Too bad I didn’t have this same clarity when it came to dating Daniel.
My phone chimes inside my purse, which I hung on the back of the chair across from my mom. While she finishes her glass of water, I reach into my bag and silence the cheery ringtone I’d assigned to Daniel soon after we started seeing each other.
“Don’t you want to answer that?” Mom asks. “Your phone’s been ringing most of the day. It could be important.”
“Not more important than spending time with you and Katie.”
As for Daniel, he’s left one message after another on my phone. The first few were filled with pleas for me to give him another chance to make things right again. Then he left another, awkwardly asking what our breakup might mean to the agreement we have with Jared and his half of the money I’m due to receive.
I haven’t listened to any of his messages since. I don’t want to think about Daniel or the agreement or anything else, except the pleasant day I’ve enjoyed with my family. The truth is, I needed the uninterrupted time together with my mom and my niece more than they could possibly know. I needed to remind myself what matters.
I glance at six-year-old Katie, who looks so much like my sister Jen it breaks my heart sometimes. “You promised to start on your homework before dinner, remember?”
She rolls her eyes at me and slides off the chair with a dramatic sigh. “Okaaay.”
Drink in hand, she shuffles out of the kitchen, then her footsteps lightly thump up the stairs toward her bedroom.
I slowly shake my head. “She may gripe about studying, but her teacher told me at our last conference that Katie’s one of the top students in her entire grade.”
“She’s a smart one, like you.” Mom smiles at me, letting go of a wistful sigh. “Jen’d be real proud of her, wouldn’t she?”
“Yeah, she would.” My sister was no slouch when it came to her studies, either, but as the situation at home spiraled downward with my father’s drinking and violence, her schoolwork suffered. Eventually, everything began to suffer until one day she was gone. I gesture to the empty water glass in front of my mom. “Want some more?”
She nods, dabbing at her moist brow again. “Thank you, honey. You take such good care of me. Katie, too. You’ll make a wonderful mother one day.”
I scoff. “I don’t know about that, Mom. You could be waiting a long time before you get any grandchildren out of me.”
I balk at the idea, mainly because it’s never seemed further out of reach. I thought Daniel might finally be someone I could see in my life for the long term, someone steady and reliable. Someone I could trust with my heart and my future.
Now, I’m not even sure I could trust him with my car keys.
My mom stares at me with a tender look in her eyes when I return with her refilled glass. “I’m sorry I wasn’t a better mother to you and your sister. I think about it so often, you know? All the things I could’ve done differently. All the times I should’ve been stronger—for you girls, if not for myself.”
“No, Mom. Don’t blame yourself for anything that happened. You did the best you could for us. I know that. I think Jen knew it, too.”
She glances down, her brow furrowed. It takes her a long moment before she speaks. When she does, her voice is small. “You don’t know how often I prayed for your father to finally kill himself. I should have packed up you girls and taken you as far away as I could instead of wishing for God to save us. I didn’t have enough money for us to leave. No family to help us, or give us somewhere to stay. I couldn’t bear the thought of raising you girls in a shelter somewhere, or worse, on the streets.”
I reach out to her, gently laying my hand over her frail, trembling fingers. Her skin is cool, almost cold, beneath mine. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” She lifts her head, an almost palpable remorse written in every line of her face. “I should have protected you and Jennifer, whatever it took. Instead I just prayed for a miracle to save us. I prayed for him to die that night, Mellie.”
She doesn’t have to say anything more than that. I close my eyes, hearing the screams that filled the car. Feeling the sudden crash of impact, the horrible roar of twisting metal and breaking glass.
“I didn’t realize he could be capable of that kind of evil,” she murmurs. “If I had, I would’ve killed him myself.”
“No one could’ve known what he meant to do, Mom.”
“I should have.” She breaks down, letting go of a jagged sob. “I didn’t realize the price of my prayers for him to die would nearly cost me both of you girls, too. Or that eventually, God would answer my failures as a mother a few years later by taking Jen away from me.”
“Oh, Mom, no.” I pull the chair next to her a bit closer so I can sit beside her. “Is that what you think? You didn’t cause Jen’s overdose. She did that to herself.”
I clasp her hand with both of mine and hold it tight as a tear rolls down her cheek. I had no idea she’s been harboring this kind of guilt, not only for my alcoholic father’s abuse of us all and his heinous final act, but for my troubled sister’s long slide into addiction and the accidental overdose that ended her life.
We tried to help her turn her life around. Jen’s doctors and therapists tried to help her. Not even the birth of Katie was enough to give her the strength and willpower required to battle her addiction. Jen was gone by the time her daughter was barely two years old.
“None of it was your fault, Mom. Don’t ever think that.” I let go of her hand and gather her close, trying not to notice how fragile she feels in my arms. “Jen would never blame you. I think she’d be devastated to know you feel this way about what happened to her.”
“I wish I could’ve saved her, Mellie.” Her tears wet my shoulder. Her voice is quiet, choked with emotion. “I wish I could’ve been the kind of mother you both deserved. A strong woman. A brave one.”
