Love Letters to the Dead(76)

Then this morning, as Mom was putting down a waffle in front of me, the syrup neatly poured into each square, I said, “No offense, Mom, it’s really nice and all, but I usually just eat cereal for breakfast now. I mean, I’ve had to do all of this stuff without you for a year. You don’t have to be, like, the world’s greatest mother now.”

But then her eyes got teary, and I instantly felt bad. “I’m trying, Laurel,” she said.

“I know,” I said softly, and started to cut the waffle along its lines. It just seemed strange to me, if she cared so much about all of this, that she’d gone so long without doing any of it.

Mom wiped her eyes and said, “I have an idea. Do you want to go out to dinner tonight? Just the two of us?”

I agreed, and so after school this evening, Mom and I went to the 66 Diner and ordered burgers and fries and strawberry shakes.

I was doing my best. “What was it like at the ranch?” I asked.

“It was pretty,” Mom said. “It was peaceful.”

I still couldn’t picture it. “Were there, like, palm trees and stuff?”

Mom sort of laughed. “No, not on the ranch. But there were in the city.”

“Oh,” I said, sucking my shake out of its straw. “You went to LA?”

“Yeah,” Mom said. “For the first time in my whole life.”

“What did you do there?”

“Well, I went to see the Walk of Fame. I found Judy Garland’s star. I wanted to stand on it.”

“Was it cool?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “It was actually a little strange. You think of the Walk of Fame—I always did, anyway, when I used to dream that I’d be an actress—and you imagine it glittering and gleaming. But the truth is, the star was just on the sidewalk. Where people walk right over it. Next to a parking lot.” She sounded sort of bereft when she said this, like a little kid who learned that Santa Claus was made up.

“We should find a star, like, in the sky,” I said to Mom, “to name after Judy instead.”

Mom smiled. “Let’s do that.”

Then it was quiet for a moment. I dipped a French fry in the ketchup and started nibbling on it.

Finally Mom looked up from her plate and said, “Laurel, I owe you an apology. I am sorry that I was gone for so long.”

I didn’t know what to say back to that. It’s all right? It wasn’t. And I wanted to try to be honest. “Yeah,” I said. “It was hard.” And then, “I mean, I know that you left because you were mad at me. I know you think that it’s my fault, and that’s why you wanted to go. You can just say it.”

“What? Laurel, no. Of course I don’t think it’s your fault. Where would you get that idea?”

“Because,” I said, “because you left. I thought that was why.”

“Laurel, if I left because of someone’s failings, they were my own, not yours. I really just—I must be the world’s worst mother.” Her voice started to break. “How could I have let that happen? How could I have lost her?”

I didn’t realize that Mom felt guilty, too. “But Mom,” I said. I reached out to take her hand across the table. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it was. I was supposed to protect her. And I didn’t.”

“Well,” I said quietly, “maybe you didn’t know how.”

Mom shook her head. “It’s like when you guys were little, you needed me. I was the sun that you’d orbit around. But as you got older, and the orbit got wider, I didn’t know my place in the universe anymore. I thought, That’s what’s supposed to happen. They’re growing up. I thought the best thing I could do was to try not to hold on too tight. But you two were my reason to be.”

“But what about Dad?” I asked. “Why didn’t you love him anymore?”

“I’ll always love your father, but we got married so young, Laurel. When May started to have her own life, and you did, too, your dad and I started having more trouble. It felt like we had so little in common, besides our daughters. But I shouldn’t have left him. I don’t think May ever forgave me.”

Mom was shaking now. She looked down at her burger that had only one bite out of it. She seemed so fragile, like a little girl. I saw why May thought that she had to keep all of the hard stuff secret from her.

“And look at you,” she said. “You’re doing so well. I can’t help but think that I was right. That you were better off without me.”

“Mom,” I said. “I love you, but that’s dumb. I still need you.”

“Do you want to tell me, Laurel? Do you want to tell me what happened?”

There it was. I knew it was coming. I couldn’t help the surge of anger that rushed into me. “That’s why you’re really here, right? So that you can find out finally? So that you can have an answer to everything? And then you can feel better?”

“No! No. I just want you to know that you can talk to me, if you want to.”

“Well, I don’t. Not about that. We can talk about something else.”

She looked like I’d stabbed her in the heart when I said it.

“Fine, Mom. Look. When we were supposed to go to the movies, mostly we didn’t go. May was seeing an older guy. And she went off with him. She thought I went to the movies with this friend of his who was supposed to take care of me, but I didn’t go, either, because the friend molested me instead, and when I tried to tell May that night, she was already drunk, and then she was so sad, and when she got up, she started pretending to be a fairy, and she slipped or tripped or fell off the bridge or something. There you go. You can go back to California now.”