Till Next Time | completed | currently under re-edit

epilogue 0.2

Through years of bottling things inside, scrutinizing and analyzing every minute detail of everything until all of it slipped beyond management in such royal proportions that it got increasingly difficult to hide the epic disaster of life to deal with it in clandestine has taught me to talk.

That, and intensive therapy.

I call my mother the first thing after I had personally dealt with the initial nerves.

Somewhere between the messy divorce and moving across the country from gas station to gas station, we had grown to like one another. She stayed up with me on the nights I would collapse back into my old miserable patterns, even more magnified now that I had lost the means to temporarily chase them away with other vices, knowing she had to get up early the next morning. In turn, I dragged my aching joints out of bed at the first hint of sunlight outside my window and walked past my mother's tiny frame snuggling a heavy blanket on an adjacent armchair, first to the kitchen, to set the coffee machine up and then to the bathroom to squeeze out a peanut-shaped dollop of toothpaste on her brush before retreating back to my bed, so she could rise in a few more hours and we both could get ready to go to college.

The fact that we went to college together, which had in the early years been the source of much embarrassment to the both of us, has aged well enough to now become a funny Thanksgiving table story. She attended community college, getting a diploma in teaching, and she accepted Father's offer to pay for my college, the only financial help she accepted from him.
I swore to myself that I would pay him back. Every check I ever mailed to him, he would return it back. Eventually, I abandoned the pursuit.

Mom never remarried.

She listens to me rant, without pausing to catch my breath and waits so, patiently until I run out of words.

I hear her sigh from the other end. "Brooklyn, sincerely, I think you should see him," she says.

"Mom-"

"Hear me out first! I have some very good reasons." If she were in front, she would raise her hands up. The silver watch of my grandfather she always had on would slide back from her dainty wrist.

"Brooklyn, he never reaches out to people. Never. All those years of being with him and trust me, I have never seen him get sentimental. John, in essence, has always been an escapist. He does not like being anchored to things."
She continues on. "Besides that, I don't think you have heard the news yet."

"What news?"

"He is selling the company."

"What!"

Will looks over at me again, concerned. I attempt to put her at ease by waving my hand in her face and then feel stupid about it.

"Yes," she says. "I heard from a mutual friend. Apparently, the deal is finalized, the process is close to completion."

She leaves the sentence hanging in mid-air, giving me the impression that there is more.

So I ask, "And?"

"He has fixed eighty percent of that money as a scholarship to low-income group students."

I frown as she can see me. "He never really cared about that, did he?"

"No. Not that I know of."

"Well, has he had an epiphany?" I joke. "Has he encountered better sense?"

She huffs in an underwhelming response. She lives by the book of Powerful-Women-Aren't-Petty-About-Their-Exes.
"I don't know, Brook. Maybe that's why he wants to see you?"

I shrug. "Maybe."

"Will you go?" she asks and it comes off sounding more like a prayer than an ingenuous query.

I pinch the bridge of my nose and answer back. "Maybe."