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Dear reader, if you didn’t catch it, Sr. Agatha meant–but could not say–that I should use the Murtagh Writing Fellowship and the resources therein to research my father’s history. And that seems ethically sound, perhaps. Or at least, you too might be able to recognize that it was in some sort of gray area. That sort of project wasn’t in line with the spirit of the fellowship, but spirits can’t be enforced in the same way written laws and policies can be. And on that front, there was very little. The only deliverable required of me was a book of some kind. Supposedly fiction, on one hand, but I could call it fiction and have no one be the wiser. Certain labels came almost entirely from the author’s discretion, so why not pick ones that benefited me in some way? No one would be the wiser.
But even in those first moments when the idea was sparkly and new, I could see cracks in the finish, flaws that couldn’t be fully ignored. A project about my dad would be far easier said than done. Dad had been gone for about a decade. Any investigator–good or bad–will tell you that pretty much every lead will have gone cold by then. There might not even be a trail left to walk down, even if I could find it. Some of the people who knew Dad were probably dead themselves. And there was his hometown, sure, but I had already shaken that tree when Mom and I went to bury my grandmother’s ashes in the family cemetery. And despite the full body effort I put into the act, the time I spent hitting the pavement and searching for some thread of the family I had lost, nothing of substance fell out.
It turns out that people don’t like to gossip about the dead to the kids of said dead. Which seemed like a weird line for people willing to gossip literally any other time, but it was what it was. And then there was the internet which had also failed me, for the most part. Nothing of note had come up. Just his obituary and a few of those “phonebook”-esque sites that sell way too much contract information for a couple bucks. Those websites didn’t list any other familiar connections besides me and my mother. They didn’t even include my two (known) half-sisters, so who knows where they got their information from.
Really, there was one stone left unturned: Dad’s old laptop. Assuming it still works. Which was a pretty big “if” considering the havoc time can do to electronics.
As is the case when one spouse survives another, absent any documentation to say otherwise, Dad’s laptop was left in Mom’s possession when he died. Maybe he would have wanted us to destroy it, but if so, he shouldn’t have kept all the family’s tax filings on it. There were a bunch of other financial documents too. It was a lot of things we genuinely needed and didn’t know how to get otherwise. But once we had them, we didn’t throw out the laptop. It was still in my childhood bedroom, turned into a home office for my mom. I knew exactly where it was, even.
However, I wasn’t in the same state as my childhood home. My mom was. It was her home, after all.
But we hadn’t spoken in a while since I told her about the breakup and didn’t capitulate to her concerns about my being alone. We were still stuck in the ensuing silence of that fight, which really wasn’t unheard of for us. In fact, this was part of an established pattern. After every fight, she would keep me at arm’s length until I apologized for something I may or may not have done. Once I did so, the argument was entirely forgotten. She never followed my apology up with one of her own, no matter what happened. And maybe it didn’t matter if we completely wiped the argument off the record with one half-assed apology from me. Maybe her empty words really would have served no purpose, and it was actually better that we just went through the motions like this. I wasn’t sure, but I also wasn’t happy with the way things were.
Regardless, that wasn’t a great arrangement. However, as mother and daughter, we made do. There wasn’t a way around it, really. Especially when I needed something, like Dad’s old laptop.
With a heavy sigh, I reclaimed the phone from the couch and typed out a text message before a second thought could set in. Sorry I snapped at you. Could you mail me Dad’s laptop?
I probably should have mentioned that she would be sending said computer to a new address. That would have been the most thorough way of going about this, and it would have given her something to focus on that wasn’t my lackluster apology. But at the same time, I needed to establish that the possibility of her sending me the computer existed before I went into the details. It was just easier that way. Journeys like that required simple steps.
Her response would take time too, I assumed. That was just how she was. Sometimes she forgot where she put her phone. Sometimes she was just too busy to answer me, swept up into some sort of impromptu adventure with some random person she had once met. Or maybe she was still ignoring me. Maybe she thought I hadn’t been punished enough just yet.
Either way, I didn’t need to wait around for her response. I still needed to unpack or at least clear off the bed. Though the aches in my muscles were little more than phantoms haunting my body for one last time before they departed, I knew I couldn't sleep on the couch again.
The other ghost taking residence in my body was that of the video from the day before, the video essay about my book, a book that maybe shouldn’t have seen the light of day. I tried hard to not think about it, but once it came to mind, it rooted itself. There was no exorcism that could banish it. I had to just ignore the sound of the haunting, which I did by putting on some music before tossing the phone onto the bed. It wasn’t loud enough without my speakers for my taste, but I wasn’t in a position to complain.
