It looked like my mother. Olive skin, sleek, dark bun, “Sarah Conner circaTerminator 2” arms. But the alien had made one fatal mistake: the apron.
“Try to tell me you come in peace.”
“For heaven’s sake, Jolene, you almost gave me a heart attack.” My mother, the alien, waved me off and bent back over the giant pot she was stirring on the stove. Keeping to the perimeter of the kitchen, I edged closer until I reached the prep sink in the island. I ran water over my fingers, then flicked the droplets at her.
“Stop it, Jolene. What’s wrong with you?”
“Hmm, so you sawSigns, too. I always thought that aliens with a water vulnerability coming to a planet that’s two-thirds covered with the stuff were too stupid to live anyway.”
“Is that was this is? You think I’m E.T.?”
“More like the queen fromAliens.” I fished the candle lighter from a drawer and flicked the flame to life. “And I’m Ellen Ripley.”
“You watch too many movies.”
“Someone had to raise me.”
My mother, the alien, paused, then turned to me. “It hurts me when you say things like that.”
In another life, in another movie, that lilt of pain in her voice would have brought me up short. But this wasn’t a charming character piece where the mother and daughter fought before one of them broke the tension with a well-aimed handful of flour that devolved into a laughing food fight and a tender reconciliation by the end of the scene. My mother and I didn’t do tender, and if I had any doubt about her motives that day, the tiny brown glass bottle that she tried to surreptitiously tuck back into her apron pocket cleared me of them. The contents of my stomach turned cold and familiar. That bottle didn’t belong in a kitchen.
I opened my mouth, then shut it, then opened it again. “Sorry.”
“How was school? Soccer practice?”
“Enlightening, as always.” My hands went clammy as I stared at the bulge in her apron. “How was... What do you do again?”
My mother, the alien, ignored that question. “Are you hungry?”
My stomach clenched. “Wrong. My mother would never ask that question. And she doesn’t own an apron.”
“She does, actually. She used to cook before you were born. Some anyway.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She lifted a spoon from the pot and held it out for me to taste.
I eyed the soup. Like my mother, the alien, it looked completely harmless on the outside, but I knew better.
Her hand shook when I didn’t respond. “It’s minestrone soup. I made it for you.”
“You first.”
The spoon slammed down on the counter, and boiling orange liquid splattered everywhere. “Dammit,” she whispered. There were tears then. “Why can’t you be good and easy? Why can’t you smile and eat a bowl of soup?Dammit.”
My whole body trembled as I watched her. I didn’t know for sure what she’d put in the soup, but something between too-sick-to-go-to-Dad’s and not-sick-enough-to-warrant-a-hospital-visit was a fair assumption. She’d done it before—not often, but enough that I no longer ate anything she’d had prior access to on these weekends. “You burned your hand.”
“I know I burned my hand.” Red welts were rising along the backs of her knuckles and down her wrist. “It was just soup, Jolene.”
It was never just anything.
“It’s ruined now.” She lifted the massive pot—which held enough soup to feed a dozen people—and dumped the whole thing down the sink. Tiny vegetables and little half macaronis clogged the drain, preventing the orange liquid from disappearing fast enough. She turned and slid to the floor. “Why wouldn’t you eat it?”
Watching her, my stomach was churning like I already had. “You’ve never made me soup. You’ve never made me anything.”
“I’m not an alien.”
But she had to be; a real mother wouldn’t do this. “That’s what an alien would say.”
