Total pages in book: 108
Estimated words: 100853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
I’d gone back and forth, organizing things here for my mother, trying to ease her suffering without becoming her servant—which, I realized, was exactly what she’d wanted. Me at her beck and call, cut off from the rest of the world. Catering to her every whim. This was the life she’d envisioned for me, and she’d only needed to contract a fatal illness to get it.
I took care of her, but I wouldn’t lie and say I liked it. Every moment under her roof was one too many. I always felt like a faker when I flew back to the Smiths and was welcomed into their family again, caring for the kids, laughing with Janice at the end of a long day. They thought I was torn, that what I really wanted was to be with my dying mother. They couldn’t have been more wrong.
I never told them how bad things were at home. It was embarrassing to admit that my own mother didn’t love me. Duty was the only thing between us. Harriet McKenna had raised me to understand that I owed her for my very existence, and she expected compensation for her sacrifice.
Intellectually, I got it. It wasn’t me, or rather, it wasn’t anything I’d done. I had the bad luck to look exactly like my father, right down to my oddly light blue eyes. I’d never met the man. He’d run off with another woman while my mother had been pregnant with me. And when I’d been born with his eyes, his dark curls, and his olive skin, she’d hated me.
I think if I’d been a little replica of Harriet—willowy with cornflower-blue eyes and wispy blonde hair—maybe then she would have loved me. I could have been a little mini-me for her to mold. Instead, as she told me over and over, I was a replica of him, sent to remind her of her failure as a wife and a woman. I was the visual representation of everything she’d lost, and she’d never forgiven me for it.
She had a heavy hand and high expectations. Some of them I’d lived up to. I’d been a good student, kept my room clean, knew how to speak respectfully. The flat of her hand taught me to keep my tongue under control. I didn’t know if my father ran off because Harriet didn’t have love in her, or if he’d taken her heart with him when he disappeared. Either way, there’d been none left for me.
The first few years my mother was sick, I helped without living under her roof for more than a week at a time. I arranged rides to and from chemo and coordinated with kind ladies from her church who brought over food a few times a week. My mother knew I didn’t want any of this. So, of course, my presence was what she demanded. Eventually, she reached a point where I was the only one who could care for her. I left the Smiths, my heart breaking as I packed my bags, my tears matching those of the children.
My nanny families had been the only true family I’d ever known, and going home to take care of Harriet felt like a cell door clanging shut, locking me away from warm embraces and steaming cocoa, sealing me into this shadowed house that reeked of stale smoke. I was left wondering if time had stood still in these walls; the clock stopped in the early eighties, the avocado countertops cracked, and a phone bolted to the wall in the kitchen, the long curly cord trailing on the floor.
Time didn’t exist in this house. For a woman who seemed to hate everything about life, my mother held on to it with a steely grip, fading slowly, day by day, dragging it out. If she’d been another kind of parent, I would have been grateful for every day we had together. But she was Harriet McKenna, and though I’d never say it out loud, in my heart I wished she’d hurry the fuck up and set me free.
And now she was gone. The house was empty, and I answered to no one. If you’d asked me before she died, I would have told you that freedom was all I wanted. Now that it was here, I didn’t feel free—I felt hollowed out and empty. Alone.
She’d left me everything. Not that “everything” was much: this house, her car, a small retirement account. I’d buried her quietly in the plot she’d purchased, foregoing a wake, letting the ladies from her church set up a quiet service. I had stacks of frozen casseroles in the freezer and empty boxes everywhere. All I had to do was pack up the house, put it on the market, and take a step into the future.
I picked up the cold coffee cup and tilted it. Still empty, and it was too late in the day for more coffee. What I wanted was an ice-cold soda. Soda had been forbidden in this house, along with any other sweets.