The Milk of Human Kindness

by Lori L. Lake

  The next day my mother called me. She still had lots of questions—not about the lesbian thing, but about the published writer thing. She actually sounded proud of me. During the conversation, we did a little walk down memory lane. She discussed all the guys who’d proposed to me over the years. “I could never see you with that one, but Greg, now he was the one for you.”

  When I pointed out that Greg was also gay, she stumbled a little. This was a different world than the one she’d grown up in. And she wanted me to know something—to make her position clear: She didn’t approve of my “lifestyle.” She never would. She thought it was wrong and felt that one day, I’d understand that too.

  I listened to her, let her talk as long as she needed. She deserved an opportunity to express her feelings. But when she was done, I said, “I didn’t tell you what I told you last night to seek your approval, Mom. I just needed you to know. And one day, I hope you’ll see that my choice was a good one—the right one for me.”

  And that was it. We never really talked about it again.

  In the coming years, as I continued to write, my mother grew ever more proud of my accomplishments as a writer and a writing teacher. When my tenth book was published, she sat next to me at the publication party as I signed books. She attended other publication events, too, always sitting right next to me at the table. I look upon those moments now as golden.

  My mother died in March of 2000. The months before her death were hard ones for her. She was as frail and thin as a sparrow. When I came to visit, to bring food to prepare for her, to strip and put clean sheets on her bed, or to look through a photograph album as we sat together on the couch, I always had the sense that she was looking at me hard—trying to memorize me. Though we agreed on very little, we did agree on one thing. We loved each other. I understand now that that love was the bridge over which we met and talked, and finally, where we healed the wounds of our differences.

  ***

  ABOUT LOIS CLOAREC HART

  Born in 1956 in British Columbia, Canada, Lois Cloarec Hart grew up as an avid reader, but didn’t begin writing novels until later in life. Several years after joining the Canadian Armed Forces, she received a degree in Honours History from Royal Military College, and on graduation switched occupations from air traffic control to military intelligence. Having married a CAF fighter pilot while in college, she went on to spend five years as an Intelligence Officer, before leaving the military to care for her husband, who was ill with chronic-progressive Multiple Sclerosis.

  Lois’s first book, Coming Home, was a fictionalized version of her life with her late husband. Initially her writing was therapeutic exercise to deal with the difficulties of caring for a quadriplegic, bedridden loved one. She wrote by his bedside, whether he was in the hospital or at home and says, “My husband lived long enough to see the book come out with his picture on the cover, but passed away before the second book was published.” While editing Coming Home for publication in early 2001, Lois met the woman who would become her wife in 2007.

  In 2010, Lois’s novel, Kicker’s Journey, received a Goldie for Best Historical Romance from the Golden Crown Literary Society, the Independent Publisher Book Awards "IPPY" Bronze Medal, the Rainbow Award for Excellence First Place Win in the Historical category, and the novel was Lesbian Fiction Readers Choice Award Winner.

  Lois and her wife commute between Calgary, Alberta, and Atlanta, Georgia.

  Grandmother’s Cup

  Fiction by Lois Cloarec Hart

  IT WAS HER great-grandmother’s cup, now the last surviving dish of a set that had been carefully packed a century before for a journey from the Old World to the New. The porcelain was wafer-thin and chipped, and the hand painted English roses had long ago lost their luster, but Meredith cherished it. She had hoped to pass it along to her only daughter, and then, God willing, to see it in the hands of a granddaughter some day.

  Now, as they had done so often in the past, she cradled the teacup with hands that had surrendered the smooth suppleness of youth. Fragrant steam curling up from the old cup whispered around Meredith’s face as she bowed her head, stubbornly fighting the tears that had threatened to overwhelm her time and again on this terrible morning.

  The dreams she had nourished since her daughter Danielle’s birth thirty-six years before had just been shattered in one bitter confrontation. What was it called? Oh yes, ‘coming out.’ It was such an innocuous phrase for the words that had left her heartsick, and as bereft as if her youngest child had just died.

