Page 126 of Heartfelt Pain
She’s talking about me.
Me.
Me and Ren.
She demands an answer. “And for what?” She stomps her foot.
Dad’s chest lifts.
“M-Mom,” I croak.
She shakes her head slightly, not meeting my eye. We might be witnesses to this conversation, but we have no voice in it yet.
“I want a divorce,” she says. “And if you cannot find it in yourself to grant the one wish your loyal wife asks of you then put me out of my misery. I will no longer be ridiculed in my own home. With my own children hating me because of the games you twist them into.”
Dad takes another breath, his chest ballooning. We all stare at him in disbelief when he doesn’t respond.
Mom’s shoulders sag. Her face breaks. The mask shatters into a million pieces as her forehead creases. She slumps into a barstool, miserable.
Max for all his moaning the past few years, is a mama’s boy at heart. So it’s not shocking when he’s the first to break the silence. “But where would you go?”
Mom rubs her face. “Home.”
It touches my soul. The way she says the word. Home. As in not this place. Not here with her sons.
But the stab is eased when Mom continues. “Your grandmother is very ill. She will not come here for fear of dying anywhere other than her home. She will be buried by your grandfather. I cannot blame her, but I cannot live with myself if she were alone by herself. I hate knowing she is so alone in that big house of hers.”
Mom has some extended family, but she never lied about wishing Grandma would move to America. There’s a wistfulness as Mom speaks. I get the idea that she’s picturing herself in her childhood home, running around playing instead of sitting here, in a home her kids refuse to visit most of the time.
“No one is keeping you from your mother,” Grandma says. She’s much more mollified than when she waved herfist around.
“But you should come back,” Max says, almost desperately.
We might be twenty-seven but it hits us then. How much we still need our mom.
Sadness clings to her as she stares at my older brother.
“You can’t just leave Sailor!”
Russ closes her eyes like she’s making a heavy decision. “H-he’s right.” She clears her throat. “Sailor won’t stop talking about wanting to watch the blue fairy with you. She needs a grandmother.”
And I wonder if Russ understands it then.
My mom is not warm and fuzzy. She will never be like Lennie’s mom, cooking in the kitchen and giggling with her kids.
But she will be your biggest champion. Your protector and ally.
Dad took us to events and cheered us on. He’d take me to car shows and Max to bookstores. He tried to keep an eye on Elijah.
But Mom was the one with us every day.
When I didn’t want to do my homework she bribed me, letting me spend time with our chauffeur in the garage around all the fleet vehicles. When Max’s elementary teachers laughed after he asked about reading Tolstoy she bought him the collection and read with him every night. And it turns out she kept Elijah’s balls safe.
I wonder if Russ, with all her heart and reasoning, is starting to understand that while Mom won’t laugh, she will go to the ends of the Earth to protect her granddaughter.
Just like she went to the ends of the Earth to protect her kids.
And all the while she felt like Dad didn’t put in the same effort.
