Page 4 of Insta-Love

Mum’s breath tickles my ear as she peers over my shoulder. “Shame.”

“Cougar,” I mumble.

She chuckles and steps toward the door. “Come on. We can go sit out the back in the sun until it’s time for me to head off to work.” She nods toward the covered window. “He’s not going anywhere in a hurry. You’ll have plenty of time to ogle him now he lives next door.”

We spend the next two hours moving between the afternoon rays and the shade of the outdoor area when it gets too hot. All the while, banging continues next-door as our new neighbour unpacks the trailer, followed by the throaty sound of his vehicle coming and going with and without the rattly trailer.

Mum talks about pointless topics such as current TV shows, the stories in the news, and the new shopping complex being built down the road. It’s our dance, the same thing Mum and I have done for years. We chat about everything and nothing all at once, avoiding the hard-hitting subjects. Which is why she takes me completely by surprise when she swivels in her seat and hits me with the home run.

“Have you ever tried to track Glen down, to get him to pay child support for Lily?”

My gaze drops to my hand, and I pick at a cuticle until it bleeds. “Once.”

“When?”

“A few years ago. When she asked me what he was doing, why he never came to see her.” I stare out at Mum’s impeccably planted garden full of green natives. “I thought he should have to answer that, not me.”

“And?”

“I searched Facebook, but couldn’t find his profile without going through hundreds of ones with the same name. His sister’s profile is private, and I don’t think his parents are on there.”

Mum frowns, resting her head on her hand as she reclines on the lounger. “Did you perhaps think of doing it the old fashioned way and going to his parents’ house?”

I sigh. Yeah, I thought of it. But facing up to my past like that always seemed too brutal. His parents never visited, never once tried to make contact after Lily was born. What did that tell me about how they’d receive me if I just showed up one day demanding to know where their son was?

“I didn’t have the guts to try.”

She clicks her tongue and sits up straight. “Do you want me to?”

I snap my head her way. “No!” Life without Glen is good. Sure, an added pay cheque would help with raising Lily. Shit, it probably would have meant I didn’t have to move back home. But the complications that come with introducing him into our life? No thanks.

Lily stopped asking where her daddy was years ago. And I stopped caring.

“I wondered how he would eventually break your heart,” she says, staring off at a dragonfly that floats on the breeze above the fence. “You were so smitten with him, and he always acted like he cared for you. But that boy had a silver tongue. He told your father and I everything we wanted to hear. He manipulated and lied to have you to himself.”

“So why, after all that effort, did he just up and leave us when he should have wanted us the most?” I ask her the question that’s plagued me for eight years. The question I’d do almost anything to have the answer for.

“I don’t know.” Age has wearied my mother’s face, but the one thing that’s stayed constant over the years are how crisp and hard her grey eyes can be when she’s angry. “I’m just glad you had the sense back then to set your pride aside and come back to us for help.”

“I had nowhere else to go and a baby that needed warmth and shelter, Mum.”

“If you’d wanted to bad enough, you could have found crisis housing, something other than us. But you came home, and that told me just how much Glen had been inside of your head.”

I reach out between our seats, and she takes my offered hand. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch back then.”

She gives my palm a squeeze. “You were young and head over heels in love. As far as you knew it was the greatest time of your life. You didn’t have the wisdom back then that came with age to know any different.”

“It was good when I was blind to it all,” I agree. “I sometimes wonder where we’d be now if he had come back to the hospital that day.”

Lily hadn’t even been an hour in the incubator when Glen stepped out.

He’d taken me up to the ward the minute we knew that something was wrong, having driven us to the hospital in a stolen car. Neither of us had money for a taxi, or to pay for the ambulance service. He stayed while they ran the standard tests to see how far along I was and pumped me with painkillers. He held my hand while the emergency surgical team was called in at three in the morning. And he waited in scrubs while our daughter was born by caesarean section and whisked away before either of us had a chance to hold her. It wasn’t until we sat on the ward, alone, staring at an empty plastic cot beside my bed that should have held our newborn that he left. “I need to move the car before it’s spotted,” he’d said. I’d nodded, knowing that if he were arrested for theft he’d miss out on so much.

Little did I know he’d planned on missing out on it all.

“Lily wouldn’t be half the young girl she is today,” Mum says in response to my question. “She gets her steadfastness from your strength. She models herself on what she sees in you.”

I swallow back the restriction in my throat. She is amazing. I count my blessings that I was gifted such a bright and compassionate child. I just can’t agree that she gets that from me.

“She’s still young,” I point out. “I’ve got her teenage years to get through yet.”

“That you do. But unlike me, darling, you have experience as a delinquent child, so I have no doubt you’ll be able to handle it a lot better than I did if she doesn’t take those years well.”

“I can only hope.”

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