My aunt loved gin. I used to sit at her yellow melamine kitchen table while she massaged the lemon before halving it. She’d tell me to get the big glass from the cupboard. It had a faded Caltex logo on the front and a crack in the base. After tracing the rim of the glass with one half of the lemon, she’d squeeze the juice of the other half into the glass. She used to say a gin and tonic had to be made just right and the right way was a holy ritual. Then she’d light a cigarette and tell me in grisly detail about her husband’s throat cancer, how he still haunted the apartment, and bits and pieces of my mom’s history.
From what I put together, my mom grew up on a farm near a small town in the Gauteng province. Aunt Ginger said the name of the town wasn’t important because the town wasn’t on any map. Although the farm was only an hour’s drive from Johannesburg, neither of my mom’s parents had been to the city. To them, Johannesburg was a place of unholy temptations and sins they preferred to avoid. After several miscarriages that happened over many years, my grandmother finally gave up on having children. My mom came as a big surprise. Having arrived later in my grandmother’s life, she kept my grandmother bedridden for most of the pregnancy. My grandparents were already in their late forties when my mom was born.
According to Aunt Ginger, my old-fashioned grandparents were strict in my mom’s upbringing. When they caught her making out with her boyfriend, they made her confess her sin in church and ask for forgiveness in front of the congregation. The townsfolk said the devil had cursed her with beauty. The day my mom turned eighteen, she left the farm to search fame and fortune in the city. Instead, she found me. At that point, Aunt Ginger always added that Mom finding me wasn’t a bad thing, of course.
Aunt Ginger died when I was eight. She fell asleep in her chair next to the kitchen table with a cigarette in her hand. The neighbors said she was so full of gin she didn’t wake up when her bathrobe caught fire.
“I love this song,” my mom says, pulling me back to the present when she turns up the volume. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
It’s peak hour, but it’s weekend, and we’re driving against the traffic. In forty minutes, we’re on Empire Road, heading toward Auckland Park. Instead of taking Stanley Road, she carries on straight past the hill with the South African Broadcasting Corporation tower.
I sit up from my slouched position to look through the window. “Where are we going?”
She catches my gaze and smiles before turning her attention back to the road. We cut through Melville before entering a shabby part of Triomf. In front of a row of semi-detached houses, she pulls onto the curb and cuts the engine.
I stare at the raw-brick building next to me. A broken plastic chair stands on the porch. The small front garden is overgrown with weeds. A shiny Harley is parked in the driveway.
Understanding dawns.
I grab her arm when she opens her door. “Mom.”
She pulls away with another smile. “I won’t be long.”
I’ve been here enough times to know I won’t be long is code for wait in the car. A memory of huddling behind the backseat of a Mercedes parked in front of a sketchy motel on a busy road in the dark rushes through my mind. I was nine at the time and frightened as I waited for what felt like forever. My mother sold her body to save my leg, but it never crossed her mind that I’d be scared alone in the car. I have similar memories from every year of my childhood. It’s been a while. I thought she was done with that. I thought we’d been through this. If Gus finds out, she’s dead. Literally.
She gets out of the car.
Shit.
Slamming a hand on the dashboard, I open my door and jump out, ignoring the stitch of pain in my hip.
“Mom!”
I limp after her, but she’s already slipped through the pedestrian gate that hangs on one hinge and is making her way through tall, dry Marigold bushes to the porch.
By the time I reach the bottom step, she’s gone inside and slammed the door.
Fuck!
My legs ache from the exertion when I stop in front of the door. I jiggle the handle. It’s locked. For what it’s worth, I bang on the door. The only answer I get is my mother’s giggle coming from the other side of the wood. The feet of the chair screech over the concrete as I push it aside to peer through the window. A sheet acting as a makeshift curtain obscures the view.