“I don’t know how to tell you this,” she finally said.
“What is it?”
Then she told me about my mother asking to meet her and how she tried to pay off Lauren to leave town. With my baby. She told me about my mother hiring a PI to dig into Lauren’s past and try to find out incriminating information about her.
“Oh, my God, Lauren, I can’t believe she did that.”
But I could. That was the sad truth. My mother would do anything, not for me, but for the son she wanted. It was like she had been fighting her whole life to squeeze me into a certain mold, hoping I’d take the shape she wanted. With some things, it had worked. Mostly, I let her have her way. But not this.
“She hates me, Matthew. She will never allow me to be in your life,” Lauren said quietly.
“It’s not up to her,” I said. “You have to believe me.”
“I do,” Lauren said, sounding miserable. “But you live in the same house, your lives are so connected.”
“I will talk to her. If she doesn’t come round, I will move out.”
“I don’t want to come between you and your mother.”
I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation.
“So, this is why you left?”
“I wanted to get away, think about everything. I felt like I couldn’t breathe in the office, knowing she could come to the door at any moment.”
“I’m flying back tomorrow,” I said. “I’m going to sort this out.
I was meant to stay a few days longer, but I had already had the most important meetings. All I could think about now, was getting back and sorting out this mess with my mother.
On the flight back, I kept thinking about the year after my father died. How my mother had sent me away to live with my grandparents. They were kind, decent people, but much older and I was a desperately unhappy boy and alone. My grandfather took me fishing and I remember him patting my back awkwardly, saying I was going to be fine. Neither him nor my grandmother knew how to comfort or talk to me. I heard them at night, talking about me, worrying about me. The following year, I stayed with my father’s brother, Albert, and his wife Kathy. Their three sons, all rambunctious and loud, sporty types accepted me into the fold. I found a way to live with them, but as I grew older, I preferred going back to boarding school and being by myself. My mother employed an older woman called Frances to run the household. Frances was short and very upright, with stiff wiry hair. She became a kind of substitute mother for me, making me hot chocolate and asking after school when I came home for the holidays. She made me sit down and tell her about the boys in my class, my subjects, and which ones I liked and which ones I didn’t. She stroked my hair while I sat at the kitchen table. I brought her chocolate that I bought from the vending machine at school. Then, when I was seventeen, I came home one year to find someone else in the kitchen.
“Where’s Frances?” I asked. The woman told me to ask my mother.
My mother sat at her dressing table, fixing her hair for an evening out. “Frances died. Turns out she had cancer, never said a word. Fell over one day, just like that.” My mother’s voice, so cold and disconnected, shocked me.
“You didn’t tell me!”
My mother’s eyebrows lifted in an expression of surprise. “Why would I?”
“I would have liked to go to her funeral!” I remember struggling to hide my sadness from my mother.
“Don’t be absurd!”
I thought her heartless and a snob.
I knew where Frances’s family lived. She’d told me once. I found the ramshackle house in the Bronx where her brother Joe and his family lived. I knocked on their door and Joe’s wife Macy opened the door. When I told her who I was, she invited me in, made me sit down at her kitchen table, offered me tea. She told me about Frances’s illness, about the cancer that had spread quickly and how she had told nobody about it until it was too late for treatment.
“She loved you,” Macy said to me, covering my hand with hers. “She always told me how you brought her something whenever you came back from school. She loved those candies more than you’ll ever know.”
Even then, I didn’t allow myself to cry. I couldn’t show this kind woman how much Frances had meant to me.
“In the end, she talked about you a lot. She wanted to say goodbye to you, but she didn’t know how to contact you at school, she didn’t want to upset you. She knew Mrs. Waterstone wouldn’t like it.” Macy got up and fetched something from another room. She came back with a mug that I had once gifted Frances over Christmas, it was a cheap gift shop purchase that simply said I love you, with a red heart in place of the word love.
“After she collapsed, she came back here. She had only a few things. This was among her belongings.”
I had never confronted my mother about her coldness, and her inhuman treatment of Frances, who had been such a comfort to me when she could not. But finding out what she had tried to do with Lauren, brought it all back again.
When I arrived home, she wasn’t there.