“Her name was Patricia. Patty.” He kept his eyes on the water. “She was kind. Creative. Hardworking. Even quieter than I am, and stubborn as hell. Dad always said she was smarter than both of us, and he was right.” What else to say? “Shehatedparties and public speaking. And she loved us, but she always needed a lot of alone time too.”
God, he was fucking this up. But how the hell could he adequately explain his mom to someone who’d never met her and never would, when his memories would always be those of a child? When he’d only rarely attempted to encompass her in words before, even in his own mind?
“She was an introvert, then.” Maria’s fingers interlaced with hiswarmed him in a way he couldn’t entirely grasp. To an extent that shouldn’t have been possible. “Like you.”
He nodded, still unsure what needed to be said, and what could remain his alone for now. What he was even able to say, and what would stick in his throat.
“She worked as a medical transcriptionist, and she was good at it, even though the job bored her.” Some nights across the dinner table, she’d eat in seeming slow motion. Drained and dead-eyed, with nothing to say about her day. “When I was born, she took a few years off, but she went back to her old position once I reached school age.”
Even though it was killing something inside her. A child could see that.He’dseen that.
“Looking back, she was probably depressed, but it wasn’t diagnosed at the time.” Suddenly restless, he lifted his arm from around Maria’s shoulders and dragged a hand through his hair, gripping a fistful at the back of his neck. “Maybe she was just generally frustrated with her life. Her work didn’t interest her. Most of her closest friends had moved away and lost touch. She had a shelf full of travel books, but Dad didn’t see the point of going overseas, because we hadn’t visited all the nearby sights yet.”
In the end, they’d just drive to the Dells again. Inevitably. Even though his mom hated water parks almost as much as public speaking.
“And when she was struggling, when she cried and tried to explain what was wrong, my father didn’t really listen to her. Instead, he’d hold her close and list all the good things in her life.” The story was coming more easily now. Spilling from him in a flood, unfiltered and uncontrolled and full of uprooted ugliness. “I guess as a reminder that she should be happy, because he couldn’tfathom how someone who lived virtually the same existence he did could find it stifling.”
Transcription work is so easy for you, he’d tell her.And just last week, you went to lunch with Janelle, remember? You can always redecorate our house if you get bored, and we can go to the Dells next month if you need a vacation. Everything’s fine, Patty. Why are you so upset?
“He loved her with all his heart, Maria. I mean that,” he added when she looked at him with open skepticism. “But empathy requires imagination, and he didn’t have enough of either.”
Her little nod didn’t necessarily indicate agreement, but she didn’t argue.
“Dad got a promotion when I was in third grade.” With one last tug, he let his hair go. “With his new salary, he made just enough to support all three of us. So she quit her job and used the remaining funds from her parents’ estate to start an interior decorating business.”
Maria’s smile was wide and bright with relief. “Good for her.”
“She’d always been artsy. Creative. Coordinating fabrics and paints and furniture satisfied that part of her.” In his LA home, some of her design sketches were hanging framed on his walls. One of them—the one he found most beautiful; the one he loved the most—he even remembered watching her draw at the kitchen table. “And if she was good at transcription work, sheexcelledat interior decoration.”
Maria tipped her head to the side. “Did she love it?”
“That first year, she was happier than I’d ever seen her before. Smiling. Energetic.”
At the time, he’d thought,It’s like someone turned up her volume.
Over their late-evening family dinners, she suddenly had so many stories to tell, and when she spoke, her voice rang withlaughter and quivered with annoyance and brimmed with professional pride. Her eyes were bright, her appetite fierce. And when he occasionally offered his own stories from school, it felt like she listened more carefully than before.
“She was...” What was the right word? “She waspresentwith us anytime she was home, even though she was working longer hours than she used to.”
“What did your father think of her new business?” Her voice was carefully neutral.
“Dad didn’t get why anyone would leave a steady job with a regular salary to ‘fuss with curtains and wallpaper,’ as he put it, but he didn’t quibble with her decision. Not—” Swallowing hard, he forced himself to continue. “Not until the economy tanked her second year in business, and she stopped getting new clients.”
“Fy fan,” Maria mumbled under her breath.
“She managed for a while, but once she’d operated in the red for a few months in a row...” He lifted a shoulder, as if the end of his mom’s business were no big deal. As if it weren’t, in such painful, terrible ways, the end of absolutely everything else too. “To Dad, there was only one reasonable solution.”
“And that solution was returning to her old job.”
It wasn’t a question but a statement. And she was right, of course.
“He didn’t browbeat her, Maria. But he has this way of framing things where it’s so hard to argue with him, because everything he says makes perfect sense. You leave the conversation convinced that what he’d do in your position is the only safe, sane thing to do, and what kind of foolwouldn’tchoose the safest, sanest path?”
Her brows had drawn together in a pained wince. “So she went back to medical transcription work.”
“Yes.” Scrubbing his face with his hands, he sighed. “It was awful.”
For a time, his mother became a ghost that drifted through their lives. Mournful. Unsettled. Rattling emotional chains only she could hear.