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My mother’s low, melodious voice is almost as familiar to me as my own. It was a source of infinite comfort to me as a child. No matter what was happening in my life, my mother was always the one person who could make everything better. If my father’s attentions were irregular and always felt conditional, Mom was the person who always made me feel like I was worthy of love no matter what. Under her gaze, nothing truly bad could happen. Her existence was protection against everything that could ever harm me.
Nowadays, hearing her dulcet tones brings up a host of more complicated emotions: overwhelming love, worry, anxiety. Relief mixed with a sort of phantom grief. It’s the kind of love you can only feel if you’ve faced the possible imminent mortality of someone you love so much you can’t imagine ever losing them.
“Oh, fine, fine,” my mother says. “Just got done feeding Buddy his dinner. That dog’s going to hurt himself someday, inhaling his food like that.” An indistinct thump sounds in the background, as though she’s setting something down. “How are you? How was your trip?”
“It was good. Uneventful. Just kicking back and resting up before my first meeting tomorrow,” I say, trying to ignore the thickness in the back of my throat.
I hate lying to my mom. She doesn’t know I’ve come to Ironwood. She thinks I’ve been hired as a regional sales representative for a cleaning supply company, and that I’m in Indianapolis for a multiple-week training program. I pulled the job description off a recruiting website. The company and the description of the position are actually real. It was the only way I could explain an open-ended trip away from Columbus, Indiana without telling her the truth: that I’ve come down here to pay a visit to her ex-husband, a man she hasn’t seen or heard from in years.
“Are you nervous?” she asks me.
“Nah. I’m sure it will be fine,” I reply. “I just hope the other people in my group are cool. I’ll be spending a lot of time with them.” I shift on the cheap polyester bedspread, and shift the subject as well. “How are you feeling, Mom?”
“Good!” she says cheerfully. “I’ve been doing my own job search, as a matter of fact. Martha across the street has been looking out for help wanted signs around town. She’s got me a whole list of places I can apply to. I’m gonna start on that in a day or two.”
“Mom, don’t over-exert yourself, okay? You need to keep yourself healthy. Don’t go applying to any jobs where you have to be on your feet all day.”
“You worry too much,” she admonishes me. “I’m the mother and you’re the child, remember? You let me do the worrying about myself.”
It’s a valid request. Except that when your mother almost died from cancer, and you’ve spent months caring for her frail, bald, birdlike self and shuttling her to and from chemotherapy and doctors’ appointments when she was too weak to do much other than just survive, the divide between parent and child blurs in a way that threatens never to become quite as solid again.
I don’t say this, though, of course. My mother is a proud woman. And she deserves every bit of freedom and autonomy she has managed to claw back for herself now that she’s in remission. She deserves so much more than that, in fact. She deserves to not be losing sleep over the gigantic pile of medical bills that loom large over every aspect of her life. She deserves to have a life free from anxiety and trouble for a while. Just living — celebrating every single day she has managed to steal away from the reaper — should be her main focus going forward.
Which is why I won’t tell her I’m in Ironwood.
My mother would be… shocked? Hurt? Mortified? if she knew I was coming to visit Dad. She is nothing if not proud. And except for the fact that her marriage gave her a daughter she loves, I know she prefers not to ever think about the fact that she was married to my father. I know she wouldn’t stop me from coming to see him — she was never a “him or me” kind of parent, even when Dad openly cheated on her and basically turned his back on both of us in favor of his new girlfriend and future wife.
But I know she doesn’t like to compare her current life of near poverty to the one she used to lead as Mrs. Richard Wilkins. She always insists to me that she’s much happier now. But her existence is much harder, for sure. The medical debt she carries as a result of her cancer keeps her right on the razor’s edge of bankruptcy.
One of the many things she guilts herself about is how her illness affected me. I was enrolled in my first year of college — two years later than any of my peers — when Mom got her diagnosis. Instead of finishing out the semester, I withdrew from all of my classes and took a leave of absence to take care of her. By the time she got the all clear from her oncologist, money was too tight for me to think about going back to the university right away. Instead, I got a series of crappy jobs to help pay the bills until Mom could start working again. And, well, one thing led to another, and… I just never went back.
It was a pipe dream anyway, college was. I wanted to get a degree in creative writing. I wanted to write novels: books where people struggled, and fought, and in the end, things worked out for them the way they always hoped they would. But by the time I was in my mid-twenties, I didn’t really believe in those kinds of stories anymore. Even as I still continued to read them — to lose myself in an alternate universe, where everything I thought my life would become, actually came true.
Just as Ihaven’t told Mom I’m here in Ironwood, I haven’t told her that Dad is sick, either. Or that he called me up weeks ago, out of the blue, and asked to see me.
Mom’s first reaction would probably be that Dad was faking it. She’d probably say that his current wife had likely left him, and that he was feeling lonely with no one to pay attention to him. To be honest, the thought had occurred to me. But the few times I’ve talked on the phone with him, Dad has sounded so tired that deep down, I know it isn’t true.
This time, even his piles of money might not be enough to save him from consequences.
Mom and I chat for a few minutes longer. She tells me another anecdote about Buddy the dog. She assures me she’ll call Martha if she needs anything at all. She wishes me luck for tomorrow, and I push down the guilt as I thank her and hang up.
The truth is, I feel like I do need the luck. Tomorrow I’ll see my father for the first time in years.
When the sun finally sets, I pop a sleeping pill, and go into the bathroom to brush my teeth. As I mechanically scrub the brush back and forth, my eyes drift to my reflection in the mirror. To the bit of chain peeking out from under the collar of my shirt.
My eyes unexpectedly fill with tears as I reach up and pull it out. The two nested rings that hang from it are warm from my skin.
I’ve worn for so long I often forget it’s there.
The few men I’ve been with since Brody have asked about it, curious that I never take it off.
Usually, I tell them some story. That the rings belonged to a grandmother, or an aunt.
Anything but the truth.
The stone in the engagement ring is called an aurora moonstone. The wedding band around it has five stones that look like the path of a sunrise to a sunset. The rings themselves aren’t worth a lot. Brody didn’t have much money when he proposed. But they couldn’t have been more precious to me, because they were from him. The symbol of our love. Our future.
I finger the rings for a few seconds. Then I slip them back underneath my shirt.