While a faint country guitar rift left my phone and did its best to be a presence in the room, I hung up the blouses and the dresses I brought from Chicago in the small closet attached to the bedroom. It wasn’t a lot. Seeing it all on display made me realize that I might not have packed enough, even though I packed most of my closet. It didn’t matter how little I had left behind when my reserve was hardly enough in the first place.
The closet, of course, was just the first step. But as I finished with it and set out to do the next thing on my imaginary to-do list, my phone vibrated, letting out a long, drawn-out tone somewhat muffled by the mattress.
Despite all the junk that comes in on that phone, I knew what that sound meant. Or I assumed it meant that Mom had texted me back. My reckoning was upon me.
As I picked up the phone, my heart started pounding in my chest. Its pace quickened until it was practically a buzzing in my chest. I pushed through the discomfort to check what my mother had said to me.
Yes. she said, making no mention of the last conversation we had. Why?
I took a deep breath to try and feel grounded, but there was no effect. Still anxious, I replied, I got a fellowship at Stella Maris. I need to write something as a final project. So I was thinking of using Dad for inspiration.
I deliberately kept that last bit vague. She knew how he could be and was still quick to come to his defense, to preserve his memory insofar as it could be spared any sort of blemish, even when those blemishes were consequences of his actions. And she knew what was on that computer. Also she knew that authors often have a terrible relationship with their fathers and use their work as a way of getting the last laugh. It was a subject she had vaguely referenced a time or two, but for the most part, we avoided it.
There was no response, at first. According to the app, she read the message, but her reply was slow to come. And when it did come, it was a phone call. The screen turned black before it turned over into the picture of her that sat in my phone linked to her number. In this way, I had a quick glimpse into the void of despair before being thrown into the fire.
I really didn’t want to answer, but I had no choice. One, she was my mother, and two, I really needed that laptop. Reluctantly, I accepted the call.
“What fellowship?” Mom quickly asked.
There was no greeting or anything like that to ease into the conversation. She might not have seen a point for such. In theory, the conversation had already started with my text. Consequently, the lack of a cordial greeting was more my fault than hers.
Whatever, I thought. I wasn’t in the mood for it, either.
“Well, Professor Evory recommended me for a writing fellowship here, and it all came together really quickly.”
That was half a lie, I was ready to admit. However, it was easier for me to invoke Professor Evory’s name than to fight honestly. At the mere mention, her mood shifted. Professor Evory had something I didn’t have: my mom’s respect. Anything he signed off on was golden to her. It was blessed by an agent of God. So she calmed and became more willing to hear me out or to overlook some of the odder parts of this arrangement, like the timeline.
“At Stella Maris?” she asked.
“Yep. In residence, too, so I’ve got a nice place to stay paid for by the school.”
And at that, she was over the moon. When I graduated from Stella Maris, she had hoped that I would stay in this town and work for that university. Dustford was a good place, she said. Safe and quiet but with enough energy to not be lethargic. Also, I would be living in the shadow of and tethered to a beautiful school that she loved.
When I graduated, our relationship had been better. We were about five screaming matches away from my discomfort with the very sound of her voice. But in the end, she had gotten what she was hoping for: I was back at that school, even if it was just for a year. She could now celebrate this delayed victory.
Not that I wanted this to be used as any sort of precedent during our future, inevitable arguments. I didn’t mean to prove her right and arm her in that way, but I also didn’t want to wallow in this fight. And in the face of competing interests, I chose the more immediate end to the suffering that plagued me, and future-me could deal with the ramifications.
So I chose to lean into her fantasy. “And I already reconnected with some people.”
Though her ears perked up, she focused on logistics. “When did you get to Dustford?”
“Yesterday, but it’s all been kind of a blur.”
She found that answer vague but acceptable, and her questioning continued. “Have you seen Professor Evory yet?”
“Yeah, I took the train in from the city, and he met me at the station. He’s doing well. His wife is well, and they have three granddaughters now.”
“From the one son?”
“Yeah, they only have one son,” I said.
After that, there was an uncomfortable silence. I expected more questions, and I thought I knew exactly which ones they would be. Mom had her patterns, for better or worse.
“And Sr. Agatha came by this morning for breakfast. She sends her love. To you.”
Excitedly, my mom started to gush, but I had to cut her cheering short. There was a point I needed to make. “But not to George. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to has had some very choice words about him.”
