Just One Day(69)

“Your father and I have decided to reimburse you for your French class,” she says, ripping off the check. “It doesn’t mean we condone any part of this trip. Or condone your duplicity. We absolutely don’t. But the French class is part of your education, and you’re obviously taking it seriously, so you shouldn’t have to pay for it.”
She hands me the check. It’s for four hundred dollars. It’s a lot of money. But I’ve already saved nearly a thousand dollars, even with the money I paid for my class, and I just put a deposit down on an airplane ticket to Paris, and Babs is advancing me a week’s wages so I can buy it next week. And I have a month yet to save. The four hundred dollars would take the edge off. But the thing is, maybe I don’t need the edge to be off.
“It’s okay,” I tell Mom, handing back the check. “But thank you.”
“What, you don’t want it?”
“It’s not that. I don’t need it.”
“Of course you need it,” she retorts. “Paris is expensive.”
“I know, but I’m saving a lot of money from my job, and I’m hardly spending anything this summer. I don’t even have to pay for gas.” I try to make a joke out of it.”
“That’s another thing. If you’re going to be working until all hours, you should take the car at night.”
“That’s okay. I don’t want to leave you stranded.”
“Well, call me for a ride.”
“It’s late. And I usually get a lift home from someone.”
She takes the check back and with a violence that surprises me, rips it up. “Well, I can’t do anything for you anymore, can I?”
“What does that mean?”
“You don’t want my money or my car or my ride. I tried to help you get a job, and you don’t need me for that.”
“I’m nineteen,” I say.
“I am aware of how old you are, Allyson. I did give birth to you!” Her voice cracks like a whip, and the snap of it seems to startle even her.
Sometimes, you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty space it leaves behind. As I look at Mom, all pissed and pinched, I finally get that she’s not just angry. She’s hurt. A wave of sympathy washes over me, taking away a chink of my anger. Once it’s gone, I realize how much of it I have. How angry I am at her. Have been for this past year. Maybe a lot longer.
“I know you gave birth to me,” I tell her.
“It’s just I’ve spent nineteen years raising you, and now I’m being shut out of your life. I can’t know anything about you. I don’t know what classes you’re taking. I don’t know who you’re friends with anymore. I don’t know why you’re going to Paris.” She lets out something between a shudder and a sigh.
“But I know,” I tell her. “And for now, can’t that be enough?”
“No, it can’t,” she snaps.
“Well, it’ll have to be,” I snap back.
“So you dictate the rules now, is that it?”
“There aren’t any rules. I’m not dictating anything. I’m just saying you have to trust the job you did raising me.”
“Did. Past tense. I wish you’d stop talking like you’re laying me off from my job.”
I’m startled by that, not by her thinking of me as a job, so much as by the implication that I am in a position to do the firing. “I thought you were going to go back to some kind of PR job.”
“I was, wasn’t I?” She guffaws. “I said I’d do it when you started middle school. When you started high school. When you got your driver’s license.” She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Don’t you think if I’d wanted to go back, I’d have done it by now?”
“So why haven’t you?”
“It wasn’t what I wanted.”
“What do you want?”
“For things to be how they were.”
For some reason, this makes me angry. Because it’s both true—she wants to keep me fossilized—and such a lie. “Even when things were ‘how they were,’ it was never enough. I was never enough.”
Mom looks up, her eyes tired and surprised at the same time. “Of course you were,” she says. “You are.”
“You know what bothers me? How you and Dad always say you quit while you were ahead. There’s no such thing as quitting while you’re ahead. You quit while you were behind. That’s why you quit!”
Mom frowns, exasperated; it’s her dealing-with-a-crazy-teenager look, one I’ve gotten to know well this past year, my last year of actually being a teenager. Oddly enough, it wasn’t something she had to zing me with much before. Which I now realize was maybe part of the problem.
“You wanted more kids,” I continue. “And you had to settle for just me. And you’ve spent my whole life trying make me be enough.”
That gets her attention. “What are you talking about? You are enough.”
“No, I’m not. How can I be? I’m the one shot, the heir and the spare, so you have to make damn sure your one investment pays off because there’s no backup.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re not an investment.”
“You treat me like one. You’ve poured all your expectations into me. It’s like I have to carry the load of hopes and dreams for all the kids you didn’t get to have.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says in a quiet voice.