by Jacquie Gee
“It’s all right, darling. These things happen,” she says.
But they don’t. Or they shouldn't if I were paying attention. How could I not know what’s been going on? How could I have been so busy with my life that I hadn’t realized what’s happening in hers, to what degree she’d been slipping? Or that she had even started… The least I could have done was remember the stupid cupcakes!
I look up, fighting back tears as I text Tia the note.
“Would you like some tea?” She strides forward, away from me, again looking bewildered. She squints, her eyes glazing over, in search mode once more, and my blood runs cold.
“I’ll get it,” I say, and dash ahead of her.
She turns and scowls at me, dagger-blue eyes piercing straight through me, as if I’m a child again, in need of scolding for going too close to the river. “I know how to make tea,” she snaps. “I don’t need your help.”
I’ve upset her again, insulted her. I don’t know what to do with all this…whatever this is.
“Of course you do, Mom, I just thought—”
“Why do you keep calling me that?” She glares back at me, irritated.
I gasp.
She reaches the cupboards and takes down two cups. “Two creams, one sugar, correct?"
She floats back in again, her expression light and airy. I don’t take cream. I never have. And I don’t like sugar in my tea. Two cream, one sugar was how she served it to Dad. “Sure,” I say, not wanting to argue.
She shoots across the kitchen in search of sugar, ambling through the broken porcelain cup again, looking shocked when the shards bite her feet. “Now, how did that happen?” she questions the air in front of her. My heart seizes in my chest. She looks dismayed and unmoored, lost in her own house. Her gaze quickens and she wrings her hands.
“I’ll get that, Mom.” She strides forward, and I bolt ahead of her. “You get on with the tea.” I’m pleased to find a broom and dustpan in the hallway closet, then scoot back and sweep up the mess before she has the chance to wander through it again. The water boils, and the kettle sings. I deposit the shards in the garbage.
“Did you break a cup?” Mom asks, reaching for a pan and filling it with water, then sets it on the element of the stove to boil like it’s 1940 or something, even though the kettle is still singing. My nerves jump in my wrists. "I wasn't expecting you, was I?" she says. Her brows crossly knit.
“Mom, the water’s done. The kettle’s boiled.” I point.
“You do it your way. I’ll do it mine.” She fills the pan with water from the tap. “Why have you come anyway? You didn’t call.”
“No, I—didn’t. I thought I’d surprise you. You know.” I roll my hand in the air, aimlessly. “I thought I might stay for a while this time.”
“Why?” She whirls around. “Is something wrong?” She looks at me hard.
Is something wrong? What does she mean, is something wrong? Everything’s wrong. “No,” I lie, my voice nearly inaudible. I place the broom and dustpan back in the closet. “I just—I just thought I’d take some time off, you know… I’ve been working hard. And besides, we don’t get nearly enough time together anymore.” My eye twitches. I'm not good at lying.
Mom scrunches her brow and purses her lips. “Penny called you, didn’t she?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me, Missy. I always could tell when you were lying.” She takes a clean plate down out of the cupboard and dries it with a dishtowel, even though it’s not wet.
“It was Mrs. Peterson, actually.”
“Martha. That busybody.” Mother drops the plate into the sink. She pulls another out of the clean cupboard and starts drying it. “It’s not as bad as they’re letting on, you know,” she states firmly. “I just forget to turn the oven off from time to time. There’s no sin in that. Who my age doesn’t? I am getting older, you know.”
“I know, Mom, but—”
“It’s just like them. They’re always embellishing things.” She frowns. “You know how people are in this town.” Her gaze implores me to believe her. “So thirsty for gossip. The whole lot of them.” She stuffs the plate in the dishwasher. “They have been after me for years. You mustn’t believe them.”
"I won't, Mom," I say, as the light in her eyes begging me to believe her, intensifies. The light that says, I’m still in here, please don’t abandon me. “I won’t, Mom,” I repeat, the words falling like tears from my lips.