With that, we entered uncharted territory. After all, I didn’t make it a habit to get engaged and unengaged. But she had made her opinions on that one-time event fairly clear. So had I. Neither of us had budged. Beyond me bolstering my ranks with supporters, the heart of my argument hadn’t changed, and even though it should have been enough to persuade her, it hadn’t been before.
“I just don’t want you to be alone,” she said calmly and genuinely.
It was a moment of serenity amidst our usual chaos. And it didn’t quite feel right. I was expecting her usual anger. I was expecting her to lash out at me like she always did. At least, I knew how to push back when she was mad. But this idea that she might have actually cared about me was something I could hardly make sense of.
It didn’t help that I agreed. I didn’t want to be alone, either. But that’s how things were right then. I couldn’t change that.
“It’s hard,” she said.
Her Filipino accent always flared up on that word. I was never sure why, but my theory was that, because of her positive nature, “hard” was a word that she didn’t use all that often. She had a tough life but never cared to admit it. And so that word was never exposed to the American air and never got Americanized, leaving its distinct Filipino not untouched.
“I know,” I murmured.
Mom acted like she was speaking from experience, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t alone. She had me and a dependence on me that she never seemed to acknowledge. Not even to thank me for all that I did to help her. Not for all the paperwork I did for her, not for all the advice I had to go out and find for her, and not for all the money I sent her to help with her bills. That should have been enough to make her realize that she wasn’t ever “alone,” but I didn’t want to correct her on that again.
The last time we had anything vaguely like that argument was when I moved out to Chicago only to find out that it wasn’t Mom’s plan, so it wasn’t something she was willing to support. She was counting on me moving back home once I got out of school and got a job. I’d live at home and help her with the bills. And with that, we would fall into a very similar pattern to the one he had before, when I was younger and constantly on the brink of some sort of collapse beneath a back-breaking weight that only I could see. And it wasn’t just her pushing me to the brink. I hated it in that neighborhood, that suburb that–in so many ways–was a small town in its own right. It was a place where I was a spectacle, a little pony that did tricks like write books and remember facts.
I hated it. I truly hated it. Moving to a different city where no one knew me was my only solution. Maybe it was a solution that made her life harder; I can’t be the one to say. But as the child in this relationship who never cut her fully adrift even when I needed to, I can say that this physical separation was a surprisingly good arrangement, and if she could see that, we would be better off.
But no, instead, when I was packing to leave, we got into an argument. She yelled. I tried to yell back but was being crushed by the weight of yet more disappointment that she couldn’t see my side of things. She wouldn’t see my perspective, the way I felt like I was going to die if I spent another moment in that town, and all the suffering I had already gone through just living there.
So I cried. And then she yelled at me for crying.
But unlike before, Mom wasn’t yelling right then, on the phone, in the ashes of my engagement. She was calm. And I didn’t know how to react to that.
Overwhelmed by that confusion, I blurted out something I hadn’t meant to tell her. “And I ran into one of the boys I had a crush on in college.”
Maybe that moment of maternal vulnerability was really part of her master plan to get me to comply with wishes I didn’t fully understand. Maybe this was just setting me up for some sort of failure in the five-dimension chess game we were playing. Or maybe it was cynical of me to look at it that way. Regardless, I had made that confession. The words had come out of my mouth and were released out into the world. It was time to face the consequences.
“Oh. Was he a student in your class?” she asked.
I cringed. Apparently it was time to find out how elitist my mother could be. Honestly, I wasn’t optimistic. It wasn’t because of anything she herself had said, but I’d seen plenty of breakdowns from other mothers over their daughters’ taking up with “townies.”
“He wasn’t,” I said. “His parents own a restaurant in town. He took it over recently.”
“Oh,” Mom said, a response that gave nothing away. “I don’t remember him.”
My nerves awakened in the space her ambiguity left behind.
“You didn’t meet him,” I deadpanned with no clarification as to why.
There was no need to clarify. And there was nothing else to say. I wasn’t going to distract ourselves with details that didn’t matter.
“What kind of restaurant?”
“A pizza place.”
“Oh. It must be good business with the university.”
She seemed genuinely happy to hear that this young man–this potential son-in-law–had business savvy. In some ways, that was better than a degree.
I sighed in relief. “Yeah. It’s like the go-to-place for all the students. And a bunch of the campus organizations.”
She hummed, seemingly in approval, but with that, the subject could come to rest and another picked up. “I should go out there and visit you soon.”
