Daina pulled a plastic tub out of the closet. There was a note affixed to the lid, “TWINS CLOTHES,” written in big block letters.
“What’s in here?” she asked.
“What’s it say?” her mother asked back.
Daina put her hands on her hips and frowned at her mother, not that the other woman bothered to notice. She was too busy still sifting through the box of old photographs, her eyes brightening or mouth bunching in confusion as she considered each picture in turn. Daina had been content to watch her for a few moments, but eventually she felt as if she was intruding on her mother’s stroll down memory lane and so she’d turned back to clearing out the closet alone.
“Twins clothes,” Daina read from the lid. “You and daddy kept our clothes?”
Her mother rolled her eyes and finally looked up at her daughter. “‘Course we did,” she said with attitude, “but those are my clothes, not y’all’s.”
Daina’s eyebrows lifted. “You and Auntie Tia?”
She rolled her eyes again. “No, me and my other twin.”
“You’re getting testy. Maybe you should leave those pictures alone.”
“And who’s gone make me? You?” her mother’s mouth lifted into a defiant smile Daina had seen in pictures of her as a very young girl, but then her mouth fell and she turned back to the pictures.
“Mama, you okay? You getting tired?”
She huffed out a dry laugh that might have sounded bitter, except that Damita Kathleen didn’t do bitter. At least Daina had never seen her that way.
She didn’t answer and Daina started to worry, in the way she was learning, only someone who’d lived long enough to see the tables turn in her relationship with her parents could understand. While her mother’s attention was focused on the photographs in her hand, Daina’s eyes moved to the delicate silvery lines of gray hair that refused to take the dye, the smooth brown skin that made even her wrinkle seem elegant, and that small constellation of three moles that Daina had always wished she’d inherited. But sometime around when her marriage started falling apart for real, Daina started to see all these things without envy, only fear.
Suddenly, she found herself wondering if there was more gray under that dye than the strands that peeked through. She worried if her mother’s eyesight was fading, if she was losing weight, if those moles had grown. She worried and worried and worried. Her marriage ending only seemed to remind her that everything would end eventually.
That life was about as many endings as beginnings. And that the older she got, there would be more endings to come. She’s always been more focused on beginnings than endings; the start of things always made more sense to her than endings, but in the last few months all she could see were endings – the ones she’d missed all her life and the ones she was trying to ready herself to weather in the coming years.
She prayed for years, but if she knew one thing it was that the Lord worked in mysterious ways.
Her mother tipped her head up and looked at Daina with a sober, grave look on her face. “When you gonna talk about what happened with you and Shawn?”
Daina shook her head before her mother could finish asking the question; the combination of the haunted look on her mother’s face and the question itself pressing the panic button in her brain.
Her mother’s delicate mouth turned down into an even more delicate frown as her gaze seemed to envelop Daina.
When Daina was a child, she would have killed for this attention; in fact, she’d once faked a sprained ankle just to keep her mother around for a few hours longer. But as an adult, she chafed under her mother’s scrutiny. Her father never managed to look at his children with anything less than full-hearted love try as he might, but her mother had a range of emotions from good and bad, thankfully neither of them could manage indifference.
Daina started to turn away, but then her mother shook her head in one, sharp movement, and Daina stilled. No matter how old she was, no matter how grown she imagined herself, no matter how much life she lived, she would always be her mother’s child.
But then her mother’s face softened. “You can stay here as long as you want, but you can’t run away from your life. We can protect you from a lot, but no parents can shield you from the whole world. If we could, we would.” She shook her head as her eyes filled with tears. “If your daddy could stand between us and the world, he would. Lord knows he tried.”