On some level, I’d known that was the case since I found the note that she’d left me under my pillow the night that she died.
The very last memory that I had of my mom was her coming into my room and kissing me on my head while I slept. I was convinced that I’d imagined it after Dawson showed up with the news that she’d been in a car accident. Maybe I’d dreamed it, in some sort of sixth sense, premonition way. Like her soul had visited me and told me it was going to be okay.
But then, three days later, I found it. The note under my pillow. The evidence that she had, in fact, snuck into my room before leaving and going out for the night.
I stood and started to head out back.
“Where are you going?” Billy asked in a frustrated sigh.
“I need to go check on the pen.”
Kevin Bacon, who had turned into an Insta-famous pig, was one of the reasons tourists came to Southern Comfort when they visited Firefly Island. He had close to a million followers on Instagram and I’d noticed over the weekend that his pen had a board loose. Normally Ray, who lived above the bar and who’d worked there longer than I’d been alive, took care of the handyman repairs but he’d just had a triple bypass and was taking it easy.
“Why don’t you ever talk about her?”
I stopped. “Who?”
“Mom.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I knew this question was coming. After the accident, when my brothers were little, I’d answered all their questions about her. But as the years went on, and they got into their teens and twenties, they stopped asking. And when Pop was around, he talked about her all the time. So I don’t think it was as obvious that I didn’t.
Part of my silence was just who I was. But another part, the bigger part, was that I didn’t want to lie. And I wanted my brothers, Billy especially, to remember our mama for the mother she was to him not for any other part of her life.
“I don’t talk about anyone.” That answer was all he was going to get.
I pushed the back door open and as soon as I was out in the fresh air, I took in a deep breath. One that burned my lungs. Whenever I thought about her or was asked to talk about her, it felt like the walls were closing in on me.
That feeling was why I hated it when people said time heals all wounds. In my opinion, that was a load of bullshit. Time didn’t heal anything. At best, time dulled things. But the pain, the searing pain, was still there. It was just under the surface of things. And whenever the topic of Sabrina Comfort came up, so did all the pain.
My brothers didn’t remember her the way I did. I don’t think my dad did either. She’d tried to tell Pop who she was, what she needed. But he had a temper. Whenever she would try to talk to him, to tell him that she was unhappy, or that she wanted things to change, he’d lose it. I did my best to protect my siblings from their fights. I’d put the TV on loud or have them listen to music with their headphones on.
I’m not sure anyone really knew her the way I did. She was only sixteen when she had me, and we sort of grew up together. I felt like it was us against the world. Pop was always gone at the bar, even before he owned it because he worked there. For six years, before Billy had been born, it had just been me and her.
Then Billy came along and I was her big helper. By the time Cheyenne and Jimmy showed up, I was doing the lion’s share of the work.
Sabrina Comfort was an amazing mom, she was loving, fun, adventurous and nurturing. What she wasn’t was organized or disciplined and she thought that schedule was a bad word. Since she was basically a single parent since my dad spent so much time with his mistress, the bar, it left me picking up a lot of the slack in those departments.
Even before she died, I’d done most of the heavy lifting when it came to homework, bedtimes, dinners, and chores. But I never imagined I’d have to do it all on my own though. I never imagined a world without her in it. Especially by her own choice.