Chapter Fourteen

June 1993—February 1994

Despite her mother’s attempts at guilt-tripping, Florence had elected to go to college on the East Coast. For her first semester, her mother called her twice a week, using every wrong answer on a test and every bad food in the cafeteria as excuses for why she needed to come home immediately. Like most children who flirted with rebellion, her mother’s long distance hovering was driving her further and further away. She grudgingly came home at Christmas because the school was closing and they didn’t allow students to stay in their dorms over the holiday. Florence tried to stay away from Wisconsin over the summer as well, but her mother screamed so loudly over the phone she nearly popped Florence’s ear drum. The threat of rescinding her tuition payments was enough to persuade Florence to move back home for the summer months.

“She won’t leave me alone,” Florence complained when she had been home for a week. Delia sat cross legged on the floor looking up to where Florence lay on her bed, flipping idly through an old fashion magazine. “She’s constantly on me to get a job, as if there are any jobs left in this crappy little town when everyone is home for the summer.”

“I know,” Delia said softly. “I think I found one of the last ones, but it was only because I got back a week before you.”

“Can you tell her that? I go out every day, but no one’s hiring. I wish I could’ve stayed in New York.”

“She missed you, Flo,” Delia said quietly.

“No she didn’t,” Florence argued. “She missed bossing me around.”

Delia sighed and tugged at a loose string on the hem of her jeans. “Maybe you should cut her some slack,” she suggested tentatively, now avoiding Florence’s gaze.

Florence snorted. “As if she’s ever cut me any slack for my entire life. Honestly, I’m surprised she wanted me to come back. I thought she’d be so thrilled to get rid of me.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

Florence sighed. “It is,” she said softly. “I really don’t know why she wanted me to come back. She’s always treated me as though I was nothing but a burden to her. She never did want me.”

“Flo,” Delia said quickly. “How can you say that? You’ve always had the coolest mom.”

“And what made her so cool? She didn’t care. I could stay out as late as I wanted. My friends could come over and she didn’t care what we did as long as we didn’t bother her. She couldn’t care less if I graduated from high school or not. The only reason I did as well as I did and got into college was because I decided I had to get as far away from here as possible.”

“But you can’t say she never wanted you.”

Florence shook her head, unexpected tears poking angrily at her eyelids. She tossed the magazine across the room and rolled to her back so she could stare up at the ceiling. She didn’t feel like continuing this discussion with Delia. Delia, who would never understand, whose parents always fawned over her, gave her every word of encouragement and praised her every accomplishment. Florence had enjoyed the freedom in high school to come home in the early morning hours, quietly to a house where her mother was sound asleep behind a closed door, oblivious to her daughter’s comings and goings. But that freedom had left her with extreme loneliness. None of her other friends could stay out so late, so most often, after her friends had gone home in time to meet their curfews, Florence stayed out, sleeping in her car at the edge of town, testing how late she could come home before her mother would show her concern. But despite how close the sun had come to stretching its pink rays over the horizon, Florence’s mother had never displayed apprehension for her safety.

The summer passed slowly. By mid-July, Florence had given up her job search. She called the school, got the names of her classes and the books she needed, and spent the rest of the summer reading the material for the next two semesters of college. Florence kept a calendar beside her bed, marking off the days before she returned to school, like a prisoner marking off time before being released back into civilization.

As the summer drew to a close and Florence started gathering the things she never bothered to unpack in order to head back to school, she realized that weeks had passed since she had seen her mother more than just in passing. She purposely lay in bed in the morning, listening for the sound of the garage door closing when her mother left for work. She’d finish off the pot of coffee, cook herself lunch in between reading books, and then leave the house in the late afternoon before her mother came home. On the occasions when Florence had returned home when her mother’s bedroom light was still on, Florence sat in her car at the end of the driveway for a half hour after the light had gone dark. Occasionally she considered if her mother had been waiting up for her, but the memories of countless nights coming home to a sleeping house throughout high school reminded her there was likely no one waiting to see that she made it home safely.

