I shook my head. “I almost apologized again.”
“I know.” Kael turned his body so he was leaning toward the window, his face out of my eyesight while I drove.
As I skipped ahead in my playlist and Shawn Mendes started again, he reached to take his phone out of his pocket.
He didn’t do what most people our age did and mindlessly scroll, he checked the screen and put it in the cupholder. He didn’t seem bothered the least bit about the uncomfortable silence between us. His disaffection, mixed with the relief that dinner was over, allowed me to start to relax.
A few minutes went by and I found myself softly singing along to the music. I wasn’t great at singing and wasn’t trying to be. The song ended and I looked over at Kael, surprised to see that he was already looking at me. I didn’t feel the embarrassment that I was expecting. I smiled at him and kept on driving. An old Mariah Carey song that reminded me of my mom trying to hit the high notes came on and I swiped up on my phone and closed Spotify altogether.
We were on the highway now, only about five minutes away from my place. I didn’t want to ask him if he had anywhere else to go; it felt rude.
“You seemed to like my stepmom,” I half asked, half told him.
“How?”
I thought on it for a second. “I guess just that you were nice? I’m an asshole. I want you to dislike her or at least call her out for being snobby or obnoxiously fake. I think it bothers me that she’s the opposite of my mom. She’s not fun. My mom was really fun when I was younger. She was spontaneous and would never have made such a fuss around a dinner. And absolutely not on a weekly basis. Every fucking Tuesday? Like, who does that?”
Kael’s expression didn’t give me anything in return, but I still felt the urge to keep going.
“My mom used to listen to music every time she was in the living room or kitchen, and not on a fancy speaker that plays throughout the house.” I looked at him to make sure he was at least paying attention if he wasn’t going to speak. He was. I could feel it in the way he was watching me.
“She basically had a soundtrack to every moment of her life and would dance around the living room listening to Van Morrison, waving her arms around like a bird or a butterfly. She wore sparkly clothes and shoes, and colorful feathers, beads, and sometimes even sticks in her hair. She had soft eyes.”
“Is she alive?” Kael asked. I was so thankful not to be on the highway anymore. The town’s quiet streets were a much better place to handle such a blunt question about my mom.
“Yeah. I mean, technically.”
He raised both his brows. “Technically?”
I nodded, pulling to a stop at the red light. “She isn’t around, but she’s not dead. Not today.” I thought about it. “Not that I know of, at least.”
There it was. My oversharing, which made most people uneasy. I continued to do it even though a really shitty boyfriend I had in high school told me to stop telling people “uncomfortable” things about myself. He said it was weird, so did my brother, and a few therapists I managed to scare away. But it didn’t stop me. I drank in Kael’s face as he smiled a little, and I silently rejoiced that finally someone got my dark humor and didn’t get uncomfortable. Kael found me funny, I could tell. Maybe he was the only person in the world who didn’t think I was weird?
“My point is that my mom was cool. Effortlessly. She was confident. And so likable. Everyone who met her loved her. She was moldable. Sometimes vibrant, sometimes bland. Sometimes appearing as a brilliant piece of art and sometimes just a blob sitting on a sculptor’s table, waiting to be morphed into the next version of herself. She wasn’t like Estelle. She didn’t have to wear jewelry and heavy makeup and heels around the house. Estelle is like glass, once she shatters there won’t be anyone there to put her back together, but my mom . . . she was like clay.”
Until now, I had never thought or spoken about my mom in this way. I usually condemned her for leaving me and didn’t really take the time to appreciate who she was—or might still be.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the headrest of the car. I couldn’t think of a single time that I sat in my car without music playing, just talking to another person. The thrum of my engine cutting through the thick Georgia air was all I could hear. That, and the whisper of my mom’s laughter as she shook her hair. Her hair always tickled my face, and the two of us would laugh until our stomachs hurt.
“She would stand over me and shake her hair, like a wild woman. I loved it. I can’t imagine Estelle doing that. Or laughing in general.”
Not a peep came from Kael; he didn’t even move. If I hadn’t witnessed him blinking, I’d have wondered if he was okay. He had this “thing” about him, and I didn’t understand it. I kept trying to make him fit into a box—was he charming, warm, friendly, genuine? He didn’t quite fit anywhere exactly, but he somehow put me at ease. It wasn’t a familiar feeling. It was sort of scary how fast I could see myself getting used to this. This must be why people want boyfriends? To have a comfortable, settled feeling all the time.
Boyfriends? Friends? What in the world is wrong with me? I kept the conversation focused on my mom. It felt nice to be able to talk about her, and who knew when I would next have this chance?
“Anyway, my mom, she wasn’t materialistic. She didn’t care about overpriced purses or flashy earrings. She shopped at thrift stores and made her own jewelry half the time. The fanciest we ever got was for our birthdays. She was obsessed with birthdays, even more than Christmas-level obsessed. She used to go all out for them. It was this huge thing, more like a birthday week. We didn’t have a ton of gifts or anything, but she was creative and thoughtful. She would make us pancakes and cut them into the shape of our age. She did it every single year until I was seventeen.”
I paused.
“If you want me to shut up, I will.” I laughed nervously, realizing that this guy hadn’t given me anything and I was telling him stuff I had never told anyone. Half of me saw the red flags, and the other half ignored them because it just felt good to be around him. It crossed my mind that I could make up anything I wanted about my mom if I felt like it. I didn’t have to tell him the truth about her. I could make her out to be the villain who abandoned her kids, or a sympathetic free spirit who escaped the ties of a life she was forced to live but never wanted.
He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. I stopped talking.
“Go on.”
There was something too casually cool about him. He was close to the line of arrogant and I could feel how sure of himself he was. I envied it. The way he knew exactly who he was and didn’t have to say it or show it off. His attentive listening made it clear he wasn’t a narcissist. I’ve met enough of them to know.
“One year she really went to town. The year before . . .” I paused. I wasn’t ready to decide which version of my mother I would put in the story I was telling Kael. “She decorated the whole house in those lights from Spencer’s, even a freaking disco ball. Do you remember that store? They had the most absurd T-shirts and penis-shaped everything.”