AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I let out the nervous breath I’d been holding, relieved to hear I was under no pressure. The first questions were straight forward:When did I start playing tennis? How had I got into the sport? What were my goals?
“I was six years old, my mother introduced me to the game, I want to help Covington Prep win their division and one day play college tennis.”
“Who is your inspiration in tennis?” Millie read from her notebook. Then ad libbing, “Like, is there a player you admire? Or someone you look up to?”
“My Mom,” I said automatically.
Millie smiled and wrote something down—the wordMom, I presumed. “Tell me about her.”
I gulped and blinked. And gulped again. Mom wasn’t supposed to be mentioned other than in a very general way, but declining to answer would make me seem arrogant, and Millie was so sweet and had bought me lunch. A chocolate pecan nut sundae for two sat on the table between us.
“Mom loved tennis and she played in college before an injury stopped her from playing. Then she started coaching and that’s how I started to play. She coached me from when I was little. She really wanted me to get this scholarship.” My words were hardly eloquent or grammatically correct, but Millie wrote frantically. A glance at her notepad showed her printing to be tiny and tidy.
“That’s lovely. Your Mom must be so proud of what you’ve achieved, the scholarship to Covington Prep. So you’d like to follow in her footsteps?”
My chest heaved at the thought that following in Mom’s footsteps would have me six feet under. I sipped on my smoothie, my eyes glazing over. I hadn’t told a single person here in River Valley about my mother, but I wasn’t sure why. There was no reasoning, no logic to it.
I sucked hard on my smoothie, nearly piercing the roof of my mouth with my straw. I pushed my glass to the side and twiddled my fingers, inspecting my cuticles. My breathing became labored.
It was all too new, Mom’s death. It seemed like only yesterday, yet also an age ago. All that waiting, all that dying...those days when you just wanted it to be over.
And then it was.
And then you wished you’d never had those thoughts.
But it was too late.
You’d already wished she was dead.
And now she was.
My chin quivered and pulsed. I reached for a napkin, holding it over my mouth, horrified that I was on the brink of a meltdown. I shivered, pretending I’d swallowed wrong, while imploring myself to pull it together. Not here, not in the most popular cafe in all of River Valley, not with a girl who was a reporter for the Covington Prep Times.
“Excuse me, brain freeze.” My attempt at a laugh was muffled behind the napkin. I cleared my throat and conjured up a stronger voice. “Maybe you should come to our practice on Monday and talk to Bianca. She’s our team captain. It would probably make a more interesting article. We play St. Augustine’s on Tuesday, and I hear they’re one of the top teams.” I prattled on, going into great detail about our training sessions. I doubted Millie understood what the drills were, but she listened attentively. My ability to divert my thoughts from the sadness of losing Mom was a skill learned from tennis training. When you made an unforced error—like hitting the ball into the net—you had to find a way to immediately forget about that shot and move on. Close your eyes, clear your head. If you didn’t, if you dwelled on the point, beat yourself up over a mistake, your game could fall apart. And in tennis, that could lead to a loss.
And the goal was always to win.
Millie turned a page and looked up, flexing her hand. “Whew! This is great,” she said, offering me a spoon. “Please! Help me eat this sundae!”
I suspected she actually wanted to get some relief from my boring monologue on tennis. I got that non-tennis people didn’t exactly find the sport riveting—much like me when it came to anime, movies or books, all topics Millie knew a lot about. Despite being complete opposites, I enjoyed Millie’s company, and I listened to her talk about Principal Porter’s plan to expand the library, the Covington Chargers' first football game of the season which she was expected to report on, and the new television series based on one of her favorite books (I hadn’t read it and had no intention of watching it.)
I ate more than my fair share of the sundae, way more. Which justified the run I needed to take.
After thanking Millie for lunch, I walked to my car, parked several blocks away, thoughts about Mom resurfacing. Moving swiftly, I was trying to outrun them, the brutal truth that I’d wanted Mom to die, that I’d wanted her suffering to be over, that I didn’t want to see her like that anymore. Hadn’t wanted to spend another day visiting at the hospital, holding her weak and pale hand, watching her life drain out of her.
I was guilty of wanting my mother to die.
And that was why I didn’t want anyone to know.
Tears streamed down my cheeks and my chest heaved as I got into my car. I would drive home, change into my running gear and run. Running is where I would find my peace, the gentle flow of the river had never failed to calm me, a breeze whispering around me, connecting with nature.
And with every footfall, every labored breath, I would talk to Mom, somewhere up there floating on soft cotton candy clouds, hoping she was in a better place, no longer suffering, no longer in pain.