I flinched at the idea. I was torn about it, really. On one hand, I missed her. On the other hand, the space between us protected our relationship.
“Well,” I chuckled nervously. “I’ve got to deliver my end of the bargain. Some sort of project. So... Dad’s laptop?”
“Yes, yes, I’ll pack it up and take it to the post office today.”
“It doesn’t have to be today,” I explained. “I won’t have access to my office for another week yet. And I wanted to spend a few days just exploring, relearning the land, you know?”
She hastily agreed. Relief washed over me. This conversation was going well, and the end of it was in sight.
“What else do you need me to send?” she asked.
“Nothing for now. I promise I will let you know if that changes. But if you need to stuff the box with some shirts, they gave me plenty of storage. Like maybe too much storage.”
And so began a sort of interrogation about the exact storage capabilities of the home and why there were three different dressers in such a small cottage. My mom had plenty of her own opinions about the things I could do with the place or things I could ask the university for. Then there was the list of things she thought I needed to buy for myself (and take with me when I left). Also, she thought I should go back to Chicago on the weekends, just to have something to do. I could bring the young man with me. If he was working so hard, he might not have seen the city and all its wonders. It was worth asking.
She meant well and spoke playfully, but through the whole conversation, I grew more frustrated. It was a lot of unsolicited opinions that really weren’t compatible with what I was envisioning for myself. As innocent as it was to have your mother tell you how to arrange blouses in a closet, I was always inclined to be frustrated. After all, her words didn’t leave any space for my own opinions on the matter.
As the conversation went on, my responses grew briefer and more disinterested. Not that Mom seemed to notice. In the end, I came up with some excuse about unpacking to get her to hang up.
“You should have unpacked yesterday. Everything will be wrinkled now,” she scolded me.
Bold of her to assume that I cared. Because I did not. “I’ll iron everything. I was going to do that anyway,” I lied.
“No, you never iron. If you aren’t going to iron you need to fold things properly. And then unpack them right away.”
I choked back a sigh and reached up to pinch the bridge of my nose. And that might as well have been the end of the conversation. There was some circling of the drain, words that really didn’t mean anything but were said just as a formality. But when we reached the end, we said more formal goodbyes. In them, we offered assurances we were sure meant something to the other. She promised to mail the laptop that day, and I promised to get to unpacking and ironing. But I did not get to ironing, nor did I finish unpacking though I had already been doing as much prior to the call. I lost the will to do so. But I moved the suitcases off of the bed and onto the floor, so that I could wallow more comfortably for however long I felt like wallowing.
The bed was actually somewhat comfortable. The mattress felt new, but it was the sort of memory foam that would hold a grudge for being under my suitcases for so long. It would get over it eventually though. It would adjust to my body and hold me just as securely as it had my belongings.
But before either me or the mattress could get too comfortable, my phone buzzed again. It was another text. I thought I knew who it was coming from. I was assuming that it was my mother offering another unsolicited and unneeded opinion about something I didn’t care about. The thought twisted my stomach, but because I needed that laptop, I checked my phone anyway.
But to my surprise, it wasn’t my mother. It was Chris. Not trying to ignore you today. Promise. Staffing emergency at work.
I sat up in bed. I didn’t like the existence of that dreaded e-word in Chris’s mouth. It sent a shiver up my spine.
Everything okay? I asked.
He replied, Yeah. Everything’s fine. A group quit at the same time. It happens. But I need to rework the schedule. And pick up some shifts to cover.
Then there was a follow up text, sent the moment I finished reading the first one. Don’t want to lose you though. Not again.
My heart fluttered at those last two words. Not again, he had said. So he really did like me back then. I smiled to myself at this slip of the figurative tongue but literal finger.
Then came a third text. I’ll make it up to you. I promise.
Maybe he was panicking, and that’s why there was this small but rapid series of texts coming at me. He knew I was there. I had responded once but not anymore, and in that text, I did not offer him the absolution and assurances he had been looking for or that he needed in order to believe that I understood and could ride out this inconvenience. In that absence, he was starting to get desperate.
And I could have kept that going. I did not have to respond to him and could instead let him show me all the cards in his hand. But that wasn’t like me.
It’s okay, I told him. When you can come over, you’re bringing pizza, though.
He countered with an offer on his own. Or something else? We’re getting a bit too old for only pizza.
Second text. Or maybe we go out. On me.
I wanted to be playful and flirty just like he was being. But I couldn’t come up with anything. So I just sent him a smiley face. Something to fill the space and maybe stay a bit mysterious as well.