Florence’s stomach was beginning to rumble for lunch as she stacked the boxes and suitcases by the door. It was three days before she would be leaving, but Florence felt so anxious to get back to school, she would gladly wait at the airport for the next seventy-two hours until her flight took off. As Florence tossed a duffle bag atop a box of school supplies, she wondered why she was feeling such animosity toward her mother. True, they had never been close, so when Florence left for school a year ago, she had parted from her mother with the same mentality as she would from an old friend whom she did not plan to see again for years and have little contact with other than the requisite Christmas and birthday cards. Her mother’s demanding that she come home for the summer was the first maternal act Florence remembered since her childhood. Of course there had been the obligatory mother/daughter conversations: when she got her first period, when she had her first boyfriend and her first break up, when she passed out drunk on the bathroom floor when she was fifteen, when she got her driver’s license. But most of Florence’s life at home was more like living with a roommate rather than a mother. For as long as she had remembered, she had even called her mother by her first name. She had been scolded and punished harshly at parents’ day in second grade when she introduced her mother as “Lily.” Her teacher had yanked her roughly aside and lectured her about respect. After the parents had gone, Florence had been left in an empty classroom while the other children played outside for recess. She had told her mother about the incident, but she had only nodded, had done nothing to rescue or defend her daughter.

Back in her now nearly empty room, Florence carefully laid out the clothes she needed for the next three days so the rest could be packed away. The grinding of the garage door opening startled her for a moment, and Florence froze, wondering if she was really hearing the sound of her mother’s arrival. It was the middle of the day. What was she doing home at this time? Florence frantically tried to clear the boxes and clothes away from the door so she could close it, but her mother’s footsteps echoed up the stairs before Florence could hide herself away in her room.

She looked up from where she was crouching on the floor beside the open, half-filled suitcase. She stared. For a moment, Florence hardly recognized the woman before her as her mother. Proud of her looks, Florence’s mother had always taken great pains to solidify her image. Hours were spent straightening the wave from her heavy black hair, the same black hair that held Florence’s curl in a vice. Her face was smoothed and powered, as flawless as an airbrushed magazine cover. Daily running kept her thin body muscular and sculpted. Often, when she was growing up, Florence found herself humiliated when people mistook her mother for her older sister, or when boys in her class would gawk from the playground when she was picked up after school.

Florence blinked, hoping the change she now saw was only an illusion, that her world would right itself in a moment. Her mother’s smile seemed too wide for her narrow face, as though she had too many teeth to fit in her mouth. Her skin was blotchy, red marks of exertion drawn across her cheekbones as though the effort of walking up the stairs was too much for her. Her figure had been transformed from svelte to emaciated. Even her once buoyant and glossy hair now hung limply around her concave cheeks and seemed weighted with the same fatigue that drew dark bruises beneath her dull eyes.

“Hi, honey,” she said, and Florence could tell she was forcing lightness into her voice.

“Lily,” Florence breathed, her disbelief evident in her tone.

Her mother uncomfortably brushed her hair from her face, clearly an attempt to distract Florence’s attention, as though trying to brush away her stare. She shifted from one foot to the other. “I came home early today,” she announced.

“I noticed.”

She cleared her throat and slipped off her shoes, sinking two inches and giving her an even stronger resemblance to a frail child. “I knew you were packing to get ready to go back to school, so I thought we could spend some time together.”

Florence rolled back on her heels. She bit back the snide retort that jumped to her tongue, forced herself to look away. She tossed a pile of clothes clumsily into the suitcase. “Whatever,” she mumbled.

“Great. Have you had lunch?”

“No.”

“I’ll get changed and maybe we can go get something to eat.”

Florence didn’t look up as her mother walked down the hall to her bedroom. She heard her moving in her room: the sound of the closet door squeaking open, the groan of the dresser drawers. Florence frantically thought back to when she had last seen her mother face to face. It had been probably two weeks since they had talked. There was the occasional call through a closed door that one or the other was leaving. She’d seen her tugging the garbage can down the driveway, but hidden behind the large green bin, any change in her physically hadn’t registered with Florence at the time. Silently, Florence followed her mother down the hall and leaned against the door jamb, watching her undress through the crack in the door, much like she had as a child.

Her mother’s back was to the door. She stood before the closet in only a bra and her skirt as her fingers flitted over her clothes. The bumps of her spine poked against the translucent flesh, her ribs a mirrored washboard. Along her left side, a large black bruise spread like a shadow, a violent and angry purple stain.

Florence pushed the door open. “Lily,” she said before she realized that she had stepped into the room. Her mother turned suddenly, grabbing a shirt at random from the closet to cover her bony and concave chest that Florence had already caught a glimpse of. “What happened?”

Nervously, Lily tugged the shirt over her head and it fell loosely over her frame, like a child playing dress up with her mother’s clothes. “Florence,” she said sharply. “I’ll be ready in a minute. Go wait for me downstairs.” The authoritative tone sounded foreign to both of them, and they stared at each other like strangers for a moment. “Please,” her mother finally added, her voice pleading.

