A mother's love

Chapter 4

Brian arrived home from school and found his mother sitting in the living room and crying. At such times Brian couldn't ignore his mother, not even if she was drunk, which she was that afternoon. Between her legs she held a bottle of vodka that was half finish. Given the state that she was in Brian could see that she had had more to drink that day than half a bottle of vodka.

"Brian? Is that you?" She called out when she heard the door open.

"Yeah mom, it's me."

He set his bag down on the floor and took a seat next to her on the sofa. She offered no resistance when he took the bottle of vodka out from between her legs and placed it on the coffee table—a piece of shutter board atop four cinder blocks. She sat motionless staring into space with tears dripping down her face. She had the sallow, loose skin of a drunk, and was wearing the same denim skirt and black T-shirt that she'd been wearing the previous day; her breath smelled horrible due to a combination of excessive drinking and not brushing her teeth and her hair was a mess. When she was like this, despite all that she put him through, Brian felt compassion for his mother. He was reminded that she hadn't had an easy life and that if he wasn't taking care of her she would be in unimaginable trouble.

"Why are you crying?"

"Your father called today."

"We were due for a phone call from him; it's been five months since the last one."

"He only asked how you were doing, he didn't have a thing to say about me; can you believe that? I'm the mother of his child and he couldn't care less about me."

"Did he say anything about where he is?"

"No, he just wanted to know if you were okay and if you were doing well in school; once I told him you were he said good-bye and hung up."

"You shouldn't be crying because of his phone call; we're used to him phoning twice a year."

"He could've asked about me; it wouldn't have taken him anything to just ask me how I was doing; what does that say about me? That I don't matter? That I'm worthless?"

"You matter to me, and you know that the only reason he didn't ask you was because he knew that you'd react this way; he just wanted to hurt you."

"That's sick. He's a sick man, isn't he?"

"Yes he is."

"We don't need him; we have each other, and we love each other, we're not like him who doesn't care about anyone."

Brian's experience told him that it was time for their talk to end. Any more words about his father who had deserted them and she was going to get angry, anger which she would later direct at him.

"Let's go to bed, okay mom," Brian said to her, sensing an opportunity to get her to bed early.

"No, I don't want to go to bed, it's still early," she slurred.

"But you're tired from everything that you've been through today."

"I have been through a lot, haven't I?" She said, always the victim.

"You have, which is why you need to go to sleep."

"Okay, I'll go to sleep. Where's my..." She asked about her vodka.

"I have it; I'll put it in the fridge and it'll be there waiting for you when you wake up."

He helped his mother up off the couch and guided her to her room. She was asleep the moment she hit the mattress; the amount that she'd had to drink and the phone call from his father had taken everything out of her.

It was rare for Brian not to have to worry about his mother for the entire rest of the day after he'd returned from school. He made use of the time he had available to him to clean up the mess that his mother had made while he'd been at school, a task he normally performed late at night after she'd gone to bed. He found three empty beer cans under the sofa that he threw into the bin in the kitchen, where he found the biggest mess. There were red wine stains on the cabinet doors, on the refrigerator door and all over the sink. Inside the refrigerator he found a box of wine the tap protruding from which hadn't been closed properly. The wine that had spilled out of the tap had pooled at the bottom of the fridge in the vegetable drawer, which he was going to have to take out of the fridge and wash along with all of its contents. Using a wet cloth he cleaned the cabinet doors, the fridge door and the sink first before tackling the much larger job of the interior of the fridge.

It took him half an hour to clean the kitchen, which he did with copious amounts of lemon-scented surface cleaner to get rid of the smell of the cheap wine, the little of which that was left in the box he threw down the drain. The whole time he was cleaning Brian thought about the phone call that his mother had received from his father. He hadn't said to his mother that his father made those phone calls to hurt her just to make her feel better, he'd always felt that way about his father's phone calls. Brian had no interest in speaking with his father or in him returning to live with them, and if he had the chance to speak with him he would inform him of that in no uncertain terms. Brian knew that his father always made his phone calls when he was at school because he wanted to believe that his son was pleased to hear from his mother that his father still cared about how he was doing. Brian remembered nothing of his father, but he was certain that he was better off without him being around.

Developing the living arrangement that he had with his mother hadn't been easy; they'd had a big fight that had turned physical when Brian was eleven and decided to assume responsibility for the household finances; when he was six he decided to start doing the cooking and ended up with a burn scar down his right arm from a pan of hot oil that he'd dropped on himself. His mother hadn't taken him to the emergency room or to a doctor to get the burn seen to fearing that if she did child services would get involved and take him away from her. She treated it herself at home with ice packs and admonitions that in the future he was to be more careful. There hadn't been any such accidents since and Brian had successfully arrogated all the authority he needed to run the house properly and keep the two of them going.

As he approached the point in his life at which he had to start making decisions about his future, Brian feared for what would become of his mother. Brenda's questions had been uncomfortable for him because he didn't want her knowing the truth about him but also because he had no answers for them; for Brian it was easier to take things one day at a time.