I woke up surrounded by white blankets, white pillows and a yellow bedspread, and couldn’t for the life of me remember where I was—what city, what hotel. Then I spotted the row of boxes with Mom’s handwriting and sat up, groggily.
I’d plugged in my cell phone last night and left it charging on the nightstand, but it took me a moment to realize why I was awake. There was an alert on the screen, a message from Sam.
So? Did you make it? Did you talk to your mom?
Sam. Only a day ago we’d been standing in front of the automotive shop, kissing. I brushed my fingers over my lips, reviving the memory. It had been beautiful and sweet, but now it felt sad, like a long-ago dream, the details already fading. I wrote back:
Not yet. Today, I promise.
I cracked open the bedroom door. Maybe this was my best chance, while Dad was still in the basement, sleeping. The door to Grandpa and Grandma’s room—Mom’s room, now—was open, the bed already made. I paused on the stairs, listening to the sounds of my mother in the kitchen, achingly familiar. The refrigerator door opened and closed, something was whisked in a bowl. And she was humming. Funny how I’d forgotten that, as if the memory itself had climbed into her Volvo and left along with her physical body.
Mom had always hummed—when she was scrubbing the bathroom floors, sanding down a piece of furniture, staring into the open refrigerator while she planned our groceries for the week. It was a trait she had shared with Daniel, but now I wondered: Had her humming influenced him, or had his humming influenced her? Mom wasn’t necessarily on-key most of the time, and she would get stuck on one or two lines of a song, usually an advertisement or, between October and January, a Christmas song, and she would hum it until we went insane—Santa baby, slip a sable under the tree, for me.... But sometimes she and Daniel would join forces in a humming duet. Once, I remembered, Daniel had been riding in the passenger seat and I’d been in the backseat, and the two of them together had hummed their way through Yellow Submarine, laughing and cracking each other up.
Standing there on the stairs, I tried very hard to remember Mom humming after Daniel died. There must have been some time, at least once, maybe when she was ferrying me from school to the therapist, or when she was reupholstering our old couch...or had that been one more thing that died, along with Daniel?
But when I rounded the corner and came into the kitchen, she was still humming, stirring something at the stove. “Hey!” She looked torn, as if she wanted to drop the spoon and give me a hug, but settled instead for a little air kiss as I passed. “How does a vegetable frittata sound?”
I eased into a chair at the table. “I should warn you that my body may not be capable of digesting anything that doesn’t contain vast amounts of sugar or salt.”
Mom glanced at me, concerned, and did some quick whisking in the bowl on the counter. “That bad?”
“No,” I said, feeling stupid for a joke that had fallen flat, and feeling defensive on Dad’s behalf. “Not that bad at all.”
“Well, anyway, your dad’s just gotten into the shower. He must be exhausted, driving all that way.”
“Hey! I drove part of the way.”
Mom glanced again in my direction, wounded. I wasn’t planning these little jabs, but maybe there was an unconscious part of me that wanted to hurt her, because they just kept coming.
“You didn’t tell me you had your license,” she said.
“I don’t. But remember, I told you that Dad let me drive in Utah, when we were on the salt flats.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Mom said. She flipped something in the pan with a spatula and stood staring down at it, as if without her attention it would burn. And maybe it would—that was a perfectly good reason for her not to look at me. But I couldn’t help feeling the awkwardness of the moment, the way nothing I said came out exactly right, the flash of disappointment on her face when I’d evaded her kiss.
This was the time, I realized. I just had to come out and tell her, find a way to get the conversation going. We would get into our rhythm, that mother-daughter patter we’d once had, that intimate, confessional space. The trouble was that I’d gotten so used to being just with Dad. He and I kept up a constant, running shtick of sarcasm and puns and double meanings. It was our defense mechanism: laugh at ourselves, joke about our failures, crack wise, and nothing in the world could hurt us. Now, with Mom, it was like we had to find our footing all over again.
“Want to pour us some juice?” Mom asked, and I slipped off the chair to comply. This should have been a simple task, but the refrigerator was one of those fancy ones designed to blend in with the cabinetry, and I first pulled open a cupboard and stared blankly at a row of canned food. Mom laughed, and I quipped, “Oh, you didn’t want me to make it from scratch?”
Finally, I poured orange juice into two tiny glasses. “So, Mom...”
“So,” Mom said soberly, as if I’d said something profound.
“I wanted to tell you that—” I froze, hearing a door open and footsteps approaching on the wood floor.
“Oh, your dad’s out of the shower. You want to get him a glass, too?”
I stood again, numbly. I’d blown it. The thing to do was to blurt it all out in one fell swoop. Dad was on the roof of the cafeteria and maybe going to kill himself and there were bullets in our car. Why was that so hard?
“What were you going to say?” Mom asked as Dad entered the kitchen, holding a bundle of dirty clothes. He was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved polo, his typical off-work uniform.
“Good morning,” he said, and just stood there awkwardly, as if he were waiting to be invited any farther into the room. But at least he was here, not avoiding us entirely like he had done when Mom visited in Sacramento. I took pity on him and handed him the glass of juice.
“I just wanted to know the agenda,” I said. It took my parents a moment to react, as if I had communicated with them in Morse code, and they were counting out the dots and dashes. “For today. I wanted to know what we’re doing today.”
Dad looked at Mom.
“Well!” she said, bustling back into motion. “Breakfast, obviously. And then I figured I’d show you around Omaha, if you wanted to see the shop....”
Dad and I took seats at the table, and Mom fussed around, delivering hot slabs of frittata onto our plates. I looked at Dad, waiting to follow his lead. This trip had been his idea, after all.
“Of course,” Dad gushed, and I almost laughed, his enthusiasm felt so fake. Of course! We absolutely want to see the place where you spend all your time when you aren’t spending it with us.
“Liv?” Mom was waiting for me.
“Um, yeah,” I said.
“Great. I told Stella I would be taking today off and maybe tomorrow, and then we’ll see from there, I guess. We can take a little drive around Omaha, find a spot for lunch and then tonight Uncle Jeff and Aunt Judy want to have us over for dinner. Sound good?”
“Sure,” I said.
“And if there’s anything else you want to see, in particular...I mean, if you need anything, we can go shopping, or I could take you by the high school. It’s only a mile or so away.”
“Why would I want to see the high school?”
Mom shrugged. “It’s where I went to school.”
I looked at Dad again, but he had set down his clothes on an empty chair and was digging into his breakfast as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. When I thought about it, he really hadn’t eaten much on our trip. He’d picked at all of our meals and then snacked in between on the odd handful of chips, washed down by giant-sized cups of whatever he’d found inside gas stations.
Still, I thought it was strange that he wouldn’t even glance at me, even as I kept my eyes on his face. We were both hiding our secrets, but I had the feeling that Dad’s were darker than mine, and more monumental than I could begin to imagine. I felt a little shiver, like a pinch on the back of the neck. A part of me was scared for him, wrestling with that dark thing I couldn’t even begin to name. And a part of me was scared for myself, too.