  After presenting her husband with three sons, Meredith had been delighted when their fourth and final child was a girl. She’d had no illusions about her own place in the universe. She would not change the world. Her name would not outlive her. She would leave no legacy but her children and their children. And that was fine with her.

  She knew that inevitably her boys would forget the old tales she had told them as youngsters, but she had faith her daughter would carry her mother’s stories on to the next generation. That had always been the only immortality of the women in her family.

  Meredith was satisfied to be what she was: a devoted, God-fearing wife and mother, living a quiet, unspectacular life in the suburbs. She loved her stolid husband and boisterous sons, but though she strove to be an even-handed parent, she had always reserved a special love for her youngest child.

  She wondered now if God was punishing her for that—for loving her daughter more profoundly and powerfully than she loved her Heavenly Father.

  “Please...don’t take her away from me.”

  It was a prayer...it was a plea...it was her heart speaking directly to the God she had worshipped devoutly all her life, but the only sound in the kitchen was the steady ticking of the old clock over the sink. No sense of peace filled her. No sudden insight illuminated her thoughts. Time did not roll back, and the sound of her daughter slamming out of the kitchen vowing not to set foot in her mother’s house again until hell froze over still echoed in her ears.

  A tiny, bitter smile, no more than a barely distinguishable quirk of her lips, broke the frozen plane of Meredith’s face. Dani had always been volatile, so unlike her staid parents. All of her children had inherited a mercurial temperament, though God only knew from whom. It had been a source of both frustration and intrigue to the older woman, as she watched her exuberant brood grow and thrive.

  How she, the epitome of peaceful domesticity, had borne and raised such a pack of extroverts was beyond her, but she was proud of every one of them, especially the daughter who overachieved her way into an early high school graduation and a plethora of scholarships to the colleges of her choice.

  In the years that followed, while her brothers embarked on more traditional paths of careers and marriages, Dani traversed the globe, acquiring degrees and taking up new professions as easily as most people took up golf. She had a restless energy never satisfied by conventional measures of success, and no six-figure income, impressive title, or corner office ever appeared to sate her inner drive.

  Dani’s return to her hometown the previous year had shocked Meredith. Convinced that it would only be a matter of time before her vagabond daughter moved on again, she resolved to simply enjoy the younger woman’s presence for as long as she was in the area. Much to her surprise, Dani had apparently settled quite contentedly into a job advocating for literacy and educational opportunities for underprivileged youth.

  Her daughter quickly reintegrated with a circle of old friends and her brothers’ families, and appeared to genuinely enjoy the abundance of nieces and nephews that inundated every family gathering. It gave Meredith hope that perhaps her daughter was finally ready to settle down and raise her own family. She tentatively suggested a few nice, church-going men as potential dates, but Dani gently stonewalled her, good-naturedly informing her mother that she was perfectly capable of conducting her own social life.

  Unwilling to push, Meredith backed off, and resorted to listening carefully at family functions t
o glean bits of information. It wasn’t that her daughter was particularly reticent, but eavesdropping generally produced a fuller picture than Dani’s edited version of her daily life. As the fly on the wall, she learned about the joys and frustrations of her daughter’s work. She became well informed on the abysmal record of her daughter’s softball team, and she now knew in intimate detail about her daughter’s Doberman’s abscess, but there was nary a word about any gentlemen callers.

  If Dani talked about anyone, it was her best friend, Adrienne. They had picked up their childhood friendship again with an ease at which Meredith marveled, given the 19-year lapse in their relationship.

  Rising from the table, Meredith carried the teacup to the sink and watched the amber stream swirl down the drain, her mind finally contemplating the realities she had nervously ignored for so long.