Florence backed out of the room and closed the door. Before turning to go downstairs, she heard the distinct sound of her mother’s sobs. An immediate lump of unknown emotions constricted her throat and Florence fled down the stairs. In the kitchen, she poured herself a cup of the dregs of cold coffee at the bottom of the carafe, not because she wanted the coffee but because she wanted to have something to do with her hands. The coffee splashed on the counter, and when Florence wiped it with a stained sponge, she found her hands shaking.

It seemed like a long time that she sat at the kitchen counter and waited for her mother. She finally heard movement across the hallway upstairs and the creak of the one tell-tale step Florence had long ago learned to avoid. Her mother appeared around the corner like a shadow, thin and drawn, smaller and more frightened than a lost child. She paused in the doorway as though startled to see Florence waiting for her.

“Would you like to get lunch?” she asked too casually.

Florence stared at her incredulously. Did she really think Florence could just ignore what she had seen? “No,” she snapped. “I don’t want to go to lunch. I want to know what the hell happened to you.”

Her mother sighed and brushed her hair distractedly from her forehead. “I’ll be fine,” she said calmly.

“Like hell,” Florence scoffed. “You look like death that’s been run over by a truck.”

Lily’s finger shot up to point in Florence’s face. “You will not speak to your mother that way.”

Florence was momentarily taken aback by the sudden authoritativeness, twice in fifteen minutes, but she knew there was no danger behind that warning, so she pushed her mother’s hand away. “You aren’t a mother,” Florence sneered. “You never have been.” She knew the words were harsh, uncalled for, but they had been like an acid burning the back of her tongue all summer and she had to spit out the bitter flavor of them.

Lily’s hand dropped like a weight to the kitchen counter. She stared at Florence for a moment who realized her mother’s overly bright eyes were caused by brimming tears. “You’re right,” she said at last, her voice steadier than Florence would have expected it to be. “I really shouldn’t have tried to make anything up to you this late in the game. It was my own foolish mistake for trying to make amends before . . .”

“Before what? Before I go back to school?”

Her mother took a ragged breath as though trying to stifle the flood of tears. “Yes, sure,” she said quickly. “Before you go back. I had just wanted to spend some time with you. I missed having you around last year.”

Florence snorted. “I doubt that. We hardly ever talked throughout all of high school. I’ve been home for three months, and you’ve hardly said a word to me.”

“You haven’t exactly been around, Flo,” she shot back.

“You haven’t exactly made me want to be around.”

She nodded. “All right. I can concede that. Can we maybe both admit we’ve made some mistakes in this relationship, but at the very least, can we try to be friends?”

Florence was skeptical of this new friendship attempt. Her mother had never shown any interest in being her mother, much less in being a friend. The calls twice a week to her at school felt born out of obligation and spite, but maybe Florence had been wrong. Maybe she really had been reaching out, and Florence hadn’t recognized it. “All right, friend,” she said, unable to hide the sarcasm from her voice.

Lily’s pursed her thin lips which somehow accentuated the dark circles under her eyes. Florence was again momentarily alarmed her mother’s appearance and was suddenly very aware of her skull beneath the thin skin and limp hair. As though she knew Florence was analyzing her, Lily turned away to open the refrigerator. She retrieved two bottles of water and slid one across the counter to Florence who ignored it, sweating beside her half-drunk cold coffee. “Would you like to get lunch?” Lily asked again, as though the exchange between them hadn’t just happened.

“Would you?”

Lily opened her water and took a long drink. Florence watched the muscles in her throat work as her head was tipped back. She finally placed the bottle back on the counter and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “I’m dying, Flo,” she blurted, unable to meet her daughter’s gaze.

The words hit Florence with a realization she already had. “I can see that,” she said softly.

Lily cleared her throat and shifted uncomfortably. “I just thought you should know.”

Florence bit back the sharp retort. “What . . .” she stopped. It seemed awkward and indelicate to ask details.

“Leukemia.”

“When . . .”

“A few months.” She fiddled with the cap to the water bottle. Florence wasn’t sure if she had asked when her mother had gotten sick or when she would be dying, but she guessed the answer was the same for both questions. “I’ve been on radiation for a few weeks now,” she said timidly.

“And you didn’t think to tell me?” Florence snapped, realizing the lengths her mother had gone to in order to hide this from her. All this time, Florence had assumed it was she avoiding her mother, but it seemed more likely Lily was avoiding Florence just as much.

“I’m sorry. I know I should have said something earlier, but I had high hopes for the treatment. I guess I had hoped it could be treated and you’d never have to know I was sick.”

The sentiment sounded brave and noble, an attempt to protect her daughter from the worry and fear of her illness, but Florence knew better. She knew her mother well enough to understand that the secrecy was born from her independence and self-imposed alienation.

