Every Other Weekend(16)
She was standing at the sink, rinsing plates and loading the dishwasher. She looked at me over her shoulder. “Change your mind about the pie?”
I took a newly rinsed plate from her and put it in the dishwasher. “I’m glad to be home is all.”
She kept running another plate round and round in her hands under the faucet. “Me, too. I—I didn’t think it would be this hard. How many mothers would love to have their house to themselves for a few days? I’ll be better next time. I’ll plan some things, and it’ll go by faster.” She nodded at me and finally relinquished the plate. “Your dad okay?”
“Fine, I guess.” I could have added that I didn’t really know, because we’d barely spoken the whole weekend, but she’d find a way to feel guilty about that. Instead, I brought up the subject that had served me so well last time I needed to cheer her up. “Did you get the picture?”
“Is that what that was? My phone made a chirping noise and I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do.” Mom had grown up Mennonite and had been slow to embrace technology even as an adult. She wiped her hands dry on a towel and retrieved her purse from the other room. When she handed over her phone, she was already smiling.
“Before you get any ideas, please remember that I just met this girl.”
“Adam, I know.” She tried to sound calm, but she was practically bouncing up and down on her toes, which ruined the effect. This was either going to be the smartest or dumbest thing I’d ever done. Thinking about Jolene, I decided it was probably both.
I showed her the picture without looking at it too long myself. Based on Mom’s expression, I had woefully underestimated the impact it would have. Her smile, which had been big and bright only a moment before, dimmed before my eyes.
“Mom?” When I tried to pull the phone back, she seized my wrist and made a sound like a wounded animal.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She pulled the phone closer, and I watched her gaze flick from corner to corner over and over again. “She’s very pretty, Adam.” Then she pressed the phone back into my hands. “Take another one for me next time, okay?” When I nodded, she smiled. “I guess all that cooking exhausted me. I’m going to go to bed early tonight.” She brushed a kiss on my cheek. “Glad you’re home.”
When she left, I looked at the phone in my hand, and it took only a second to see what I had missed before. Her reaction had nothing to do with Jolene or the two of us together. It had everything to do with that fact that, in that hastily taken photo, I looked just like my dead brother.
Greg.
SECOND WEEKEND
October 9–10
Jolene
There’s this famous sci-fi movie from the ’50s, I think, about aliens who come to Earth, only humans don’t realize they’re being invaded, because the aliens snatch people and replace them with aliens who look just like them. Also, there’s something about pods. I should probably watch the movie at some point, but pre-1970s sci-fi doesn’t really do it for me.
Still, it would have been helpful to know how the humans defeated the aliens in the movie—they did, didn’t they?—because I was 96 percent sure there was one in my kitchen.
It looked like my mother. Olive skin, sleek, dark bun, “Sarah Conner circa Terminator 2” arms. But the alien had made one fatal mistake: the apron.
“Try to tell me you come in peace.”
“For heaven’s sake, Jolene, you almost gave me a heart attack.” My mother, the alien, waved me off and bent back over the giant pot she was stirring on the stove. Keeping to the perimeter of the kitchen, I edged closer until I reached the prep sink in the island. I ran water over my fingers, then flicked the droplets at her.
“Stop it, Jolene. What’s wrong with you?”
“Hmm, so you saw Signs, too. I always thought that aliens with a water vulnerability coming to a planet that’s two-thirds covered with the stuff were too stupid to live anyway.”
“Is that was this is? You think I’m E.T.?”
“More like the queen from Aliens.” I fished the candle lighter from a drawer and flicked the flame to life. “And I’m Ellen Ripley.”
“You watch too many movies.”
“Someone had to raise me.”
My mother, the alien, paused, then turned to me. “It hurts me when you say things like that.”
In another life, in another movie, that lilt of pain in her voice would have brought me up short. But this wasn’t a charming character piece where the mother and daughter fought before one of them broke the tension with a well-aimed handful of flour that devolved into a laughing food fight and a tender reconciliation by the end of the scene. My mother and I didn’t do tender, and if I had any doubt about her motives that day, the tiny brown glass bottle that she tried to surreptitiously tuck back into her apron pocket cleared me of them. The contents of my stomach turned cold and familiar. That bottle didn’t belong in a kitchen.
I opened my mouth, then shut it, then opened it again. “Sorry.”
“How was school? Soccer practice?”
“Enlightening, as always.” My hands went clammy as I stared at the bulge in her apron. “How was... What do you do again?”
My mother, the alien, ignored that question. “Are you hungry?”