Page 97 of Feel Free to Scream

Back home, I used to braid it. But Keller likes it, and loves to run his fingers through it. I’ve started to keep it loose, and I no longer mind it.

“Oh, Claire, you’re resplendent,” she tells me, giving me a hug, made slightly awkward by the flowers.

She uses words like that, my mother. Resplendent. It’s funny, coming from someone as magnetic as she is.

“You too!” I assure her.

“I guess you had to get it from somewhere, huh?” she says without an ounce of false modesty.

“AndIguess I’m just part of the decor,” my grandmother sneers.

“If that were the case, you’d be silent.” Hyacinth snorts. “Hello, Mother. I brought you flowers. Please don’t die on the operating table, I can’t afford a funeral.”

I’ve always half admired, and half been outraged by the way she talks back. After Keller, I just laugh.

Frankly, her presence is a huge and unexpected relief. She’s the object of my grandmother’s constant criticism, so typically, I fade back to the background.

Not today.

“Did you hear what happened? Your daughter left, and not one week later, broke up with her boyfriend and cut off all contact,” my grandmother says.

I never thought I’d see the day I’d be more the focus of her ire than her own daughter.

“Oh, that boy Noah? Good for you! I didn’t like the way he talked to you.”

My grandmother breathes in sharply, and I smile at my mother.

It’s not the first time she’s said so, and before, I dismissed it. He talked to me normally. He paid attention to me, unlike anyone else. Looking back, I know she was right. The constant little jabs about my clothes, my drawing habit, my interests, my hair, putting me down slowly, weren’t how a boyfriend should act. Not how anyone should act, really.

“Noah is a good boy, from a good family—” my grandmother starts.

“You mean, from your parish, with grandparents who show up at mass. In case it’s escaped your notice, Claire, like me, doesn’t share your faith, or your ideas on what’s good for us.”

This isn’t new. Their arguments about what I believe in, what I want. Usually, my grandmother wins by pointing out that Hyacinth left me for her to raise, and my mother shuts up. But this time I actually hear her. She’s right. I didn’t want to stay close to home. I didn’t want weekly religious meetings. I’d rejected her idea of heaven for people like her and hell for everyone else years ago. I didn’t know why, exactly, but suddenly I think I understand.

Hyacinth did not raise me. But she brought me books, enrolled me in classes, expanding my horizons where she could, so I’d acquire a taste for the world outside of what her mother wanted to teach me.

“Noah was perfectly?—”

“Boring,” she finishes for her.

“He wanted to marry her! Right out of high school, rather than living in sin like young people nowadays.”

That’s true. I’m the one who said no. I didn’t even want to think of anything like that before I finished college. The idea of being married to a guy on the other side of the country was stupid.

I wonder whether I wasn’t just rejecting the very idea of Noah, rather than the distance, our age, and other things.

“You mean control her. Trap her with a bunch of kids, keep her home.”

“What’s wrong with that? Strong family values are important. And I went so wrong with you, God will not forgive me if I fail another girl.”

Hyacinth laughs. “Of course it’s about you. Your redemption. You’ve always seen Claire as another chance at making a little clone, huh?”

She turns to me, shaking her head. “I’m so damn sorry you had to deal with that.”

I realize something. My grandmother has been talking crap about me for the last twenty minutes, yes, but I’m no longer tense and stressed. It’s not me she’s shouting at.

I wonder why Hyacinth is here at all. She doesn’t like her mother. She doesn’t get along with her. Come to think of it, every single time she came home, wasn’t it just to do this? Reassert my rights, my freedom, mychoices.

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