But I didn’t feel like being the one to tell him.
“Yeah, maybe.” Fiddling with my phone, I started toward my room. “I have to make a phone call.”
My mom’s number was dialing before I made it to the top of the stairs.
“Hey, honey, busy day? I tried reaching you a few times, wanted to find out if you’re ready for the snow coming your way,” she asked.
“Busy week.” Closing my door, I fell onto my bed fully prepared to come clean with her on the phone.
I needed to tell someone.
“You OK, Ava?”
Such a loaded question.
“Yeah, Mom, I’m OK. I just, ugh, can I ask you a question?”
The silence that followed was unusual. She always responded immediately.
“This sounds serious. Are you in trouble?” she finally responded.
“No!”
Well, not the type she thought, anyway. Though, I had no idea what trouble she was thinking I was in.
“Well, then what’s up, my darling? Don’t keep a mother on eggshells like this.”
“OK, so when you left Dad, you, umm…Christ, this is hard to talk to your mom about.”
She chuckled through the line.
“Spit it out, babe. We’re both adults, I can take it,” she said.
“Did you have any boyfriends after Dad?”
There was no hesitation in her answer, whether I wanted there to be or not.
“Of course I did. I was just really good at keeping it from you and your sister.” She let out a belly laugh on the other side of theline. “I went on dates, and there was one guy I got kind of serious with at one point. But I chose not to bring even him around. Unless I thought it was going to end in, well, marriage, I didn’t want anyone getting close to you girls and then walking out on us.”
That made sense, and I respected that. It probably would’ve been hard if we’d gotten attached to someone else and then they dipped.
“Why do you ask? Did you think your mom would die a spinster?” She laughed again.
“No…nothing like that.”
I sat back on my bed, surrounded by my pillows as my eyes were drawn to the window. The soft flakes drifted through the sky, lazily making their way to the ground. It was beautiful, but it reminded me of what was waiting for me downstairs and the anxiety ratcheted within.
“Mom, how were you able to be with someone else after Dad? Like, how were you not scared that another guy wasn’t going to do the same things to you? Hurt you…”
The hum of her contemplation was loud through the silent phone line.
“We try to protect our children the best we can as parents,” she said. “But there was no protecting you from what he did, was there?”
The hitch in her voice told me she was crying, and that broke my heart. My intention wasn’t to open old wounds for her.
“Mom…” I barely whispered into my phone.
“I’m OK, baby, it just hurts a momma’s heart to know you had to witness all of that.”
