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For what? Jed’s death or Allison’s inability to feel it? She cleared her throat. “What happened?”
Releasing her, her mother picked up Allison’s overnight bag and deposited it by the stairs. Then, with the sigh of a person who’d never truly known rest, she dropped into her favorite reclining chair. “He stopped taking his meds as soon as he left the hospital. He had a heart attack. Alone. Paula found him when she stopped by with groceries.”
Allison pressed her hand to her mouth. It was awful, to die alone like that, but also so like Jed. He’d never wanted the burden of another person’s presence. Everyone and their feelings were too much of a hassle. Too dramatic.
But if you kept pushing everyone away, they would stop coming back. Allison had come too close to learning that with Sophie. She clutched her phone against her palm as if that might tether her permanently to her best friend, no matter where she ended up.
She lowered herself to the couch. For a while, the dogs’ playful growls as they tussled on the carpet were the only sounds.
The reclining chair creaked with her mom’s movement. “We can talk about it, you know,” she said.
“Talk about what?” Allison hugged a pillow to her chest.
“Whatever you’re feeling.”
“What if I’m not feeling anything?”
Her mother shook her head, her lips a frustrated line. “Of course you are. Your father just died.”
“That’s the thing, though.” Allison crushed the pillow’s cream cable knit between her fingers. “I know he was important to you, but he was in my life like the walls of this house are.” Her eyes flit around the living room. “Always there, but I feel no attachment to them.”
“Honey—”
“No. Maybe that’s not the right metaphor.” Allison studied the ceiling fan. One of the blades was bent at an angle with a crease like a fault line through the metal, a victim of Allison’s attempt in sixth grade to learn to dribble a basketball in the house. Jed had never fixed it, even though he’d bought her the ball. “To start moving that heavy body,” he’d said. The house retained as many scars from him as Allison did. “Maybe he was more like a mirror that kept forcing me to see my body the way he did.”
Her mom sighed. “He wasn’t perfect.”
“No. He was awful.” Allison tossed the pillow to her feet. “Why can’t you admit that?”
Her mother’s gaze fell to her lap, and her jaw began to tremble. “Because I don’t want to believe that I could love someone who was truly awful.”
Allison’s chest cracked open. Her mother was too generous to believe that someone had no good in them. She’d love a scorpion as it stung her. She couldn’t control that any more than Allison could will her own feelings into existence.
And after what had happened with Colin yesterday, she knew alittle about not seeing the person you love clearly. The frustration she’d been nursing toward her mother melted away.
Crossing the room, Allison folded herself onto the floor beside the recliner, her head falling against her mom’s arm. “I know I’m supposed to, but I don’t love Jed, Ma. I can’t. I’m not like you. I don’t have endless stores of love to offer people. I can’t give it away so easily.”
She’d done so with Colin, twice, and she was emptier for it. The places in Allison’s heart open for others shrank every time it broke, like a plate never glued back together exactly the right way. If she wasn’t careful, eventually, there would be no room left.
The chair squeaked quietly as her mother rocked back and forth, and both dogs perked up their ears.
Allison caught her mother’s gaze. “I need you to let me feel what I feel about this, without any guilt. Even if what I feel is nothing. This is my relationship to navigate. And it should have always been. All those calls telling me to visit, and to be in touch, and how he needs me, they hurt because I couldn’t do it. It was as if my feelings toward him were wrong.”
Closing her eyes, her mother waited a long moment before responding. “I’m sorry, honey. That was never my intent. I just didn’t want you to have regrets when he was gone. I know what that’s like from your grandma—it eats away at you.”
“But you and grandma fought. You felt too much, maybe. Jed and I never had that.” They’d never had anything. “So all that guilt about not being there for him kept reminding me of everything we weren’t.” Allison settled a hand over her heart. Its beat thrummed against her palm. Maybe her numbness was its own kind of grief, as if emptiness were the only way to mourn something that never existed.
Her mother’s hand came to rest on Allison’s head. “I’m sorry I couldn’t see that,” she said. “You’re an adult. I need to listen more and parent less.”
With a small grin, Allison muttered, “I like that plan.”
Her mother snorted. “Well, while we’re on the subject, maybe you could parent me a little less, too?”
“What does that mean?”
“Stop paying my bills.”
“They were late. I wanted to help.”
