Page 112 of Why Cheese?
At the end of the alley, my mother is standing with her arms crossed and her face stone. She’s switched out the hotel bathrobe and slippers for her serious suit. I only ever saw that for funerals and therapy sessions. What’s she doing here? She can’t get in. I have the only key.
“I can’t say I’ll be sad to see it go.”
Oh, she’s talking to someone. It’s that soap lady from across the street. I can’t see her, but that meddlesome tone is baked into my gray matter.
“It is a den of debauchery. The sooner it’s gone, the better the world will be,” my mom says. I want to brush off her comments that I’ve heard hundreds of times before about places from casinos to public libraries, but the back of my neck’s tingling. Why would she care about a random house of ill repute here?
The soap lady sighs. “I’d hoped your daughter would turn it around, but sadly…”
Why is she talking about me?
My mother scoffs and shakes her head. “My daughter is a magnet to temptation and sin.”
Oh no.
“Scuse me.” A man in a blue jumpsuit holds out a mess of paintings of the sun.Brie’s paintings!“What do you want me to do with these?”
“It’s trash, isn’t it?”
“They’re kinda pretty,” he says.
“Either throw them in the garbage or pay me ten bucks for each one,” my mother demands.
He tosses a painting toward the truck sitting at the end of the alley. Doesn’t even look at them, just hurls all of Brie’s hard work like Frisbees.
“Stop!” I shout and take off running.
The man keeps going, flinging the final painting into the pile of garbage. “What are you doing?” I shout not at him but my mother.
Gasping at the street, I pivot my head and nearly fall to my knees. A good dozen men are carting hundreds of cheese wheels and freshly installed shelves out on carts. The store’s gutted, every piece of history, memories, love ripped from the walls and hurled into the dumpster.
“What have you done?” I shriek at my mother.
“What you need,” she says smugly. I bunch my fists, my brain screaming in a continuous panic.
“You had no right. You have no right!” I shout. “Everyone stop!” The garbage men freeze in place and look at the woman who hired them.
“I have every right. I am your mother.”
“No.” My voice stops shaking and plummets to an icy depth I never thought I could manage. “This is my store, not yours. I own it, mother. Not you!”
Only the roar of the running truck engines cuts through the air. I stare my mother down, refusing to melt at her lava glare. I know that look. It’s the same one a flower feels just as the tweezers come to pluck its petals away. I’ve let her take them one by one never weeping, or crying out as she tried to make me perfect by leaving nothing but a stem.
No more. I’m keeping this last petal. She can’t have the store.
“Um, should we put this down?” a man asks me.
“Yes!” I cry.
“No,” my mother counters me. “It belongs in the trash, along with your attitude young lady.”
Young lady. That phrase was always a double-edged knife in my back. My youth enraged my mother. Every night she’d find a wrinkle then tell me I was ugly. Remind me that no one could want a creature as decrepit as me.
And lady. I was supposed to be pleasant, soft, and silent. A shadow in the background. A whisper in the wind. A…
“I am not your goddamn doll, Mother!”
“What are you going on about?”