“So why say anything now?” Florence couldn’t help feeling a tightness in her chest, an ache in her throat. Her bitterness crawled up her throat from her gut, burning her insides with an acerbic sting.

“The radiation hasn’t had the results we hoped for. I’ll be starting chemotherapy in Marshfield tomorrow.”

Florence nodded, unsure of what she could say. She was reminded of how prominent her mother’s skull appeared under the thin skin of her face. She got the sudden image of her with a bald head, translucent, gray skin. Florence forced herself to look away. “Will you still be working?”

“Today was my last day. They threw a little party for me this morning.”

Florence nodded, feeling the acidity rise again, the resentment of knowing that strangers to her, the people with whom her mother worked, had known of this illness before she did. “How long have they known?” she asked snidely.

Lily bristled slightly. “A few weeks.”

“I see.” Florence understood this conversation as only informing Florence, not to ask for any kind of support. “Well,” Florence said, trying hard to keep the disappointment from her voice, “You seem to be ready to handle this on your own, so maybe I’ll see about heading back to school earlier.”

Lily sighed. “Please don’t.” Her voice was small, broken.

“Why not?” Florence snapped, unable to keep the bitterness from her tongue any longer. “You’ve done everything you could to keep this from me. Honestly, I don’t even know why you’re telling me now.”

“I guess I was looking for a little support,” she said sardonically.

“From me?” Florence scoffed. “When have you ever looked for support from me? That isn’t us. You’ve never asked for anything from me, other than for me to leave you alone. Why now, after all this time on your own, would you suddenly feel like you want to have a daughter when you have made it abundantly clear up to this point that you wish you hadn’t?” The words were out of her mouth and seemed to hang in the air between them. Even though Florence felt there was truth to them, she wished she could grasp them out of the air and stuff them back in her mouth, swallow them, and pretend they had never existed.

Tears were evident in her mother’s eyes, but her voice was even. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Florence.” Lily turned and was out of the kitchen before Florence had a chance to try to apologize.

She knew that her mother was likely to die before she would be back to see her again, but something painful was curdling in her stomach and she suddenly didn’t care. While her mother cried quietly behind her bedroom door, Florence finished packing her things, called a cab, and left for New York. After she had changed her ticket and made reservations at a hotel in New York for three days before she could move back to school, Florence found herself sitting on the plane, waiting to take off, and regretting everything she had said and done since that morning. The airplane taxied down the runway and took off, planting guilt in Florence’s gut that would eat away at her for the rest of her life.

 

***

 

The world had descended into a frigid cocoon of snow before Florence spoke with her mother again. Every day she picked up the phone, started to dial the number home, and hung up before it had even rung once. On Thanksgiving, from behind the cartons of take-out Chinese, Florence pressed the phone hard to her ear while it rang. There was no answer. Florence called four more times before stoking the courage to leave a message. It was awkward and short, sending Thanksgiving wishes and asking stiltedly if she could come home for Christmas.

Florence received a call back Sunday night as she was finishing her homework for her Monday classes. Her mother’s voice was distant and hushed as though the effort was exhausting for her. She explained how she had been in the hospital for the last week with a kidney infection. “I’m okay,” she asserted weakly and unconvincingly.

“Should I come home?” Florence offered, feeling the unspoken argument heavily on the line between them.

There was a pause. “I think at Christmas would be fine.”

Florence wasn’t sure if she should feel offended or relieved that her mother was projecting another month of independence before she might need her daughter. Florence finished the rest of the semester, dreading the winter holidays in a way she never had before.

Christmas came upon her quietly. Florence returned home, begging a ride from Delia from the airport as her mother was now not able to leave the confines of the house. Delia had hugged her quickly while she got her bags out of the trunk, and Florence promised they would get together to exchange Christmas gifts sometime before the end of the brief vacation. As she approached the front door, Florence felt oddly like a stranger at her own home and she briefly wondered if she should knock on the door before entering. She stood on the front porch, feeling the cold from the unshoveled snow seeping through the soles of her tennis shoes. The chill of the deep winter air was settling into her bones by the time Florence had the strength to turn the door knob.

The house was surprisingly festive. A garland of pine boughs wove its way up the banister like ivy. Winking white lights glinted from around the windows. The oversized artificial tree had appeared from the basement, filling the whole living room so the couch was halfway in the kitchen and the TV was pushed into the hallway. Florence closed the door behind her quietly and surveyed the tree. She recognized the ornaments that had been accumulated since her childhood, including the crumbling dried Play-Doh star and string of crumpled construction paper garland.

“I had some help putting up the tree,” her mother’s voice echoed from behind the tree. “But I decorated it myself. I think it was the first time since you were a baby.”