"Good." She smiles and turns back to the oven, opening the door to check on something inside that isn't there. She rises back up, looking confused, then tends to the pan of bubbling water. I gasp and rush forward to help, watching as with shaky hands she pours the scalding water from the pot to the teapot.
“What is it, dear?” She notices my gasp.
“Nothing,” I say my voice a thin thread.
My assurances seem to have comforted her for now, but I worry about what’s ahead for us. What am I going to do? I can’t keep lying to her. I can’t catch my breath. How am I going to handle this? “Who fixed the stairs, Mom?” I change the subject, testing her memory.
“Trent did,” she answers promptly as if she knows I’m quizzing her. She looks at me seriously, as if to say, go ahead, ask me another one, and I get the feeling she’s been tested like this before. "He fixed the whole place up for me. Isn't it lovely?" She raises her arms. "You've met Trent, haven't you?" She struggles to remember. "He's my roomie. The young man from downstairs."
Roomie. Now I’m very worried. “Yes. I just met him.”
“Oh, how’d that happen? And what do you mean, just?”
“It doesn’t matter, Mom.” I shake my head.
“Ah, I see.” Her brightness sours. “You don’t approve?”
“Approve of what?” Her eyebrows dance as she stirs sugar into two empty cups. “Why is he here, Mom?”
“Because he wants to be, I guess.” She turns her back to me. Her shoulder flinches as if to say, back off. “How am I supposed to know why an Aussie would up and emigrate to the land of ice and snow?”
“No, I mean, why is he here, in our house?” I point to the floors.
Mom drops the teaspoon she’s been using into the sink. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She smooths down her jeans and heads for the window.
“Yes, you do. I can tell.” I follow. “Tell me, Mom, what is he doing here?”
She hesitates, her bottom lip quivering.
“It’s all right. I’m a big girl. I want to know the truth.”
“All right then.” She slowly turns, raising a proud, stiff chin. “I decided the place was getting too big for me. So I gave it up to him.”
“You did what?”
“Handed it over.”
“Don’t lie to me, Mother. You did no such thing. You think I lie badly? You’re the worst. Now,” I say, and take her by the hands. “Why did you give up the house?”
“I haven’t.” Her brow arches in that wonky way it always does when she’s reached her anger point. “It was only half.”
“All right then. Why did you give him half of your house?”
“It’s just easier, okay?”
“Easier than what?”
She snaps away from me. “Life. Now, if you please—”
“Mother,” I say, grabbing her arm, “tell me.”
She considers my request a moment, then furrows her brow. “He showed up one day, made me an offer, and I took it. End of story. What’s it matter anyway? You never wanted the house.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You hate it here.”
She sets her jaw, and I can’t argue with her because it’s true.
“Now there’s someone to do the yardwork and the snow removal, and fuss with the customers. Is that so bad?”
“The customers? Is he running the gift shop, too?”
“No. Who said that?” She spins around, angry. It’s clear she’s fading out on me again. “Don’t you go putting
words in my mouth, little Missy.” She folds her arms.
What is with that saying in Heartland Cove?
“So you’re still working the shop?”
“Of course I am. What do you think, I’m an invalid?” She pushes past me to the other side of the kitchen, plucking an apron down from a hook.
Silence moves in on us like a Maritimes storm front.
I approach her slowly. “Mom, I just want to know, why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ask me for help before you—?”
She whirls around. “What? You’re gonna the shovel off the porch all the way from New York, are you? Or come dig out my drive?” She glares.
“Mom, you know what I mean.” I hope…
“Did you just come home to interrogate me?” She folds her arms tightly across her chest. I feel like I’m ten, caught riding my bike after dark.
“No—”
“Well then.” She adds hot water to the cream and sugar mess that she’s been stirring in the cups, and serves me one. “Are we going to have tea, or aren’t we?” Her stern features morph into a pleasant smile, and she's away. "How about we go sit together in the living room, hmmm?" Either she’s forgotten what we were just talking about, or she’s playing me to her advantage. I’m not sure. It’s so hard to know what’s going on here.
