Page 60 of Opposites (Never) Attract
For him, I came home.
I tried to think back to that time. Had my mom tried to tell me the truth about who my father was then? I remembered her asking me to stay longer, telling me she had so much she wanted to tell me. But I’d been sick with grief and loss. Mixed with the guilt that I hadn’t come home to visit more when he’d been alive. There was always supposed to be more time.
And there was that raging resentment.
I didn’t linger after my dad’s death. I went back to the city and threw myself into work. Burying my feelings under money and success, until the only thing I cared about was making partner.
The front door to the house opened, making the scarecrow statue my mom had made out of flatteneddiet coke cans shimmy, pulling me from my memories. Mom and I stared at each other over three feet of cracked red brick pavers that led to the porch I’d helped my dad put in when I was in fifth grade.
The truth was, I had been a shitty daughter.
So, yeah, my mom had made mistakes. But I had, too. I could start there.
“You planning on coming in?” she asked. She sounded unsure. Worried. Part of me wanted to pounce on that feeling, make her feel worse. But that part was small and exhausted. Mostly, I was just…sad.
“Was that Tag dropping you off?” she asked, when I was quiet.
I nodded. Tag, who had filled my head with dirty, distracting thoughts so I couldn’t obsess over my confusion and hurt feelings.
Tag, who had so quickly become a safe space in this town.
“He’s a good man. Always lending everyone in town a hand when they need it,” my mother said.
She took a deep breath and I suddenly felt bad for her. How scared she seemed. Small, too. My mother was an artist. Sort of. A woman with big ideas and spotty follow through. When we were little, she’d take us for midnight picnics. She’d feed us cake for breakfast and scrambled eggs for dinner. She was chaos, and for another kind of kid…probably magic.
It wasn’t her fault that I wasn’t that kind of kid. I just never understood her and she never understood me.
“Well, come inside,” Mom said, opening the door. “We should just have this out.”
I shook my head and took a couple steps towards her. The world felt different in cowboy boots. I didn’thate it. “I don’t want to have it out, Mom. What’s done is done,” I said. “Getting angry and shouting isn’t going to change anything, and you already told me what happened.”
Mom’s lips trembled and she shook her head. “Getting angry and shouting might make you feel better.”
I laughed. “I don’t know, Mom. Seems like a lot of work.”
She laughed, too, until it caught on a sob. She pressed her fingers to her lips like she was trying to keep it all in. But then it all came pouring out.
“I was young and in love. Stupid,stupidin love. I couldn’t make myself get over him. No matter how I hard I tried.” she said.
“I think what I don’t understand is…he didn’t pick you, Mom. He picked his family over you and he got married and you still…” I trailed off, wondering why she hadn’t respected herself more.
“Honey,” Mom licked her lips and seemed to search for the right words. A giant bumble bee flew around her hydrangea bush. A breeze lifted the ends of her reddish-grey curls. “I hope you never get your heart broken the way he broke my heart. It was…” she shook her head and I stepped closer again. “Humiliating. Life changing.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“So, when he came back, sniffing around my door like a kicked dog, begging…beggingfor a chance to talk to me. To see me. To touch…anyway,” she shrugged. “It took a stronger woman than me to say no.” She stepped forward then, her eyes liquid and soft. “Yes, it was wrong, but it wasn’t a mistake. It brought me you.”
“Mom,” I said, all but rolling my eyes. We didn’t need the sappy stuff.
“I know I failed you in a lot of ways. You were…so different from me that it made me doubt myself around you. You got so old so fast that I didn’t know what you needed. I felt like I missed my chance to be important in your life. I saw how your father was with you, your real father, the man who raised you. I saw how he loved you and how you leaned on him. I thought maybe that was all you needed-”
“It wasn’t,” I stopped, took a deep breath. “I needed you, too, Mom.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice breaking. The tears that had been pooling in the corners of her eyes finally falling. She wiped them away fast, like she didn’t want me to see them.
“Did you love Dad?” I asked. “Or was he just a convenient scape goat?”
I was surprised by how angry I was at the thought of that. My beautiful, special dad should have been no one’s second choice.