Florence tried not to stare as her mother stepped out from behind the sagging boughs. Florence hardly recognized the woman in front of her as her mother. She seemed to have shrunk in on herself. Her head seemed overly large for her frail and skeletal frame. Her cheeks were gray and sunken; dark puddles sagged beneath her eyes. Her head was wrapped in a purple turban of cloth, and Florence knew instinctively all her mother’s beautiful black hair was gone from beneath it. Her wrists poked from beneath the sleeves of her shirt like the twig arms of a snow man, and black bruises spread like a rash over the pale skin.

Lily shifted slightly, and Florence realized that despite her best efforts, she was staring after all. “How are you?” Florence asked, unsure what else she could say. She realized the strap from her duffle bag was cutting sharply into the shoulder, and she carefully lowered it to the ground.

Lily shifted again, and Florence wondered if she wasn’t wishing she could be sitting down. “I’m doing well,” she said, but Florence could recognize the lightness she was forcing into the sentence. “Don’t stand in the doorway,” she chided. “Come in.”

“I’ll go take my things upstairs.” Florence fled from the room, listening to the comforting and familiar sound of her feet beating a rhythm up the stairs. After dropping her luggage in her room and shrugging out of her coat, Florence sat for a moment at the top of the stairs, straining to hear her mother’s movements. It was silent. Carefully, Florence descended. At the bottom of the stairs, she peeked around the corner and glimpsed her mother leaning back into the couch, her eyes closed, her bony chest barely rising and falling. In spite of her resolve, Florence felt tears spring to her eyes. She couldn’t tear her gaze away. As much as she wanted to look away, to deny that this invalid was her mother, Florence watched her rest, wondering how long she could monitor the steady movement of her breath before it stopped.

“How long are you going to stand there and stare at me?” Lily asked suddenly, her eyes still closed as though sleeping.

Florence cleared her throat. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I’m not sleeping.”

“Obviously.” Florence could feel her annoyance begin to rise, so she quickly escaped to the kitchen and began rummaging through the refrigerator, which she was surprised to be filled with her favorite foods.

Sitting at the kitchen counter, Florence deftly sliced an apple and plunged the pieces into a jar of peanut butter. She imagined all the other college students coming home for Christmas, the warm greetings they must receive at the door, the constant questions of how the school and college life was, the unmistakable joy at having the whole family back under one roof. She heard the shuffle of her mother’s slippers on the floor in the hallway and felt a heavy weight sinking in her stomach. As much as she wanted that kind of welcome when she came home from school, Florence dreaded having any interaction with her mother.

“You didn’t really want to come home, did you?” Lily asked as she carefully climbed up on the stool across the island counter from Florence.

Florence took a bite of apple so she wouldn’t have to answer right away. “You don’t exactly make me feel welcome to want to come home,” she said, fighting to keep her voice gentle.

Lily nodded, the purple turban shifting slightly as her head wobbled on her thin neck. “I know,” she acknowledged. Florence watched as her bony shoulders rose when she took a deep breath. “Since this visit is likely the last time you will see me alive, do you think we could both try to make more of an effort, at least for these few days? You can go back to hating me when you leave and after I’m dead.”

The realization she was probably right about her eminent death hit Florence like cold water up her nose. She startled and stared down into the jar of peanut butter. “I don’t hate you, Lily. I just don’t understand you.”

From the corner of her eye, Florence could see her mother’s bruised and frail hand inch across the kitchen counter. “Are you willing to try for a few days?” Her hand moved a little closer to where Florence clutched the peanut butter. “Do you think we could both acknowledge that neither of us is very good at this mother/daughter thing, and try a little harder?”

Florence remembered the conversation at the end of the summer, her mother’s feeble attempt to forge some kind of an eleventh-hour relationship with the daughter she didn’t really know. This time Florence knew Lily was right when she said this would likely be the end of their time together. She nodded. “I can do that.”

Lily smiled briefly and for a flash, Florence had an image of the mother she had known on rare and ephemeral occasions of her childhood. That mother who peeked in on a sleeping child after a nightmare, who made sure plenty of green beans accompanied the mound of spaghetti, who offered a healing kiss to a skinned knee. The tears seemed just below the surface as Florence saw that fleeting image of her mother was buried deep in her memory. As quickly as recognition came, the smile faltered and the memory was replaced with familiar indifference.

For the next several days, Florence stepped into the role of caregiver. Despite the protests that she could do it all herself, Lily gratefully accepted the food Florence cooked and wore the clothes Florence washed. Christmas came suddenly as though they couldn’t have anticipated its arrival. Florence baked a ham as neither of them felt like four days of leftover turkey. Lily ate very little, pushing the food across her plate, and Florence had to bite her tongue to stop herself from reminding her to eat more.