“Isn’t it lovely up here?” she says, referring to the apartment, as she plops down into an oversized chair near the window, her tea sloshing over the sides of her cup. “Your father fixed this place up just lovely for me before he died.”
“Mom, Dad’s been gone for years now.” I was ten when he died. It’s just been Mom and me ever since. Surely, she must remember that. She scowls at me, her eyes feverishly darting. Her lips part, but no words come out.
She seems to be here one moment and gone the next, reverting in a flash from present to past.
Grandma’s Victorian gingerbread clock ticks on the mantelpiece, peppering the tense silence that follows.
I scoot forward in my chair and clench my hands. “Have you been to see Doc Carmichael lately?” I ask her, choosing my words carefully.
“No.” She sits back. “Why would I do that?” She looks over at me angrily.
“It’s just that—”
“Doc Carmichael is dead. Been dead for three years. Where have you been?” she snaps. “If you wanna see a doctor these days, you’ve gotta haul yourself all the way up to Fredericton, to the new Chinese fella.” She slurps her tea.
“Mother,” I say.
She swallows. “Doctor Kung Pow or something—”
“Mom!”
“What? That’s his name.” She arches her brows. “Never had Chinese here until the last few years. Now they’re everywhere,” she mutters.
“Mom, you can’t talk like that—”
“Why not?” She wrinkles her lips over her cup. “Is he here?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, then.” She relaxes back. “I didn’t say they weren’t nice people; I just said they were everywhere.” Her brows lift. “Things are so different here now.”
“You mean not everyone is just white anymore?”
She frowns. “I mean, nothing feels familiar anymore.”
I sigh, then draw in a heavy breath. “So, I take it you haven’t been to see this new Chinese doctor.”
“No, I’ve been.” Her voice quavers. She sets down her cup and drums her fingers on the arm of her chair. She bites her lip and fixes her gaze on the seam of her apron, where she picks at a loose thread. Winding it around her finger, she yanks.
“So what did he say?”
“Nothing.” She shrugs.
“Who took you? Penny?”
“No, Pamela did.” Her eyes dart up.
“Pamela? Who’s Pamela?”
“Trent’s waitress from downstairs.”
Waitress? He employs a waitress? But there was no one in the restaurant. “So, it was his idea, then?”
“Whose?”
“Trent’s.”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t yours.”
My cheeks flush. I’m embarrassed. I snap back in my chair. Omigawd, a stranger’s been looking after my mother in my absence.
“He said it wouldn’t hurt to at least go meet the man,” Mother continues. “And some crap about it being nice to have some sort of relationship, just in case I ever needed him."
Clever.
“And?”
“And what?” she snaps.
“What did he say?”
“Who, dear?”
“The doctor.”
She looks confused. “Oh, I don’t know. I can’t remember. I couldn’t understand him." She flips a hand in the air. It's clear she's trying to avoid the subject.
“Did he give you anything?”
“What do you mean?”
“To take?”
Her chin stiffens. “Whatever for?”
“I dunno, for anything?”
Her nails sink into the arms of her chair. She sets her chin and scowls like we’re in some sort of duel, then swallows and stares out the window at our gift shop, refusing to look at me anymore. The muscles at the side of her jaw flex. “I told him I didn’t want any of what he was peddling,” she says firmly. “I’m not a junkie. I don’t take drugs. Let alone what he’s pushing. Never have, never will. Despite what he wants.” She snaps her gaze to me. “I’m perfectly fine, especially now that I’m out from under the burden of the house. It was just the stress I was going through—”
“What stress?”
