our being saved, the day kept on its downward spiral. I shuffled around, squinting. Too bright, too many primary colours, too many loud noises. And one of the loudest? Zach, who threw a tantrum whenever my mother let go of his hand. Her trip to the bathroom cost me a churro and another Slushee – this time grape.
On the way home we got stuck in five o’clock traffic, which, anywhere in the Bay Area or its ever-outstretching vicinities, begins at three o’clock. The kids fought over every toy like wild dogs over a porterhouse, and my mom, who always received compliments on her youthful appearance, looked every one of her sixty-two years and then some. The air-conditioning malfunctioned so that it felt like a person with a high fever was blowing at us through the vents, while in the rearview mirror I watched Annie rip Zach’s Bubby from him until my mom screamed, ‘Ella! Stop!’ I slammed on the brakes just in time to stop us from smashing into a yellow Hummer. You know who would have survived that crash. Not us in the Jeep.
I calmly and quietly said to my mother, ‘We almost got into an accident. Accidents happen randomly and with no warning. Joe was killed in a drowning accident, and now we could have been killed in a car accident. Just. Like. That.’
‘Jelly? Are you okay?’
I shook from top to bottom, and the kids kept right on fighting. I hit the steering wheel with both hands and shouted, ‘Goddamn it! I can’t drive! Now, you two shut up! Shut up!’
And they did. No one said another word the entire drive home except the voice in my head, which told me over and over, You, my dear, are the very worst mother on the planet.
When we pulled up our driveway, Callie loped up to greet us, but the kids were out cold. Annie’s cheeks were pink despite the sunscreen I’d covered them with. The side of Zach’s face stuck to his car seat; drool ran down his T-shirt, which now held red and purple splotches that coordinated with his lips and chin. The Slushees had left what looked like bruises, but I felt I’d done far worse damage with my own temper tantrum. I could almost see their wings, so angelic were they in sleep, certainly incapable of causing an adult to scream at them at the top of her lungs. I carefully pried Zach from his seat; his arms and legs hung loose and heavy; his head lolled before resting on my shoulder. He let out a long, stuttered sigh. These were my angels who had just lost their dad. Whose birth mother had decided it was okay to poke and prod from a distance, enough to do little more than remind them that she’d left them. And now their evil stepmother had yelled at them for being kids.
We got them settled in their beds and tiptoed out to the kitchen. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to my mom.
‘For what?’
‘You know. For losing it in the car.’
‘Well, honey. It’s understandable. They were acting up. You’re exhausted. Give yourself a break.’
‘But they’re bound to act up right now.’
‘That doesn’t mean you let them scream and fight in the car. It was an intense situation. You didn’t have time to remind them, “Use your inside voices and nice words, children.”’
‘I didn’t remind myself to use my nice words. I don’t remember you ever yelling at me like that.’
‘I didn’t?’ She knit her eyebrows. ‘Didn’t I? Well, after your dad died, you hardly made a peep. You’d been such a yacker, always into everything, disappearing for hours with that little notebook of yours. You know how the kids started saying “Why? Why? Why?” when they turned three? You were still asking that all the time, even when you were eight.’ She shook her head. ‘Such a character, you were. And a handful! But then you got really quiet. All that happy hoopla just drained out of you.’
She stopped talking, pulled a bracelet back and forth over her hand.
We were a pair of skaters trying a new leap, a new twist, but it was time for one of us to pull back into our familiar routine, each of us depending on the other one to stay clear of obstacles or warm spots. ‘You’ll all get through this.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve been where you are. And you’ve been where they are. And we got through.’
Now she made it sound like it had been easy. Out the window I saw a squirrel stop on our porch railing to inspect some kind of pod, turning it in its paws. ‘I still think about Dad all the time. All those camping trips on the Olympic Peninsula, how much he taught me in eight short years.’ She reached out and squeezed my hand. ‘So, Mom, how did you make it through that?’
She opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of pinot blanc.
‘Oh, that’s how.’
She smiled. ‘Tempting, I admit, but no.’ She poured us each a glass.
‘Actually, at first I did check out, as you probably remember . . . But then I kept thinking about my grandmother. Your great-grandma Just. She waited in Austria while her husband went to America. He said he’d find work and send for her. She waited a year and never heard from him. So she sold every single thing she had and took her two children and got on a boat bound for America. She didn’t speak English. She didn’t know a soul. I can see her as if I were there: a tiny woman with a braid past her waist, an arm around each child, freezing and miserable, holding on to them for dear life. Can you imagine? Huddled on that ship, bound for the great unknown . . .’ She shook her head and looked at me. ‘And when I felt bad about my situation, I drew strength from her.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Well. She found him. She actually found him! He’d drunk away everything he’d earned. Penniless, sleeping around, and worse, violent. So she kicked him back out and, ironically, set up a moonshine business during Prohibition, and raised those two kids – my mom and Aunt Lily – with a trapdoor covered by a braided rug under the kitchen table. It’s the same kitchen table I still have.’
I didn’t say anything. I was trying to figure out what part of the story she and I could relate to. Not the secret trapdoor. Not the moonshine business. Not the tiny mother with the two kids on the ship. Not the sneaky drunk husband. Callie barked and I turned to see the squirrel dive for the trunk of an oak and disappear.
‘Ella.’ My mother held my shoulders. ‘We come from a line of strong women. I see that strength in you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, our faces only inches away, almost too close to each other, too close to all the unspoken. I could have asked more right then, but I knew better; I’d learned my lesson long ago. I stepped back and picked up my wine, and she did the same. ‘Hey, does that mean I get the old pine table? I love that table.’
She raised her glass. ‘Not while I’m still breathing you don’t.’ We clinked our glasses. A wordless toast to another success: once again, we’d talked about my dad without talking about my dad.
The next morning I dropped my mom off at the airport shuttle bus, but not before she offered to postpone leaving and get someone else to cover for her at work.
I didn’t want her to go. But I knew postponing her departure wasn’t going to help us all get to the other side, or wherever the hell we were headed.
And so we drove her to the DoubleTree Inn, where she stepped onto the shuttle bus to the San Francisco airport and I pulled out cookies and juice to distract Zach, who otherwise would have definitely run up and grabbed
