It faded when I saw the look on his.
“No one calls me Ranger but my mom and my aunt,” he went on.
His mom.
My heart started beating fast.
And hard.
“Her name was Lisa Michelle Hutchison.”
Oh God.
This was always how he started his tales of woe when it came to females.
“And my dad’s name was Jonathan Walter Hutchison.”
This addition did not bode well.
“Okay,” I said gently.
The intent look in his eyes was scaring me.
“You have to know this, Mabel.This formed me.”
No less scaring me.
“I should have told you before,” he said.“But now,”—he waved his fork between us—“this is real.You need to know.”
“I’m right here and not going anywhere, honey.So if you want to tell it, tell it to me.”
“She was the best mom ever.”
That wasn’t what I was expecting.
He sat back in his chair.“She cut eyeholes in one of her scarves.She’d wrap it around her eyes so she could be the villain.Tie a towel around my shoulders so I could play the superhero.And I’d catch her being a bad guy and save the day.”
“That’s sweet,” I said very quietly, because I had a strange feeling it wasn’t.
“She got down on the floor and helped me build shit with Lego.She zoomed my race cars with me throughout the house, laughing and shouting and cheering.And she’d walk right into my class at school, announce grandly, ‘Ranger has somewhere to be,’ take my hand, and we’d go get ice cream.Go buy candy.Go home and make a mess while we made cookies.Go to the toy section of the store and she’d say,”—he suddenly threw his long arms wide, making me jump—“‘Take your pick, my boy, and it’s all yours.’”
I abandoned my food, grabbed my mug, and sipped coffee as I listened.
“Then I got older,” he said.“And I realized it might be weird for your mom to take you out of school just to get ice cream or make cookies.”
Here it was.
“And then I got even older, and I heard Dad discussing…he was alwaysdiscussing.Not fighting.Not shouting.He did everything he could not to trip her trigger to pull some shit.But I heard him discussing how she had to stop doing that.‘He’s hardly going to fall behind missing one afternoon,John,’ she said, even though it wasn’t just one afternoon.Then he told her, if she absolutely had to do that, then she had to go to the office and tell them she was taking me.Not swan through the halls and just grab me from class.”
“She didn’t even tell administration?”I asked, shocked.
“Lisa Hutchison did whatever she damned well pleased.”
Bitter had crept into his tone, and not a little of it.
And it didn’t leave when he kept talking.
“As it goes, I got even older.But it was only much later, when I was an adult, when I realized she was a performance mom.Going through the motions.Making them memorable.Because for the most part, she wasn’t around.She was a vague memory of the scent of her perfume and the sight of her red lipstick.Only when that memory started fading would she show up again and make a big show of being the best mom ever.I didn’t know if it was so I wouldn’t forget her when she took off or if she thought she was making up for something.I still don’t know.”