  Adrienne was the only child of her best friend, Iris, who lived right next door. As young wives, Meredith and Iris had both moved into a brand new subdivision forty years earlier, and through the years they forged an iron-clad friendship. Both would drop everything to help in emergencies, and they had each honoured the other in naming their daughters.

  Meredith had been there for Iris through the sorrow of two miscarriages before her friend was finally able to have Adrienne. And it was Iris who had called the ambulance and stayed right with Meredith the day her husband, Gary, collapsed in the backyard with a non-lethal heart attack. Meredith had been prepared to provide moral support for her best friend when Adrienne confessed her orientation to her mother the day after high school graduation, but Iris hadn’t needed the traditional consolation of chocolate-iced brownies and a friendly shoulder to cry on. She cheerfully accepted her daughter’s pronouncement, and through the years had even occasionally fixed up her mortified child with eligible young women, though to Meredith’s knowledge, Adrienne had remained resolutely unattached.

  Iris had confided that she had been sure that Adrienne was gay pretty much from the moment she was sent home from school for beating up a bully who preyed on the other girls for their lunch money. Privately, Meredith had shaken her head, as she had done many times watching her best friend’s liberal, laid back, free thinking, child raising practices. She would never have criticized Iris openly, but, though she suppressed it firmly, she couldn’t help feeling the slightest tinge of moral superiority when comparing her more conventional children to Adrienne.

  Iris’s daughter had been the neighborhood tomboy and had endlessly instigated adventures through the fields and playgrounds of their children’s youth. Despite the age difference, Meredith’s three sons, Brad, Bill, and Brian, had followed Adrienne’s lead as eagerly as Dani.

  Dani.

  Staring out the window at the neatly cut lawn and the hedge separating Iris’s back yard from her own, Meredith grimly forced herself to reevaluate Dani’s childhood. There had been piano lessons, and dancing recitals, and pretty, frilly dresses to wear to birthday parties and church, but for all the trappings of femininity, Dani had been as much of a tomboy as her best friend, Adrienne.

  She was more likely to be found playing road hockey with her brothers than amusing herself with the profusion of dolls that generally ended up discarded under her bed. The selection of make-up that her mother bought her for her sixteenth birthday went untouched, discovered by Meredith years later at the back of her daughter’s sock drawer. Dani had been furious when her brothers had all gotten BB guns one Christmas, and she had not. Against her mother’s orders, she had cajoled her middle brother, Billy, into teaching her how to shoot out in the woods behind the subdivision. In her last year at home, she showed up after school one day on an old motorbike she had used all her hard-earned savings to buy. When her parents demanded that she get rid of it, she fought them tooth and nail. She lost, but circumvented their orders by keeping the bike inside an abandoned barn several miles away. She rode it surreptitiously until the day she left home for college, when she’d sold it to Billy for a hundred and fifty dollars.

  Meredith shook her head ruefully. The first thing Dani had done on settling back into her hometown was to conscript Adrienne into chauffeuring her to all the local motorcycle dealerships, until she found a huge black and silver bike that she handled with ease, but which scared her mother half to death. And as always, as she had been all throughout their childhood, Adrienne was Dani’s staunch ally, cagey confidante, and gleeful co-conspirator.

  The two friends were as inseparable now as they had been as children. You just couldn’t keep those two apart. Meredith’s memory turned to the countless times the best friends had begged their mothers to have sleepovers. Had they... No, she didn’t want to know.

  Seizing a dishrag, she dampened it and briskly scrubbed at the already pristine counters. She really didn’t want to know about it at all, but Dani made that impossible today by forcing her to confront the truth she would never have accepted on her own.

  Painfully, her mind resurrected every detail of this morning’s conversation...

  THE OLD SCREEN door screeched, and Meredith paused in finishing up the breakfast dishes to see her daughter burst through the door. Amused as always by Dani’s inability to enter a room quietly, she smiled at the younger woman.

