Page 22 of Plunge

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Thistle

WHEN I GET home, I’m surprised to find my mother is still alone in the house. I had thought my father would be back in town by now for Christmas, but then, why should this year be any different. December 24 is, as he often reminds me, still a business day. Apparently, people sign contracts for engineering services on Christmas Eve.

Mom is in the kitchen working on leg exercises from a chair. She’s got a weight around one ankle and straightens her leg, flexes her foot, sets it back down and pauses to take notes on her tablet. I walk up behind her and kiss her cheek, looking down at the screen. I see that she’s making lists for dinner tomorrow.

“Still trying to make it all perfect for us,” I ask.

She smiles. “Meatballs,” she says, pointing to the screen where she’s typed LENTIL ROAST. “Meatballs,” she repeats. “Shit.”

“Hey, you got a curse word right!” That’s a pretty big deal, considering my mom almost never cursed before the stroke. “Look at you slinging language around like an old sea hag.”

That gets a laugh out of her at least. She pecks around on the screen for a minute, and the robot voice says, “So your date went well I take it?”

I had plenty of time on the train to practice this, but I still feel my cheeks flush with the lies and the omissions. I tell her Antonio was charming, that we walked around a Christmas market, that we stayed out later than the last train so I got a hotel alone and indulged in some cable television.

She waggles her eyebrows at me and says, “sounds nice.”

All the past weeks here together, making such incremental progress toward normalcy, and my mom has used two phrases correctly out loud this morning. It makes me cry, and then I’m not sure why I’m crying, which makes me cry harder.

“God, Mom, you’ve been working so hard,” I blubber. Tears well up in the corners of her eyes, too, and she knocks over her water glass reaching to hug me again. We stand in the kitchen sobbing together until I’m not sure if we’re crying for her, or me, or all of it at once.

I should tell her I saw Fletcher, even if I omit the part where I agreed to marry him to help with his work visa. I should sit down with her and just unload everything I’ve been carrying around all those years, but I don’t. I don’t blame her for what happened. I came to her distraught and pregnant, a few weeks away from leaving for college.

I knew I didn’t want that journey to end with me as a mother. Not then. Not now. She made calls for me and told me she’d take care of me, that nothing had to change. And then we both decided not to tell Fletcher, because we knew he’d drop everything to help, that he’d stay here until everything was taken care of.

And even through my terror that my entire plan was unraveling, I couldn’t bring myself to shred Fletcher’s dreams, too. I was the one who decided to keep it all a secret from him. I can’t put that on my mom. Not then and not now.

Finally, I take some deep breaths and wipe my eyes. “All right,” I say. “What do we need to do to bring some Christmas to this house?”

“Groceries,” she says. When I grin, she beams. “Tree.”

Shit. I never put up the tree. I look around the house, which pretty much has the same autumn decorations sitting around that had been there before Mom’s stroke. Cutting it a little close, but it’s not Christmas until midnight. “All right, Mom,” I say. “Grab your tablet. Tell me where all the decorations are.”

---