2005

Air conditioning blowing in her face, steady turn of the wheels under her, Tori content in the back seat, Alison rolled down I-85 towards the Gulf Coast, towards Mum. She seemed to have been in an even phase for some time, so, with the boys, then 17, 15, and 13 packed off to summer camp, Alison told Mum she and Tori would visit. Wade said they couldn’t afford flights, so Alison packed Tori and herself into the minivan for the long, hot drive.

With increasing regularity, Wade told Alison that they just didn’t have the money. She knew she should know more about their money, felt ashamed that she didn’t. She’d asked Wade when they were first married. There had always been an excuse—her name not on the mortgage application because she hadn’t had credit or a job. It was too hard to manage two people writing checks from the same account. Wade always had a reason. She was afraid to push. He was right when he said that he knew more about it than she did. He gave her cash for groceries and for clothes for the children. When she’d gone to rent a saxophone for Mikey for his band class last year, the clerk had come out of the back room, Alison’s application in hand, clearly flustered.

“It’s like you don’t exist,” she said.

Alison’s eyes welled with tears. She held out her driver’s license, proof of herself. She thought of herself as Jayne, hidden in the basement of the House of Records, never to be let out. She’d flushed as the woman asked a series of questions, incredulous. “Don’t you pay rent somewhere, or have a mortgage? Car payment?”

“I pay cash,” Alison said. “My husband.” She hesitated.

The woman softened, as though she knew what Alison would have to say next. “Never mind, honey. I’ll approve it.” It was her first line of credit. Just hers. She exited the store, carrying her son’s saxophone and a determination to have something of her own. She set up an Etsy account for small pieces of art and craft. With what she made, she opened a tiny savings account. She thought Wade would be pleased when she told him. “Why do you need that?” he asked. “Don’t you have enough?”

“I do, Wade. Of course. I’m sorry. I can close it.”

The next night, he came home with her favorite bottle of wine and a hand-made necklace from a local wearable art shop. He kissed her neck as he put it on. “I know sometimes I don’t show you how much I appreciate you.”

She didn’t quite get around to closing her account. Just recently, she’d applied for, and got, her first credit card. She’d used it to book the hotel for this trip. She’d told Wade she’d sold enough on Etsy. She rolled down the window, turned up the radio, let all of that fly away as they headed down the interstate.

~

The last time, Wade and the boys had been with them; Mum had had a new boyfriend. Charlie had been eleven. He’d given a surly look at his plate at dinner one night. Alison had leaned into him, rubbed his back, whispered that he should eat, be polite, maybe there’d be ice cream later. He ate a few bites, and then pushed the plate away.

“I’m full,” he said.

“Okay, honey,” Alison said.

“No point babying him,” Mum said, her anger rising. “I know what they’re like at that age. Playing their parents.” Alison glanced at Wade, flicked her eyes towards the door. They’d agreed on this in advance.

“Ice cream,” he said. “Me and my kiddos.”

“We have some here,” Hank said.

“They haven’t finished,” Mum said.

“They’ve finished. Time for waffle cones,” Wade said, though he rarely ate ice cream or allowed it in the house. When he did, it was in a carefully measured scoop.

They were hardly out the door when Mum flared at Alison, pushing her chair back and waving her cigarette in the air, listing a litany of Alison’s flaws, ending with her saying that Alison had been cold from the beginning. She’d turned to Hank. “She was horrible from the day we got her. I gave her my life and she never even tried to love me. Even after all I did for her.” Mum stalked away.

Slam of the door. The windows shook. Palms on the table, Alison let the awareness of her breath return.

“Dang,” Hank said. “That’s a new one.”

“No, Hank. It isn’t.”

“Sorry, honey.” He jiggled his glass. “Drink?”

Wade and the children returned, and they all left before Mum got back. Neither Wade nor Alison said anything as they changed into swimsuits in the hotel room, descended to the pool, the happy family splashing in the evening sun.

In the morning, over their last breakfast with Mum, it was as though nothing had happened.

Wade smiled and waved as they pulled out of the driveway. “I’ll never come here again,” he said, still smiling and waving. “She’s insane, that woman.”

“She’s my mum, that woman,” Alison replied.

“Thank God you don’t have her genes.”

When Alison brought up going again, just with Tori, he asked what she would do if Mum erupted, without him there to run interference.

