Chapter 4
I volunteered to do the dishes with Mom, which only solidified her suspicion I was sick. It was perfectly okay with Fel, because she usually did the dishes with me but wanted to be as far away from me as possible today. I didn’t know if I blamed her. I didn’t want to be anywhere near me either.
The list of names—the people I loved—was hooked in me, pulling at my insides and I kept seeing the fire, and my mom dragging Fel behind her. I didn’t know how to talk about it with mom, and I wasn’t sure if there was something wrong with me. This had never happened in my life and I was afraid, really truly afraid, for the first time in the past year.
When Dad had died, I was afraid.
I didn’t know what I was going to do, how I was going to live, what life was going to be like without him. The fear had settled into a loneliness I hadn’t been able to shake. Now the fear was back, but it was an irrational fear, like the fear I sometimes had when I had a dream. This was like vivid dreams while I was awake.
Mom was rinsing dishes and I was sudsing them up and scrubbing the yellow egg yolk off them.
“Mom, have you ever been in a fire?”
The water shut off. Her stare was a weight on me, though I pretended to concentrate on what I was doing.
“Are you sick?”
“Have you?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“No,” her voice was forceful and irritated. “I’ve never been in a fire.”
“Okay.”
She had started the rinse water up again, but shut it off almost immediately. She grabbed my shoulders and turned me around. She was worried. Her eyes were not mad, just scrunched with concern.
“What’s this all about? Fire? Are you missing your Dad?”
“Are you happy he’s gone?”
As I said it, I was immediately sorry. I hated myself for it because I knew better. She had been with Dad for twenty-five years. Twenty-five. I didn’t and hadn’t known anyone or anything for twenty-five years. I hadn’t had any kind of devotion or stayed with anything for more than three years. Now I had hurt my Mom and I was afraid she wouldn’t forgive me, and I had definitely hurt her. It was obvious in the way she flinched away from me, like I had physically struck her. She pulled back so hard, for a second, I was convinced she would fall into the cabinets. No tears, but her facial expression, a grimace and a frown, and the way she did everything to avoid looking in my eyes let me know she was disappointed.
She grabbed the dish towel from the counter beside her.
She said, “I can go ahead and finish this up. You probably have a lot of things going on today with your friends.” She gave me a half-smile, but still didn’t raise her eyes from the suds in the sink.
I was a jerk.
“Mom, I’m sor—”
She just waved me away.
“Don’t worry. It’s your birthday. Go have a good day with your friends.”
I had never been the best kid. I was a kid. It was almost a prerequisite to being a child. You disappoint your parents once in a while. My parents had had their fair share of disappointments coming from me, bad report cards, once I even changed my grade because my Spelling grade hadn’t been good, I was failing. I ended up grounded for the entire summer. But even that had been nothing compared to what I had just done to Mom. I’d betrayed her. It was an ultimate betrayal, because she had not asked to be left a widow with two children to raise on her own. She’d fought on after Dad was killed. She had kept her chin up and had never shown us anything but a smile and now I had kicked her in the teeth for it. She had kept a roof over our heads, made sure we had food in our stomachs and everything we needed. She was even going to bring me and my friends to the video arcade to celebrate my birthday. Her reward for holding us together, when her world had completely disintegrated, was to bear the condemnation of her son.
For the first time in a very long time, on top of the loneliness I felt because Dad was gone, I experienced a cold loneliness from my Mom, like she had left me too, in one split second. One second she was completely there, her love intact and the next, absent from the room as fully as she was in it.
I was going to throw up. My guts coiled under my skin. My nerves felt cold on my face, and tingling at the same time. I took a deep breath, and though it was warm from the dish water, the air helped me to calm down.
I didn’t even know how to deal with this and didn’t know how to apologize to her for what I had said.
But I didn’t have to talk about it right then, because someone knocked on the front door, with a heavy, insistent hand.
