If she saw me with her. If she saw what I did to her. How I vandalized her virgin mouth that’s been taunting me ever since I saw her at the bar.
No one’s ever touched me there. Before.
Jesus Christ.
“I thought my son wasn’t a quitter,” my mother continues, and I finally get enough sense gathered to understand what she’s talking about.
She’s talking about her sister, Sarah.
Nother.
She’s talking about the girl I’ve been with for eight years. The girl who betrayed me. The girl who made a fool out of me. The girl because of whom I’m a failure.
As I turn to face my mother, my reckoning, all the peace, all the warmth from the past hour is gone.
Instead, I feelthem.
I feel the bugs crawling and scratching at my skin. I feel hot under my collar. I feel the jitters.
I feel the shame.
That’s what it is. This sensation is shame.
This is what my mother always reduces me to and that’s why I didn’t want to come to this house.
That’s why I didn’t want to talk to her.
Because I knew what I would find when I looked into her eyes.
Grave disappointment.
The woman who made me perfect. Who taught me to never make mistakes.
Who hauled me to practices, to all my games until I learned to drive myself. Who would stay up late at night to check on myhomework, to make sure that I was prepared for a test, until I could handle it all by myself.
My mother.
“I’m not a quitter,” I tell her with clenched teeth.
I’m not.
She’s made sure that I’m not. It has been her life’s work.
It has beenmylife’s work.
“Aren’t you? What do you call this then? What you did tonight.” My mother comes forward, shaking her head. “I gave you everything. I gave you all that I could and it was hard, Arrow. After your father’s death, raising a boy all alone was hard. Raising a boy who could walk in his shoes was harder. But I made sure that you did. I made sure that I kept your father alive in you. That I never let him die. I made sure you had every opportunity to succeed, to be the best. To be the kind of son your father and I would be proud of. But look at you now.
“Your career is hanging in the balance. You’re going to therapy for your issues.Issues I didn’t even know you had. And you broke up with the girl you were going to marry. What do you call it, if not quitting?”
She cheated on me.
I want to shout at her.
I want to scream that she fucking cheated.
And she did it with my best friend, and she did it for months.
I trusted her.
