We Went Broke at Midnight | ✔

13 | time is more valuable than money

❝If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.❞
— Henry Ford

13 || time is more valuable than money

She has the same car.

When I get in I choose to sit in the back. I have choices, too. Like her choosing to leave, I can choose to sit in the back of this car.

Mom turns around.

"You're not gonna sit up front?" she asks, confused.

I shake my head.

"I'd really like it if you sat up front," she tells me after a minute goes by. I'm not looking at her. I'm not going to say anything to her that I might regret, but it's hard not to. I don't want to look at the woman who's caused me so much pain for the last five years.

"Can you just say what you want to say?" I mutter. She's the one who wanted to talk. It says a lot if I'd rather be explaining to Brolin what that kiss in the street meant, than be here talking to Mom who's not only trying to get some remorse from me, but her wanting me to hear whatever excuse she had for leaving is pathetic.

I so badly want to get out of this car.

Mom doesn't say anything, but nods and turns around in her seat. She might be facing the front, however I know she's looking at me from the rear view mirror.

Nothing in this car has changed, sure it's cleaner than I remember, yet it still has marks left from me when I'd been younger. Like the ketchup stain on the ceiling next to the hook from when I was six and I'd been eating fries, or the faint green sharpie on the edge of my seat from when I was four and I thought coloring on something other than my Barbie coloring book would be nice. I wonder if Mom ever saw these reminders and thought, I'm making a huge mistake. I need to go back home.

"I know you're mad at me?" Mom says, steadily.

I scoff. Mad?

"That's an understatement," I say. "Pissed off, yes."

She turns around, again.

"Karen I know you're angry, but that language is not gonna sit well with me—"

I laugh out loud. Oh so now she wants to be a mother?!

The laughing can be seen as a facade to my hurt. The problem is, I'm genuinely laughing. I'm laughing out of anger, hurt, and sadness. True genuine and authentic emotion. It's true, the moment she left was the moment she stopped being my mother.

"So now you want to be a mother?" I say, amusement still coating my voice.

You can call this not having let go, but there's hurt that remains in every part of my heart that went missing the day Mom left.

"Karen, I'm sorry—"

I shake my head. "Sorry you're not," I argue. "You wouldn't have left in the first place, if you were sorry."

I thought I could handle talking to Mom again. I thought wrong.

Mom tries to reason with me. I don't listen, I just want to leave. I try the handle to my door, but I remember that both doors to this car are jammed on child safety lock.

"Can you open my door?"

"Karen, just listen plea—"

"OPEN THE DOOR." I yell.

She gets out the car and goes to my side and opens the door for me.

I run away.

:: :: ::

"How did it go?"

"Terrible."

I walk pass Brolin who's sitting on the curb.

I feel as if I've cried, but my face is as dry as the heat will allow it to be.

I feel terrible. Though I should feel glad that whatever I needed to get off my chest, I got off my chest. In some ways I feel as if I betrayed the woman who birthed me. But the more the scene replays in my mind, I don't regret it.

Not at all.

Does it hurt that I said all those things and acted that way? Yes. Did I have every right to act that way? I think so. Could I've acted worse? Yes. But did I? No.

"Are you okay?" Brolin asks as he catches up to me.

I shrug. "It's going to have to be."

It's going to have to be...

Those are the same words Dad said the day after Mom left, when I'd asked him if things were going to still be okay. I hadn't liked Dad's answer, one bit. It wasn't what I'd wanted to hear. I wanted to hear that Mom was coming back... that whatever problems she needed dealt with were going to be dealt with. I guess it was better than him lying to me.

"So what do you wanna do?" I ask Brolin.

I don't want to talk about my mommy issues, anymore.

"Uh... I don't know." He has his hands on the back of his neck.

"We could call an uber and it can take us back to the city," I suggest.

:: :: ::

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