20 Million Tiny Particles

29. Mom

Here was the thing about Mom. When it was bad -- the drinking and the late nights and the fighting with my father -- it was really bad.

Bad has a way of wanting to eclipse the good, and the good is usually too shy to tell you that it has no right to be that way.

But Mom was fun, too, especially before the drinking became such a heavy part of her routine. When I was young, she was a flame burning bright in the cold house, warming us with fresh cookies on Friday nights and shining through the window of the Jeep, hers before it was mine, in the carpool line, jangling her gold bracelets as she let her hand fly through the breeze, a Fleetwood Mac song on the radio.

She had all the fun energy she'd given to Ava, but with none of the ego or self-righteousness. She was kind, too. Even though I knew she might not answer on the first try when I rang her from the school infirmary, sick with a stomach ache, I always called her before Dad, because she's the one who'd tuck me into a blanket bed on the couch and bring me a grilled cheese sandwich. Dad, for all his good intentions, would be looking for the right medicine from the cabinet.

And she was smart -- it wasn't the first thing that came to mind when you thought of her, but that didn't make it any less true. It wasn't smart to spend your life seeing the world from the inside of a vodka bottle, no, but that was such a small part of the whole of her. Only one of the bending, breaking particles that built up her chemical structure.

It was Mom's idea to even start the business. Instead of buying their first home, she wanted to spend their wedding gifts and meager savings on an antique shop. "But we could buy a nice family home in a better town," Dad had advised. Formerly an accountant, Dad was looking for the practical right ahead of them, while Mom was seeing the spectacular glistening around the bend.

"Where will we live?" he would have asked, her starry eyes looking out at their potential futures. Not the money or the power they could get from opening a tiny shop in an even tinier town, but the wonder of it.

To her it was simple -- we'd live above the shop. It had three stories. Why not convert one into an apartment?

To her, everything was simple. Not in the way that Dad, or sometimes I, viewed life, like a math equation. Not that life had rules, and if you followed the rules, life would follow suit in its formulaic way. But simple in that, everything would come together if you allowed it to.

In the way that no one expects a diamond to form from flimsy little carbon pieces, when they might as well just keep on making graphite.

For her, no matter how much she wreaked havoc on our lives and left us alone in the dust of all her madness and her selfishness and her bad behavior, it was all so simple.

For her, it was biscuits.