What Happens Now(86)

After the waitress left, Mom turned back to me and said, “Look, I know I can’t always protect you. I can only hope you have the skills to do it yourself.”

“Then why were you so against Camden’s friends when you hadn’t even met them?”

“I didn’t understand at first, either. The thing about driving ninety minutes to work and back each day is that you have a lot of alone time to think about stuff.” She paused. “Sometimes I think I took that job because of the alone time on the road.”

Mom seemed to drift off for a few moments, then finally checked back in. “What did I tell you about how your father and I met?”

“That you went to high school together.”

“That’s right. Well, I’ll tell you the rest of the story now. It’s relevant.” She wrapped one hand tight around her water glass, but didn’t drink. “We’d never really known each other growing up. Until the summer after high school was done, when we worked as counselors at the same day camp. We had, you know. A summer fling.”

The word fling felt creepy and wrong coming from my mother. I took a sip of my coffee and spent a long time gingerly placing the cup back in its saucer.

“Then summer ended,” Mom continued. “We went off to start college in different states. But then the next summer we were both back at the camp. . . .” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “And the next—”

I held up my hand. “I get the picture.” It was a gross picture.

Mom laughed a little, shook her head. “After we graduated, we both found ourselves back home. And back with each other. We started dating for real.” Now she picked up the water glass and jiggled it so the ice clinked. “For real was different from a summer fling. We had our ups and downs but we stuck with it. Stayed on the track, you know? Moving in together, then marriage. Then we had you and I wanted so dearly to make it work.”

“Why did you stop? Making it work, I mean.”

“This stuff is really hard for me to talk about.”

“You’re doing great,” I said.

Mom laughed. “Gee, thanks.” Then she got serious. “Okay, it was this. I found out that he’d been having a relationship with another woman. For a long time. So I kicked him out.”

“You always said he left.”

“Well, the way I see it, he left the moment he cheated on me.”

The waitress came back with a bowl of granola and a little metal container of milk. She hovered for a moment, but there must have been something about our energy that told her to get lost.

Mom didn’t pour the milk. She picked up two pieces of granola in her fingers and popped them in her mouth.

“I know you weren’t expecting to hear all this, but I do have a point and I’m getting to it.”

“Take your time,” I said. Who knew when this portal would be open again. It felt both natural and unnatural that we were here, having this very grown-up conversation. I liked that feeling.

Mom smiled at me, then her eyes traveled instinctively to the scars on my arm.

“When your father left,” she continued, “I didn’t expect him to go so far. Certainly not all the way across the country. But he had a friend there who offered him a job and he wanted to make a fresh start. I think he did truly plan on being in your life. He was just going to take some time to regroup.”

“So much for that,” I said.

Mom didn’t seem to hear me. “Once he was gone and I was alone, a single parent of a two-year-old . . . I really thought I’d die.” She swallowed hard. “I mean, I really thought I wanted to. For a long time. Three years, give or take. I don’t remember much except thinking that maybe you’d be better off living with your grandmother.”

I turned to look out the window, unable to meet her glance. “Then why are you here, alive, and I’m not sitting with Grandma watching soap operas right now?”

Mom laughed a bit. “A friend convinced me to get help. Then one day, my boss at the bank sent me to an electronics store to buy a DVD player for the conference room. They’d just released the first two seasons of Silver Arrow.”

I turned to look at her now. She was shaking her head.

“Wait, wait. I need to backtrack,” she added. “The Silver Arrow thing. One year in college, there was a guy in my dorm. He was socially, you know, awkward and wanted to be popular. So when the show went on the air, he’d buy beer and snacks for anyone who wanted to drop in and watch with him. At first, only a few people came but eventually, the whole hallway would gather. I got addicted. It was so much fun to share something that way.”

I wanted to jump in and say, Yes! Duh! That is called fandom and that is why there is cosplay. But my mother was now unreeling so much of herself, I didn’t want to risk tangling her up.

“I could only watch it on and off after that year,” Mom continued, “but I always loved it. So the day I went into the store and saw this big display with life-size cutouts of the crew, it was like bumping into long-lost friends. I bought the DVDs and a player to go with them. But watching it again, with you . . . reminded me of that time in my life when I had everything in front of me. It seemed so safe to dream big back then. I hadn’t made any of my mistakes yet.”

She picked up another piece of granola and held it between her fingers.