Page 130 of Two Marlboros

“How can you say such a thing?”

Her lips trembled, in an attempt perhaps to hold back tears.

I looked up at what had once been my father.

“You never asked him that question, huh?”

Those words had come out on their own, but my mother knew she could not retort. She had always pretended not to see, had always let my father shower me with insults and sometimes slaps. The truth was that I meant nothing to her, just as I did to my father.

“You are a hypocrite, Mom. You act like you care about me-”

“I do care, about you!”

“You never did anything for me! You never stood up for me, you never took my side!”

“What do you know about what I did for you!”

Her lips stopped trembling, and, a moment later, some tears began to line her face. So did my words, which kept coming out without me being able to stop them.

“See, you hide behind these phrases, just to keep your conscience clean. But you know what, Mom? At leasthewas honest in telling me to my face what he thought, unlike you!”

“You are at least as much my son as Jimmy, Nathan. You know I love you, and you also know I couldn’t live without you.”

Instinct led me to shake my head and print a bitter smile on my face. My mother had sought me out all those years only because I was her son, not because I was Nathan. She didn’t care about me. Maybe she didn’t even know what I studied or where I lived or what I ate for dinner.

“You think loving me means seeing each other secretly? Telling me when he’s not there, thinking you’re doing me a favor? I’m sick of all this, sick of you and him and your falsehood!”

“Would you have preferred it if I had abandoned you?”

“You did!”

Her expression, from contracted that it was, became serious. For a moment I no longer read in her eyes the affection she was so much flaunting. There was a different light in that moment,perhaps the same light that inflamed my father when he insulted me.

Repulsion.

In her eyes was chaos. She tightened his lips. Tears stopped streaking her face. She took a couple of steps toward me and sustained my gaze without wavering.

“You know what, Nathan? All these years I’ve loved you, but maybe now it’s time to give it a rest.”

She and my father, for years so distinct, were now equals. He stared at me frowning, in the same position he had assumed a few minutes earlier. She had his same gaze, though she could not see it.

I thought of the moments I had spent with her and with Jimmy, moments she had given me. Years she had spent hiding me from my father, only to be told she was a hypocrite, that she didn’t care about me. I loosened my fists and let my body shed the remaining crumbs of anger. There was really no more room for me.

If I had tried to hug her at that moment, she would have sent me away. If I had called her “mom,” she would have told me not to call her that.

I was an orphan.

“Are you still here,Nathan?”

The detachment with which she stressed my name hurt more than any physical pain.

“Go away. You are no longer welcome in this house. After all, isn’t that what you wanted?”

I looked up at my father, but there was no tone of defiance.

I was begging him.

I was asking him to say something, but I had scolded him for talking far too much in all that time. He was still standing upright, arms folded. Maybe he thought I deserved it.

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