That evening, she made a small fire in the fireplace and forced her mother to relax and enjoy its warmth. She brought her a steaming cup of cider and placed a small wrapped package beside her.

“I didn’t think you would have gotten me a gift,” Lily said.

Florence shrugged. “It is Christmas.”

Lily smiled. Her fingers looked as thin as straw as she tore the paper open. Out spilled a red woolen scarf that puddled in a mound on her lap. “It’s beautiful.”

“I thought you could use a little extra warmth.”

Lily met Florence’s eye as she wrapped the scarf around her neck. Even with the blue turban she wore, her head looked small above the sea of thick yarn. “I haven’t been able to get out much,” she began, and Florence opened her mouth to protest but Lily held up a hand. “Let me finish. I haven’t been able to get out, so I’m afraid I don’t have a gift for you.”

“You don’t need—”

“Let me finish,” Lily said again, her voice sharper. “I decided I would give you for Christmas something you’ve wanted and needed for a very long time.” Lily paused, whether for dramatic effect or to catch her breath, Florence was unsure. “Information.”

“Information?”

Lily cleared her throat. “Do you remember my fortieth birthday this year?” Florence nodded, recalling her mother telling her over the phone about going out with her friends. At school in New York, Florence was still able to be embarrassed by the thought of her mother in a halter top and mini skirt on a cold February night while both she and drunk college boys pretended she was younger than she was. “That isn’t entirely accurate. I didn’t turn forty on my birthday.”

Florence bristled slightly with surprise. “How old are you?”

Lily looked down at her lap, her fingers playing with the ends of the scarf. “Thirty-five.”

Florence quickly did the math in her head and stared at her mother aghast. “You were sixteen when I was born?”

Lily nodded. “I had to lie about my age so I could get an apartment and a job. The lie just stuck because it was more acceptable to be twenty-one with a new baby than to be sixteen.”

“But I don’t understand. Why were you on your own to begin with?”

“You don’t know anything about your grandparents.” It was a statement, not a question.

Florence shook her head. Only once in her life had her mother ever made mention of her parents. She had come home from school in third grade with a project in her art class of the grandparents she had fictionalized in her mind, the loving, gray-haired couple she had pieced together from stories her friends told her at school and movies she had seen. Her mother had unceremoniously shoved the craft in the kitchen garbage with the succinct explanation: “They’re dead.” Florence had by then learned not to question her mother when she chose to be authoritative.

“Your grandparents were strict Baptists, and when I was a teenager, I behaved like most teenagers: I rebelled. I ended up doing the one thing they could never forgive.”

“You got pregnant.”

“I got pregnant.” Lily seemed to sink deeper into the cushions of the chair, as though the memory of it was a physical weight bearing down on her. “I might as well have killed my own grandmother for how they reacted when they found out. My mother stood in my bedroom doorway watching me pack—making sure I didn’t steal anything—while I listened to my father in the other room talking with his lawyer about taking me out of their will.” Lily paused and her breath was ragged. “I left the house that night with one bag and the twenty dollars my brother slipped me when he said goodbye.”

“You have a brother!” Florence could feel her heart pounding in her throat as she imagined all this family she never knew existed.

Lily shrugged. “Somewhere.” She cleared her throat and shifted. “Between buses and hitch-hiking, I made my way from Virginia to Wisconsin where I ran out of money.”

“That’s pretty far for twenty bucks.”

“It went a lot farther back then. I had wanted to go to Canada, but this was as close as I could get. So here was where I stayed. I got a job, lived on the street for a few weeks before I could afford an apartment. And then I had you.”

The years of bitterness, animosity, and indifferences Florence had exchanged with her mother were beginning to melt, and Florence felt an unnamable emotion tightening her chest. “What about your family?”

“I never talked to my parents again. My brother somehow managed to find me a few years ago. You were twelve or so, I think. He wrote to tell me my parents had both died in a car crash.”

“Do you know where he is? Do you think he would like to know you’re sick?”

Lily shook her head. “By that time he had been sufficiently poisoned against me and made it clear he had no intention of contacting me again and I shouldn’t mistake his message for anything more than what it was—information—probably so I wouldn’t try to contact anyone in the family in case I had been trying.”

“What about . . .” Florence stopped, unsure how to ask, but she plunged ahead. “Who’s the father?” Somehow it felt easier to refer to her paternity as an abstraction rather than a figure she could claim as her own.