  “Good morning, sweetie. You just missed your father. He’s gone over to help Brad and the boys work on the new deck. I know it’s not the best way to spend a Saturday, but I thought for sure you’d be joining them. Heaven only knows you’re handier with a hammer than Brian and Bill.”

  Her youngest shook her head. “Maybe later, Mom.” Pulling out a chair, she dropped into it, and Meredith winced at the sound of the wood creaking as Dani leaned back on two legs.

  “Oh honey, please don’t do that. One of these days it’s going to break and you’ll end up breaking something, too.”

  Obediently Dani rocked forward and planted her elbows on the table, folding her hands under her chin as she eyed her mother’s preparations for tea. Meredith chatted amiably as she turned on the kettle and, as always when it was just the two of them, pulled out the last two cups of great-grandmother Abigail’s set. It was only as she poured the water over the bags that she realized her daughter had been uncharacteristically quiet, letting her mother carry the bulk of the conversation.

  Curious now, she set a cup in front of Dani and pushed the box of sugar cubes toward her. Settling into a chair across from her daughter, she sipped her tea and waited. She was surprised when the younger woman merely toyed with her tea and didn’t say anything. Typically, within moments of sitting down at her mother’s table, Dani would’ve blurted out whatever was on her mind. As she watched her daughter suck in a deep breath, Meredith became concerned.

  “Honey? Is something wrong?”

  A slow smile played across Dani’s face. “No, actually something is very, very right, and it’s time to tell you about it.”

  Meredith was startled by the gentle glow in her daughter’s eyes and the radiant smile on her lips. She had never seen Dani so suffused with happiness. Suddenly, she bolted upright in her chair.

  “Oh, my heavens! Danielle Iris, you’ve found someone!” Leaning forward, she covered her daughter’s hand with her own. “Oh honey, that’s wonderful! Now tell me all about him. Who is he? Where did you meet him? Is he a local boy? Do I know him?”

  Dani laid one hand over her mother’s and squeezed gently. “I have found someone, Mom. Someone I love like I’ve never loved anyone else in my life. Someone I want to spend the rest of my life with, and...” she met Meredith’s gaze directly, “...someone who feels the same way about me.”

  “Sweetheart, that’s just wonderful! Tell me all about him. I want to know everything!”

  Shifting uneasily, Dani’s gaze swept the kitchen, and Meredith was puzzled by the younger woman’s underlying nervousness. Patiently she waited, determined to accept her daughter’s choice even as she prayed that he wasn’t a married man or someone equally unsuitable.

  When Dani remained silent, she prob
ed gently. “Honey? Talk to me.”

  Abruptly, Dani stood and circled the kitchen until she came to rest with her back against the fridge. Crossing her arms and bracing her legs, she stared at her mother. Despite the unmistakable defiance in her eyes, Dani’s voice was low. “Mom, I’m going to tell you everything, but you have to promise to hear me out, okay? No flying off the handle halfway through. Promise?”

  Somewhat insulted, since she did not consider herself an irrational or unreasonable woman, Meredith nodded her head. She was becoming increasingly concerned at the way her daughter was treating what she had assumed would be a joyful announcement.

  When Dani began to worry at her thumbnail, Meredith knew something wasn’t right, but she stilled her instinct to cross the room and wrap her daughter in a reassuring hug. Whatever it was, they would work it out together. There was no problem her daughter could bring to her that they couldn’t resolve somehow.

  “Mom...” Dani stopped, then tried again. “Mom, there’s something I’ve been keeping from you for a long time. I didn’t really think there was any need to tell you because there were always thousands of miles between home and wherever I was at the moment. And I probably took the path of least resistance. As Billy would say, I was being a goddamned, lily-livered, yellow bellied poltroon.”

  Meredith couldn’t help a smile. She couldn’t begin to count the number of times she had chastised her middle son for his unusual and colourful language as a boy. He delighted in finding insults that his buddies wouldn’t understand, and frequently practiced them on his siblings, at least out of his mother’s earshot.