“We’ll leave,” Alison said. “She’s my mum. I need to see her. I could go on my own.”

“Who will tend to Tori?”

“You?”

“I can’t just cancel clients and court.”

So, there they were, Alison and Tori, passing through Georgia, moving onward.

As the miles rolled on, the fear of what might actually happen grew. Alison paused Tori’s audiobook.

“Mum!”

“I’ll turn it back up in a minute.” Alison gripped the steering wheel. “I need you to know something.”

“What?”

“Nana, she has a temper.”

“I know.” Tori tucked her chin. “Dad says she’s not quite right.”

“Does he? Are you afraid, then?” She reached out, took Tori’s hand.

“No,” Tori said. “Charlie says she’s funny. She makes Dad want dessert before dinner’s finished.”

“True,” Alison said. Her stomach flipped, though. What was she doing to her daughter? “Even so, just in case she has one of her tempers, I need to give you a rule. If, at any time, when we’re with Nana, I say it’s time to go, it’s really time to go, right then, no matter what. Okay?”

“Okay. Can I have my story back?”

~

Mum and Hank lounged on the deck when they arrived. Tori and Alison each hugged Mum loosely by turns. A glass of wine, dinner on the deck, and then Tori and Alison returned to the hotel pool, floated on noodles as the sun began to set.

“She’s fine,” Alison told Wade, on the phone. “She wants to go shopping tomorrow. Her happy place.”

Mum had insisted. Tori resisted far less than Alison. She spun the earrings display in Macy’s while Mum and Alison thumbed through a nearby rack of dresses. Mum stopped suddenly, turned to Alison, nodded over her shoulder. “Why is she here?”

“She’s my daughter, Mum.”

“She doesn’t have to be with you all the time. It isn’t healthy.” She scraped the dresses apart, lifted one out, clanged it back down. “I don’t like children. Never did.”

Alison fought to remain aware, to resist the impulse to let her keep going, to just be still and let it all wash over her. Mum could have said whatever awful thing she wanted about Alison, and she would have remained, thinking the words flowed over her and not in, as she always had. But this was about Alison’s daughter, about this wild-haired girl who liked to twirl in the sunshine and who loved to tell jokes. Alison glanced at Tori, apparently mesmerized by the earrings.

“I’m aware, Mum.”

“You owe me.” Her hand on Alison’s arm, gripping. “More than this.” She let go as suddenly as she’d taken hold; she stalked off.

Alison turned, found her daughter beside her. “Is it time to leave?” Tori asked.

White-knuckled on the steering wheel back to the hotel, she called Hank and told him to go and get Mum. Gripped then, with the idea that Mum would come to the hotel, that they’d be trapped, that she’d say something awful to Tori. “We’re going home,” Alison said. “We’ll stop on the way, at a nice hotel with a pool. We’ll swim. We can order room service. Okay?”

“Okay Mum,” Tori replied. She turned towards the window. “Are we running away from Nana?”

“No. We’re. It’s just. It’s time to go.”

“She looked really mad. Did I make her mad?” Tori hadn’t heard what Mum said.

Alison pulled the car over, wrapped her arms around Tori. “You did nothing wrong. Nana’s just a little mad most of the time.”

“Maybe we could take her an ice cream?”

Or give her a doll.

“That’s lovely, darling. I think it will take more than ice cream to sort her. She’ll be fine. Hank will know what to do.”

~

Alison was barely at the county line when the first message came in. She neither answered nor listened to the messages until she got home. Each of them, a repeat of a previous mantra, except for the last: no one else loves you. Only me. And then Mum listed them. Wade. He’s just using you. He’ll dump you when he’s got whatever he wants. Your children will dump you as soon as they have what they need. Your Dad doesn’t love anyone. Your birth mother. Her mother. Your birth father, whoever he was. They dumped you. I’m the only one who has ever loved you. Mum, making a lie of the fairy tale beginning, of every source of love.

Alison woke in the middle of the night days later with the words still playing in her head. She sat at the kitchen table, replaying the message, transcribing. With the words there on the page, she could not pretend anymore.

She did not reply to Mum. She told herself she might, one day. But she had to protect her daughter. And, for the first time, the girl who still lived within her, who would do nearly anything to be loved.

At length, the messages subsided. Two years, then, until the letter arrived from Hank, saying Mum was dead.

Alison’s hand shook as she held it. Tears welled and fell. Grief and guilt. And relief.