Lily was silent. If it wasn’t for the nervous twitching of her foot, Florence might have guessed her mother hadn’t heard the question. “He was a guy at a party. I don’t know his name. I’m not sure I ever knew.” She took a deep breath and looked past Florence at nothing. “He had brought me a drink. My parents didn’t want me to go to that party. The only reason they let me was because I promised not to drink. I was only a sophomore and pretty proud of myself that I had gotten his attention. I took the drink.” She paused and closed her eyes. “I don’t remember a lot after that. I remember more drinks and a lot of jostling and someone crying. That might have been me.” She rubbed her forehead as though the action could recreate what time and alcohol had erased. “I remember being cold, shivering and searching for my clothes in a dark room. I’m not sure how I made it home.”

“He raped you.” Florence suddenly felt indigent.

Lily lifted a thin shoulder in a half shrug. “I guess that’s one school of thought.”

“You’re okay with that?” She was disgusted by her mother’s lack of fury.

“What could I do, Flo? I was fifteen, pregnant, and homeless. I didn’t even know who he was. I wasn’t exactly in a position to enact any kind of justice.”

“Maybe if your parents had known they would have been more understanding.”

She shook her head. “No. It was my punishment.”

Florence stiffened. “You mean I was.”

Lily’s eyes suddenly glistened with tears. “Unfortunately I did think that way for a long time. I blamed you, as though you chose to be conceived and ruin my life. It was a foolish and immature mentality. By the time I realized the injustice of my feelings toward you, it was too late. You were old enough to recognize my indifference toward you. I had destroyed the only family relationship I had left.”

“You could have made an effort.”

She shook her head again. “It was too late. I decided I had given up being able to be a mother, so I could try to be your friend. I gave you freedom because that’s what I assumed you wanted.”

“It wasn’t. I just wanted you to care.” Florence felt the child in her through her voice.

“Oh, Flo. I did care. I do. The nights I stayed up, staring at the ceiling in a dark bedroom, straining to hear the sound of you coming home so I knew you were safe.” She shook her head.

Florence sighed, wondering how different her life might have been if they had had this conversation years earlier. Every major decision she had made in her life had been related to her mother’s perceived attitude toward her. Had Florence really known her mother’s history and her true feelings, Florence might have been an entirely different person.

“I hope it’s not too late now,” her mother said.

Florence couldn’t help but feel the injustice of the situation, but decided to give her mother what she knew she needed and wanted. “It’s not too late,” she said simply, but had to look away from the satisfied smile that broke across Lily’s pale face, threatening to shatter the image Florence had known all her life.

 

***

 

The rest of the holiday break was spent quietly in each other’s company. The only time they were apart was when Florence left to get groceries or when she sat in the stark and sterile waiting room at the Marshfield hospital while Lily had her chemotherapy treatments. Most days, Florence sat at the edge of Lily’s bed, reading her stories, quietly watching cheesy soap operas, or watching her mother sleep. The resentment Florence felt that her mother had been too stubborn to realize how her indifference had impacted her childhood remained as a festering wound deep in her stomach. The forced friendliness between them ate away at the sore as though she was trying to treat the stink of infection by dousing it with perfume. The effect was only a growing injury that rotted away, ignored because the symptoms remained masked.

The break from school drew to a close, and now while her mother napped, Florence started packing her bags to go back. She had arranged for Delia to drive her to the airport so her mother wouldn’t need to be concerned with how she would get back to school. It eased her grief that she was able to provide some comfort to her mother and give her what she needed, but that sacrifice did little for the bitterness that now seemed to be imbued in her blood.

Lily had declined drastically in the time that Florence had been home. Each treatment had left her weaker and more and more nauseated. A cup of broth over the course of several hours was all she was able to stomach. Florence found she could only look at her mother’s eyes because it seemed to be the only part of her that hadn’t been radically washed away by chemotherapy. Lily constantly reached her hand out to her daughter, and Florence suppressed shudder after shudder to hold that cold, skeletal hand—as though she was holding hands with death itself.

Florence came to say good-bye while Delia packed her bags into the car. A Hospice nurse waited politely in the kitchen to take over Florence’s duties when she was gone. Lily tried to sit up to give Florence a proper farewell, but the effort so exhausted her, it was several minutes before she could open her eyes.

“It’s not too late for me to stay home. I don’t have to go back this semester,” Florence offered, but before the sentence was finished, Lily was adamantly shaking her head. “Well, I can be home in a few hours,” she amended, feeling her stomach involuntarily recoil as she grasped her mother’s hand. “Call me if you need me.” She paused a moment.

Lily nodded, but they both knew she would do no such thing. “It’s moments like this that you want to say something really profound and memorable.” Her voice had turned gravelly with disuse. “I’m not sure if I should say ‘I’m sorry,’ or ‘I love you,’ or just ‘good bye.’”

