Glimpse of Us | Jenlisa [COMPLETED]

Chapter 18

She doesn't drive back to the house.

She knows it's been some time since she last cleaned and she should get on that. Or maybe she could call the hospital and ask if they have any extra shifts they want her to take, but she doesn't do that either.

Instead, she drives to her mom's.

It's a leftover feeling from high-school, knowing that she's mad at her and with good reason, but not being able to feel right until they talk. She hasn't grown out it. Even if unlike her 15 year old self, she has managed to put this conversation off for too long.

Almost two years too long.

She pulls up to the driveway.

Her mom is outside, tending the garden.

Her dad had gotten it into himself to make one, just a few months before he passed, and her mom had finished it. And though she'd never had much of a green thumb, she still kept the garden alive, and made a new one when she and Sungho moved into this house. Jennie thinks of the chrysanthemums in her own backyard. Maybe her mom and she aren't so different.

She gets out of the car.

"Jennie." Her mom looks up at her, covers her eyes against the sun. There's a moment of silence, a recognition of the ignored called and the tension the last time they spoke. But her mom doesn't call her out. "Want to help?" she asks.

Jennie nods.

It's a little ridiculous, kneeling in her jeans on her mom's front lawn in the middle of the day, but she puts on a pair of gloves and helps her mom pluck out the weed.

It's mindless work.

Tough. Her hand's aren't used to it.

Jennie is used to moving her fingers with practiced delicacy, to handling scalpels and forceps, to knowing that too far, too strong, too fast, could mean someone would lose their live.

This is nothing like that. There's something calming about letting her hands be strong, rough. Angry.

It feels like exactly what Jennie needed.

She's almost disappointed when she realizes they're done. There's nothing else to do, and Jennie looks up to find the world is as she left it. Things piling up. She follows her mom inside the house.

She washes her hands in the kitchen sink.

She sits down while her mom walks around, putting things away and pulling out food for lunch. Jennie watches while she re-heats some pasta, and all the while she's wondering, thinking.

"Why were you always on her side?"

Her mom drops the spoon.

She picks it up quickly and leaves it on the sink, and then lets the pasta heating up. She sits down next to Jennie.

It's a question Jennie hasn't asked before, or, at least, asked meaning to get an answer. On her worst days she'd been unwilling to hear an answer, but those days are past.

Jennie shakes her head.

"She left me, and for so long I hated her for it... but you never did. Why?"

She knew her mom kept in touch with Lisa, that she spoke to her then estranged wife more than Jennie herself did. Her mother's calls didn't go unanswered like Jennie's own. Jennie would bet her texts didn't go ignored.

She used to -as much as it makes her feel ashamed- resent her mom for it.

Her mom shrugs slowly, the way she used to do when Jennie was in high school and she said no to a party. The shrug that meant 'it is what it is'.