pretty please (with sugar on top) - larry stylinson

55

It was just as he remembered. Balmy air and dark nights, the after-hours quietness that settled over the trailer park. Tiny sounds scattering over the condensed space. It was quiet, but not deserted. A woman lit a cigarette while standing on the stairs, looking out over the stillness. The prickling sense of being watched by more than just one pair of eyes filtered over him like the mild breeze. Harry's boots squelched in the mud as he wandered down the aisles of mobile homes, remembering the pathway like the back of his hand. He didn't even have to think. It was all muscle memory.

The scents, too. The people. He recognized not all, but some. Campsites like this made for a kind of vagabond life, requiring travel when the park operator demanded too much money. Prices fluctuated, and people migrated, but Harry caught a whiff of a few familiar scents, those older ones that had always been around, the man on the corner who still chewed tobacco, the beta couple with their dogs. Well, the dogs were different now, but the couple was the same.

The trailer was near the back of the park, squished in between two larger ones, the broken roof still cracked and slanted, just as it was years ago. He stared at the tinkling wind chimes that used to lull him to sleep, the ones the neighbors complained about every chance they got. When the wind drifted, so did the sounds.

The steps creaked under his weight. A figure was peering at him from the window, the curtain drawn back slightly, watching. Harry rapped his knuckles on the door. The hinges old and rusty, it opened.

The whole way here, the plane ride, waiting at the terminal, driving the rental down the roads he remembered from his childhood, passing the diner where he used to work, passing fields and farmland and windmills and darkness, he tried to figure out what to say and what to do, given the thousand possibilities. There was a chance his mother was not even living here anymore, a chance she had moved on long ago. He had tried to prepare for that possibility. He had also tried to imagine what he would say to her, if it turned out she was still here. He even tried writing down a speech, an apology. But he hadn't settled on anything in particular, the words refusing to come.

If he had managed to prepare a speech, though, it wouldn't be any use now, standing in front of the life he had tried so hard to leave behind.

"Mama," Harry breathed, all the air wooshing out of his lungs in one word. "I'm so sorry."

She stared at him in the way only a mother could stare: appraising, calculating, quiet. He half-expected the door to slam shut in his face. He knew he deserved it. But soft arms shot out and wound around his back, yanking him inside. He was smashed against her in a cradling hug.

An inexplicable warmth flooded him, and he felt small, like a child. It had been so long. Her familiar scent wrapped around him like her arms, the unspoken promise: I'm here. I never left. Harry sunk into her hold, let her support him. Wasn't that how it always was.

"I'm so sorry," he repeated, over and over, starting to cry. She coaxed it out of him like she always used to, pulling him over to the couch and rubbing his back, rocking him side to side.

"Harry," she said. "You came back."

She never displayed her emotions and tonight was no different. Harry, quite the opposite of her calculated collectedness, shrunk under her gaze and wiped the tears that had gathered beneath his eyelashes, sniffling and laughing a little because he was dramatic and pathetic and so, so happy she hadn't slammed the door shut in his face.

"I'm so sorry. For everything."

"I know you are."

He cringed, running his nails along his jeans. "I missed you. I missed home."