“I can’t believe you’re doing this!” She throws down her white napkin on her half-eaten risotto. “You’re selfish. That’s what you are!”
I inhale deeply through my nostrils. “Mom, Donavan agrees—”
“First, Steven, and now Donavan! Throwing away every good man that lands in your lap—” How Steven remains a topic of conversation this far out is beyond reason. I roll my eyes but she continues on and on. “I swear, you’re just like your father. You always do this, Julia!”
“Do what? Get on your nerves? My God, Mom, you’ve hated me since I was eight.” I don’t bother lowering my voice, so the table next to us all shift their gaze to us with horrified eyes.
“That’s not true!” Mom hisses as she rises from the table and storms out of the restaurant. I follow after, meeting her out in the frigid March air, damp with spring showers and the concrete grit of downtown Bellevue.
“Is it because I look like him, and I look like his mom?” I don’t have to say who I’m talking about. She knows.
“No...” she breathes out the word, a delicate hand to her forehead. In some other century I picture the hand gloved and supplied with the adjective faint or delicate. The façade makes the fire in me burn even more.
I step forward. “Is it too painful to see his features on my face so you get angry instead of letting yourself be sad?”
She shakes her head, and her gaze drops to concrete. I can’t read her, but I don’t let up.
“You loved Dad, but you hate that I look like him? Is that it? Do I not live up to him?” A man passing by slams into my shoulder and keeps walking. We both ignore him.
“No!” she shouts, then softly says, “No. I loved him so much, and he left us.”
My face twists in confusion. “He didn’t leave. He died—”
“He was leaving!” She tries to stiffen her upper lip, but it trembles and for the first time in the longest time, my mother looks not only defeated but horrifically sad. “He was leaving me, Julia.”
A prickle of a thousand spiders running across my neck makes my thoughts stand still.
“Mom?” It comes out like a question because I feel like she just undid my entire childhood. I thought my father dying ripped us apart. Now, I wonder if we would have just been torn at a different seam.
She pats her cheeks twice as if the pressure will clog her tear ducts. “The last moment I saw your dad he had this terrible expression on his face—this kind of hollow desolation. It was the way his brown eyes shone with sadness... anguish. Then he dropped his gaze and closed the door.”
The hum of the city amplifies the shock.
“Then he died.”
She presses her lips together. “I sometimes wonder if I had pleaded with him to stay for one more minute if he would have gotten on the freeway five minutes later and the drunk driver that hit him would have been a long way away, but... He was the love of my life, Julia. I just wasn’t the love of his.” She shakes her head. “I was so angry at him for abandoning us, and then he wasgone so soon after, that my anger just morphed into sadness. But with you...”
“The anger rested on me.” I nod once. It all makes sense. It doesn’t make it okay, but it all makes a little more sense. I step back, letting the cold brick wall catch me as I lean back. “Did Gramma know?”
“She did.” Mom nods. “And she was so mad at him, and she loved you girls with a fierceness I couldn’t at the time. Then, before I knew it, you were leaning on her and relying on her for things I started to feel incapable of. I vowed to be better with Emily, but I just know it was at the expense of being worse with you.”
“It didn’t have to be that way, though.” My chin trembles with memories of what I could have had with her.
I sense she’s envisioning it too, because Mom starts crying—giant droplets pool in her eyes and they fall one by one. She isn’t a pretty crier, but there’s something cathartically beautiful about seeing her in this vulnerable state.
“I probably should have loved you better.”
“You should have.”
“You were eight.”
“I was,” I agree again, numb with hurt yet broken open by understanding.
“I’m sorry,” she says, tears soaking her face and her hands now holding mine.
I wait five seconds before responding. “I accept your apology. I need some time to process it, but I want you to know that I will forgive you. Because all I’ve ever wanted is for us to get along.”
She takes my shoulders and holds me, murmuring in my hair, “I love you. It’s been so hard, but I love you.”
