cheat.”
“Honey…”
“I’m happy.” I take her hand between mine, careful of her wires, and press a kiss to her frail knuckles. “I’m busy with school. And my friends. I’m busy not living up to my father’s ridiculous expectations, and I’m especially busy keeping him at arm’s length so I can live my life and pretend he’s a half-decent person.”
“Aurora—”
“I take his calls, at most, once every two or three months. I assure him I’m still in school and my grades are good. I decline his offer of an internship at his law firm. We argue about it for a minute, then we hang up, and I spend two months processing the fact he’s a dick and the third month wondering if maybe, next time we talk, he might be a better person.”
“I’ve always worked hard not to say bad things about him in front of you.” Her hand begins to shake between mine. Not from fear or worry or upset. But purely because she’s tired. She’s broken. She’s dying. And because she’s the bravest, strongest, sweetest person I know, she’ll pretend she’s not all the way to the bitter end. “He broke my heart, baby. But I never wanted him to break yours, too.”
“He did that all on his own.” I hold her hand tighter to stop the tremors and give her a little of my strength. “There’s this saying, isn’t there, about leopards and their spots. He is who he is, and no one can change that. Especially not him.”
“There’s gonna come a point soon…”
When I’m all alone in this world and need family?Yeah, I know. She’s afraid I’ll run back to my father and fold myself into his world of toxicity. And at the same time, concerned I won’t. She’s sorry she only had one child, so I have no siblings to lean on when she’s gone, and sad she was an only child too, so when it’s all said and done, my choices are to be all alone in this world, or to surround myself with assholes.
She thinks those are my only options. But she forgets that third one I’ve relied upon my whole life. That I take comfort in my own company. When she worked all day and night, and I couldn’t be with her, I was home. Reading a book I’d borrowed from the school library. Cooking a meal with whatever random ingredients we had in the pantry. Watching a movie—really, the same movie over and over again, because it was my comfort watch. When she was picking up extra shifts because I needed braces, I was at home, losing myself in medical books we found at an old secondhand store. They were ten years outdated, but they had sections dedicated to dental health, and I educated myself as best I could on what my mom was working so hard for.
God forbid she ask my dad for a penny and a little help.
Every other weekend, I was taken from our tiny two-bedroom duplex and lumped into an eight-bedroom villa, like having two wildly different homes is normal and okay for a child. I was force-fed junk food as though my dad and step-mom—one of many over the years—thought eating crap for three consecutive days and nights would endear me to them; then they’d send me home with a stomachache and a ‘make sure you tell your mom how much fun you had’ pat on the head.
For those six days a month, surrounded by people, things, and belly-aching food, I was lonelier than I ever felt inside my little house with a hard-working mother. And when she’s gone, I’d make the wager that visiting my father’s home, his fourth wife, his three extra kids, and his complete inability to show unconditional love, will feel lonelier than sitting in a drafty two-story duplex and living the life I’ve known since infancy.
“You need to stop worrying about me.” I lean in and press a kiss to her forehead, only to frown at the warmth I find there. She’s running a little hotter than usual, so I pull back slowly and cast a glance across every part of her body I see. She wears a blue and white checked hospital gown that folds at the front because of the position she lies in. I get an up close and personal view of her port scars and catch a hint of an old bleed that the hospital staff clearly attempted to clean before I arrived.
My mom’s head is wrapped in a pink and blue scarf she likes to wear not only for warmth but for her own self-image. Like me, she’s always had long hair, so when her treatment began this time last year, and within weeks, she lost every strand from her body, we went shopping for lengths of fabric she could repurpose to cover her scalp.
We’re never going to be rich. And she’ll never get to buy anything she wants with no consideration for the price tag. But we made an exception that day. Still on a budget, but she got to choose her fabrics without worrying about the number at the end.
At the sound of her pulse quickening through the machines strapped to her body, I cast a glance toward the door and the medical staff bustling through the hall.