She ignores me. “Making me nonsensical.” She looks out the window again. “I tell you, leave the oven on a few times, and everyone wants to have you put away. It's nothing I can't get over." She stares straight into my eyes. "I'm a strong woman. I'll be just fine. I've been through worse in my day." Her gaze softens as if pleading. “Don’t look at me like that, you know I have.” Thirty years of hard work and loss, flicker in her eyes.
“I know you have, Mom. But—”
“Don’t get me wrong, he was a nice enough man. I rather liked him. I wouldn’t mind returning. Your father wouldn’t have liked him, though.” She chuckles. “But he’s not as open-minded as I am. I doubt he’ll ever grace his doorstep.”
“Mom, Dad’s been dead for twenty-three years,” I repeat myself.
Her head whips around. She looks lost again. Then she leans forward like she’s got a big secret to share. “Pamela’s Korean, you know,” she whispers.
“She’s what?”
“Korean. Or so they tell me.” She leans back, like the thing about Dad was never said. She plucks another thread loose from her apron seam. “She makes the best meatballs.”
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“Perfectly, why?” She lifts her chin, dragging her gaze from me to the window and back again. “It’s not true, what they said about the river, you know. I only intended to wade in it.”
Chapter 10
So, she did do it. Mrs. Williams wasn’t lying. I fly down the stairs. She did wander close to the river. It’s shallow along the very edge, but then it drops off…like, completely off. The current alone could drag a person to their death. A rush of heat comes over me. I throw open the bottom door, round the corner and am up on the porch before I know it, bursting through the doors of Green Grub.
“Who gave you permission to take my mother to the doctor?” I accost a stunned-looking Trent.
“Ah…”
The door slams shut behind me, glass rattling in the pane.
“Nice to see you again, as always, Becca.” Trent straightens.
“I asked you a question.”
“And I’ll give you an answer, but maybe you’d like to say hello first.” He sets his jaw and crosses his arms.
“Some nerve you have, sending my mother all the way to Fredericton with a total stranger.”
“It wasn’t some stranger. It was Pamela.”
“Oh, so you admit it.” My chin snaps up. Like I have room to hold a gru
dge. I wasn’t even here. I half expect him to say it. “Where is this Pamela creature, anyway?” I look around.
“Right here.” A woman pops out from the back kitchen. Her hair is a mess, half-in, and half-out of a bun. Flour dots her nose.
“I think what you’re going for here is ‘thank you,’” Trent interjects.
“I most certainly am not.” I glare daggers at him. “Why would I be thanking anyone for taking my mother to a doctor without her daughter’s permission?”
“I’m outta here.” Pamela slips back into the kitchen.
That came off more witchy than I’d planned.
“Oh no, you don’t.” Trent reaches back, catching Pamela by the arm. “You were with her. What did the doctor say?” He looks to her.
Pamela’s face tinges white. Her gaze shifts. “I think maybe that should come from your mother,” she tells me.
“Yeah, well, that’s easier said than extracted, as you well know.” I glare, then I shoot them both with a fuel-injected how dare you replace me look, followed quickly by a why did she trust you with her secrets and not me?
Another layer of guilt-icing forms on my skin.
“Fine,” I say, gritting my teeth. “If that’s how you wanna play it.” I back out of my ex-living room, tripping over chairs before reaching the threshold, and fling open the door wide behind me. “I’ll thank you both to stay out of my mother’s affairs from now on. I’m here; I’ll take care of things.”
I storm over the threshold and slam the door, and for one nerve-pinching moment, I worry the glass might break—the glass my great-grandfather secured into place with box-head nails back in 1856.
Out on the porch, I feel small and lonely. I’m not finished, but there's no way I'm going back in there. I swallow my pride and shuffle down the porch steps.
“Well, that went well,” I hear Trent say to Pamela through the door.
Chapter 11
I cross the road and head onto the widow’s walk of the bridge. I need a moment to myself. Perching my elbows on the rail, I look out over the water, battling tears. How could this much have changed since I’ve been home last? I know it’s been a while, but I call Mom twice a week. I wipe my nose with my sleeve.