The maps app says it’s twenty-five minutes to Home Avenue, and even with my sudden devotion to speed limits, I pull into the driveway just twenty-eight minutes later. Much like my last visit, mine isn’t the only car in Mom’s driveway: Kurt’s silver Lexus still sits right where it was. My stomach somersaults. I should’ve known I’d be running that risk, showing up unannounced, but too late now.
When I step up to the front door, I feel a little like I’m preparing to enter my own court hearing rather than my childhood home. My finger hovers over the doorbell, but I can’t make myself press it. Turns out, I don’t have to. The door creaks open before I can work up the courage.
“Hi.” Mom’s voice is short, but her thick, silver hair is longer than I’ve ever seen it. It must’ve been pulled up last time, or else I was too caught up in Kurt to notice.
“Hi, Mom.”
“You’re…here.”
“I am.” I give her a watery smile. There’s a screen door between us, a sieve that our conversation filters through.
“That’s…a surprise.” Mom’s thin brows leap up to her hairline, digging four distinct grooves in her forehead like well-planned rows of a garden.
“Well.” I splay my arms out in a pose that’s usually accompanied by ata-da. Mom doesn’t look impressed. “Do you, uh…can I come in?”
Mom doesn’t say anything, but she does push open the screen door, and once I’m inside, I feel a little more welcome. I haven’t been cut out of any of the family photos on the wall or anything, and if the cops are on their way to arrest me for crimes against mymother’s well-being, she doesn’t let on. Instead, Mom digs back into the cupboard for my favorite mug—the yellow one that we stole from a coffee shop in Michigan when she and I road-tripped up to see Dad play a festival. She doesn’t ask, just fills it most of the way with coffee and then dresses it up exactly right: a splash of oat milk and two packets of sweetener. My heart stings like a scraped knee. It’s been so long, but Mom still knows me so well.
She makes herself a mug of tea, and we walk to the living room—she in a slow, deliberate march, I with a tentative shuffle. Mom sits on one end of the couch, and I opt for an armchair, leaving a coffee table’s width of distance between us. I’m not sure what to say, so I start again with “Hi.”
“Hi.” Mom doesn’t look unhappy, per se, but there’s a visible discomfort in how she’s situated on the couch, shrinking into the armrest like she’s hoping to slip between it and the cushion.
In my kindest, most even-tempered voice, I ask. “Where’s Kurt?”
“Upstairs.”
“He can come down, if he wants.”
Silence. Mom frowns and dunks her tea bag. “I wasn’t sure he’d be invited.”
“It’s not my house,” I remind her. “I don’t choose the guest list.” After a beat, I add, “How’s he doing?”
“He’s great. The band is excited about the show.” Mom dips her chin. “They’re hoping you’re still going to attend.”
“Of course I’m coming.” I’m offended she’d ever think otherwise.
“Well, we hadn’t heard from you, so we weren’t sure.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” I insist, but it stings to realize she has no reason to believe me. How many times have I told her I wouldshow up only to cancel at the last minute? There’s a lump in my throat that the coffee can’t wash down, and I abruptly change the topic. “I love what you’ve done with the living room.”
Mom’s frown pulls her whole face toward the floor, but her eyes stay firmly on me. “I haven’t done anything to the living room.”
“Really? Didn’t there used to be something in the back corner? A plant or something?”
“Yeah,” Mom says flatly. “The Christmas tree.”
Right.
After Dad’s funeral, I stayed with Mom for three weeks. I don’t remember whether we discussed it, but it just didn’t seem right for either of us to be alone. Once I moved back home to my apartment, I still had built-in reasons to come back every month for a while—Mom’s birthday, then Dad’s, then Thanksgiving, all spent crying and reminiscing at Mom’s kitchen table. Christmas was for fielding weepy phone calls from distant relatives while eating my weight in peppermint bark. It was exhausting. Then it was New Year’s, and the world rang in a fresh year that Dad would never see, but it also was no longer the year my dad died, and it never would be again. Mom wanted to keep up with the crying and reminiscing, but I didn’t. It hurt too much. I had to look forward. I had to focus on myself. But I’d left her there in the hurt, all by herself.
“I’m sorry.” I barely recognize the tender, shaky voice as my own. It feels silly to tell her that I don’t want to feel this—who would? But I know that I don’t have a choice. I’m still learning how to feel, how to sit with a pain that I’m certain will kill me if I don’t run from it or numb it or pack it away. All I can choke out is “It’s sohard, Mom.”
“I know.” Mom’s eyes are glossy with tears. “It’s hard for me, too. To live here without your dad.”
I drop her gaze and fall right into a wave of nausea.Right.I got to walk away from the place where Dad died. Mom still has to wake up here every morning, to find a way to move through her day-to-day without him.
I choke out a question I don’t really want the answer to. “So does Kurt…live here now?”
Mom shakes her head no. “Kurt and I…” She steeples her fingers and rests them against her lower lip, and when her eyes flutter closed, she looks like she’s praying, asking God for the right thing to say. She draws in a deep breath through her nose and says, “When you stopped by and surprised us…that’s not how we wanted you to find out.”
