Lauren frowned. “What do I have to come back to?” Lauren asked. “I’m truly curious, Ma. Because if I remember correctly, my condo has new owners. Am I supposed to…what, make up with Derrick and get back on the wedding train, or go down to Monterey to be an aunt-nannie for Lahn and Derrick’s child? No? Okay, maybe I’m expected to move back in with you and Daddy and act like?—”
“No, no more acting,” Ma Mable said, briskly. “No more acting for you, and no more pretending and accepting for me. I left your Daddy, and I left Lahn. I know it didn’t feel like it, but I always chose you.”
“No Ma! It very much didn’t feel like you were choosing me.” She felt a gentle pressure on her thigh and tried to reel her emotions in. Was she upsetting Deborah? She didn’t want to upset the young spirit, but she couldn’t step back from the precipice.
“Why are you always upending my life?” she shouted, shaking. “You track me across the country and tell me this, expecting me to feel supportive so you can run from your guilt, leaving Daddy there to pick up all the pieces? Because really, who do you ever care about besides yourself and your precious Lahn? What the hell did I do, tell me, since we’re no longer pretending and all. What did I do to make you hate me so much?”
Ma Mable didn’t shout, didn’t get in her face, didn’t smack her. All those things Lauren would’ve expected. No, her mother looked hurt and stunned, two emotions Lauren didn’t recall ever seeing.
Like an automaton, Ma Mable walked to the back of the house, opened the door and stepped out on the back porch, where she sat heavily on the bench swing and looked at the lake.
Lauren felt visceral fear, panic even. Had she gone too far, broken a woman she always believed was unbreakable.
She didn’t know what to do. Go back in the house, ignore her mother, apologize, even though her anger was justified.
She took a deep breath and went to sit next to her mother who folded over, covering her face with her hands, crying.
Lauren’s heart arrested.
She felt like what little safe harbor she had was disintegrating around her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice sounded small, like she was the apparition trying to be heard and seen. She reached her arm around her mother’s back, resting her head against her shoulder and crying with her.
When Ma Mable seemed to be all cried out, she sat up and wiped away Lauren’s tears in much the same way she had all Lauren’s life.
“You’re my world. Always first in how I’ve made the choices I made. Hate you? Baby, my love was the reason you were raised with two parents in one home.”
Her mother sat back and seemed to meditate on the lake, setting the swing into its back-and-forth motion.
“It really is peaceful here,” Ma Mable said.
Lauren took in the lake, the trees, the mountain, Julian’s and Santi’s houses arcing around the shore.
She remembered Santi rising out of the water like Poseidon.
“I’m ready to listen,” Lauren said after a few more minutes of sitting beside her mother, without the intensity of resentment and anger that felt a part of her for a long time.
Ma Mable nodded.
“Woman to woman now?”
“Woman to woman,” Lauren agreed, praying she had the control to resist lashing out again.
“I was proud of you for walking away,” her mother said out of left field. “Even if it hurt to know how bad I hurt you, I was proud that you refused to accept an unacceptable situation from a man that didn’t deserve you. I’m not saying that simply because I never wanted Derrick for you. You were so excited when he proposed, and I didn’t want to be the one to break your heart. When I found out what he and Lahn did, I deluded myself into thinking that you’d forgive them, ignoring that you were always my fire child, unwilling to accept unfair treatment.”
She’d learned it from watching Ma Mable fight injustice her whole life.
“I was wrong not to tell you about Lahn’s pregnancy sooner, and when your daddy told me to stay out of it, to let the three of you work it out, I held my peace, but I thought one of them—Derrick, your daddy, Lahn—one of them, would step up and find the damn courage foronce....” Her mother took a steadying breath. “I’m proud that you were strong enough to walk away. I tried it once by couldn’t stay gone. This time, I said if you were strong enough to leave, to choose yourself, it was time I did the same.”
Lauren pulled back, stiffening. “Wait, you left daddy before this?”
Her mother looked at her long and hard before speaking. “Woman to woman?”
Lauren nodded, but she wasn’t so sure now.
“A child shouldn’t have to suffer for the sins of her parents, that’s what I initially told myself. Lahn’s your half-sister. She’s your father’s biological daughter, and you and I would’ve probably never known about her if Lahn’s biological mother hadn’t passed away.”
“So, when Daddy said Lahn was Uncle Rodney’s daughter, that was a lie?” she asked, feeling numb.