Florence smiled. “You said all you need to.” She gently squeezed the icy fingers and made a move to leave. Lily’s boney grip suddenly tightened.

“I need you to know . . .”

“It’s okay, Lily. I do know.”

Lily’s thin and dry lips parted in a pale and brief smile. Her eyelids had closed again, and Florence wondered if she even realized how the exhaustion had overtaken her. Without a word, she slipped her hand out of her mother’s grip, leaned carefully across the bed, and gently brushed a kiss against her forehead.

 

***

 

The Hospice nurse had agreed to keep Florence well informed, so every day she waited for a phone call with the latest developments. Most days the response was, “No change.” Lily had become too weak and tired to speak on the phone, so Florence sent messages through the nurse, encouraging and forgiving words, the things she needed to hear, even if they weren’t what Florence wanted to say.

One day in early February, Florence looked up in her British Literature class to see the dean peering through the window in the door. He raised a finger to motion her into the hallway, but Florence already knew what he was going to say. As the door closed behind her and the class craned their necks to see where she had gone, the dean shifted awkwardly from one foot to the next and cleared his throat. He was a large and beefy man, the figure of a former football player who had let time and fast food get the better of him. Despite his forbidding stature, Florence had found him to be a soft-spoken and gentle man.

“Florence . . .” he began.

“My mother is dead,” she supplied for him.

He looked startled that the sentence could fall so easily from her lips. “Well,” he faltered, “her nurse called to say that it’s a matter of hours, and if you would like to go home to say good bye, now is the time to do it.”

Florence paused. She had assumed her mother would die quietly alone. She hadn’t considered she might go back to be with her in the last moments. It would be easier for Florence if she could just return after the fact and make the necessary arrangements. Sitting beside a death bed asked for an additional emotional commitment Florence wasn’t sure she wanted to make. And yet, her mother had clearly been making efforts to patch the frail relationship with her daughter. Florence’s guilt drove her to nod her head, knowing that this was likely what Lily would have wanted.

The dean nodded curtly. “There’s a flight this afternoon. We can arrange to get you to the airport as soon as possible and you can take a leave of absence from your classes for as long as you need this semester.”

“Thank you,” Florence managed. The tears were choking her throat, but she didn’t recognize them as tears of either grief or sadness. These tears were the product of her own torn and confusing emotions, mixed with guilt and self-loathing.

The dean, expecting the tears but misunderstanding their cause, nodded sympathetically and awkwardly patted her shoulder. After hastily packing a bag, an administrative assistant from the admissions office was recruited to drive Florence to the airport. By the time she got back home, the sun was dipping low behind the trees on the horizon. The nurse opened the door as though she had been waiting for her, and quickly ushered Florence upstairs.

After the rush of trying to get home, Florence took her time climbing the stairs. She had had the time in the car and on the plane to consider what she would find when she got home. Florence found she didn’t really want to be here for these last moments after all. She would have preferred the dean to just deliver the final news. Florence’s stomach recoiled at the hospital smell that had invaded the home—that stink of illness would take her months to wash away.

The layers of blankets over Lily’s body did little to hide the fragility of her frame. Her skin was pale, but small red spots gave her an unbalanced and blotchy appearance. A heavy, rattling breath parted her dry and cracked lips, and Florence stood frozen in the doorway shuddering at the sound of life fighting to escape the prison of her mother’s body.

“She hasn’t been conscious since yesterday morning,” the nurse said behind her. “I don’t think she can hear you, but I like to believe she can sense that you’re here. Already her breathing is less agitated than it was. You can sit with her, if you like.”

Florence stepped cautiously into the room, just wanting the nurse to stop talking. A chair waited for her at the bedside, and Lily’s hand rested conveniently at the edge as though she was waiting for her to grasp it. Florence dropped into the chair and heard the nurse close the door behind her. Her stomach clenched as she picked up her hand. The fingers were bony and cold, but Florence thought for a second she felt her mother squeeze her hand.

As the minutes ticked by slowly, Lily’s breathing became shallower. The rattle in her lungs had quieted, and with each exhale, Florence waited longer and longer for it to be the last. Finally the narrow chest stopped rising and the fingers between her hands seemed to grow even colder, though Florence knew such a response was her own imagination. She sighed, relief and guilt vying for her primary emotion.

“Good bye . . . Mom,” Florence whispered, startled by how natural the word felt on her lips. Of course, she knew again it was only her imagination and the shadows cast in the dim room, but Florence saw a slight, satisfied smile pull at the corners of her mother’s mouth.