Baking Up Love

by Simone Belarose

  That pulled me up short. “Why did you hinge the whole thing on me- Oh.” Now I got it. Jemma may have wanted to see our mother but she also wanted a plausible reason she could say no. I’d taken that away and now she only had one recourse.

  She’d have to go through with it.

  “It’s fine. Let’s just go in and order.”

  She didn’t make a move towards the door. I waited a full minute and still nothing, so I opened the door for her. Only then did Jemma reluctantly get out and follow me into the diner.

  There was a definitive retro feel to the place. The red leather booths and polished chrome edges of Formica tables screamed 1950’s. The L-shaped bar where a host of what I could only assume were regulars sat on chrome-banded stools eating completed the image. It was like something out of Back to the Future.

  I was going to pick a booth off in the far corner, somewhere we’d be left alone but as I was scanning the room I saw a hand shoot up and start waving frantically my direction.

  It was the woman from the funeral. The one who hadn’t bothered me. I’d thought it was strange then, now it made sense. This strange woman whose face I could barely remember was my mother.

  Jemma looped her arm with mine and together we marched down the tiled floor to the corner booth I probably would have picked in the end. Though I wasn’t about to admit it.

  She didn’t bother to get up and greet us. She watched us anxiously. All she had was a plate of toast and a half-empty coffee mug.

  “I figured we could have some privacy back here,” said my mother with a sweep of her hand to take in the booth. “And if you ended up wanting to storm off and leave I wouldn’t cause too much of a scene sitting here by myself.” She gave us both a sad, self-deprecating smile.

  Jemma slid into the seat first and pulled me along after her. We both sat opposite our mother. My hands clenched into fists beneath the table.

  Think about Thomas.

  I pulled Thomas into my mind’s eye. His sculpted muscles, the way his arms felt so secure wrapped around my waist.

  The way he could just pick me up and haul me around like I was no heavier than one of his sacks of flour. Calmed, and unfortunately a little aroused, I opened my eyes to find my mother’s green eyes staring back at me.

  Did I get my calculating methodology from her? Was she good with numbers like I was? I didn’t know but if she was she had to be aware how poor her chances were here, no matter what her goal was.

  “What do you want?” I spat it out between us like some gross, half-chewed thing. I was mad. Of course I was. There was no other way I was going to be and thinking of Thomas or not wasn’t going to change that.

  When I told him that this was something I had to do on my own I meant it. Summoning his image in hopes of giving me some sort of strength would be the exact opposite of what I had told him. If I was going to do this, I had to do it on my own.

  Besides, I didn’t want to be turned on at a time like this.

  “I figured that would be obvious.” Her voice was vaguely familiar. Like hearing some actor’s voice who once played a bit role in a very old show you used to love. Recognizable, their name right there on the tip of your tongue, but no matter how much you wrack your brain for the answer it always remained just out of reach.

  “Indulge us,” I said, taking control of the conversation. I didn’t think Jemma would mind.

  “Very well.” She squared her shoulders and laced her fingers atop the table. She had features I could recognize as having some commonality with my own. I saw bits of Jemma in there as well. “The short answer is I heard about your father’s death and figured my best chance to see you both at the same time would be after his funeral. If not, then at least I could pay my final respects.”

  “I mean why now, you’ve had twenty years to reach out to us. To try and become part of our lives again. Where were you?” A little heat crept into my voice and I pulled it back with an effort. It felt like I was pulling on the leash of a massive animal straining against my grip, yearning to be free.

  The waitress came to our table and took our orders, the Brunch Special all around with juice and coffee. My mother waited until she had left to answer.

  “I always meant to come around. Every birthday, Christmas, I thought about it and then something always ended up coming up. Before I knew it the years had slipped by. It was a struggle just to get and stay clean. Once I finally did, you weren’t my little girls anymore. I’d lost that right. You were fine young ladies well on your way to adulthood. What right did I have to intrude on your lives?”

  I bit back a rude comment and let her continue. It wasn’t as easy as I thought to stay angry at her. She was making sense. If she were anybody else I might be able to see her side of things.

  While I’d never battled addiction, I knew several people who had. You didn’t get far in the business world without running into addicts. The money and the clothing changes, but the habits stay the same whether they’re rich or poor.

  My mother took out a worn silvery-gold coin, on one side it had the large number ten. It looked lopsided as if she’d habitually rubbed one part of it over and over just the way she was doing now with her thumb.

  “This is the second thing I’m most proud of.” She looked at the table. “The first would be having you girls.”

  “What do you want?” asked Jemma. Her voice surprised me. I recognized the same undercurrent of dark anger below the childlike hurt.

  “Oh, honey…” My mother sighed sharply. “I just want to tell you I’m sorry for leaving. For all the pain I’ve caused and am causing you right now. It was important for me to let you know it was never about you. I couldn’t stand to think of either of you believing that you had something to do with what happened.”

  “We don’t,” I said through gritted teeth. “We both blame you.”

  She flinched as if I’d physical slapped her.

  Her dark green eyes fell back to the table. “I deserve that. And more besides. What I wanted was to look my beautiful girls in the eye and tell them…” She looked up, first at me then Jemma. A surge of unwanted emotion roiled in my stomach. “That I love them. I never stopped loving them, and that I’m so very sorry for everything. If you don’t want to hear anything else, I’ll go and you’ll never have to see me again.”

  I was just about ready to tell her to go and never come back when I felt Jemma’s hand touch my thigh beside hers. Maybe she’d seen the anger in my eyes, the clench of my jaw, whatever it was she wanted to hear her out.

  I could do that much. For Jemma.

  “Why’d you leave us?” I heard Jemma ask, in the smallest voice I ever heard her use.

  “I was sick,” she said and before I could interject she held up a trembling hand. She rolled up her sleeves showing faint but still quite visible blotches of darkness like bruises that never quite healed. They trailed all the way up her arms. “I’ve been clean for over ten years now, though.”

  The waitress came to the table, my mother caught the motion out of the corner of her eye and with a twitch of her wrists she had the sleeves covering the scars. Her track marks.

  I hadn’t known it was so severe.

  “Here you go girls, my name is Joyce, just give me a holler if you need anything, anything at all.” She set the platters of waffles, bacon, eggs, chicken, and pancakes down. “I’ll be back with your drinks in a sec.”

  My stomach growled, reminding me that I had foolishly turned down breakfast with the wonderful man who was probably worried sick about me right now. I dug in almost immediately.

  “It started not long after I had you, Jemma,” my mother continued the thread she’d momentarily set aside until the waitress had gone. “I had severe postpartum depression. Your dad was very worried for me, he was always such a worrier.” Her eyes misted with tears and I wondered how much of that was true and how much of it was manufactured for our sake.

  It’s not like Dad could contradict her anymore. Still, this wasn’t add
ing up. “Last I checked,” I said after chewing a bite of overcooked, rubbery sausage. I really miss Thomas’ cooking. That man has spoiled me rotten. “They didn’t give opioids out to people with severe depression.”

  She worried at her coin, twirling it between her fingers and running her scarred thumbs over the edge. “No, they don’t.”

  “Then?” prompted Jemma.

  “I’m not making excuses,” she said, her eyes hard and resolute. “I own up to my mistakes, and I have more than most. Way more. As I said I had severe postpartum. I thought I could tough it out. Be stronger because I needed to for my girls.

  “I was wrong. I refused to talk about it with anybody. Jemma wouldn’t nurse and it only made me feel like an even greater failure as a mother. I couldn’t get my own daughter to do the most basic, instinctual thing a mother and child share.

  “I couldn’t help but think about what was wrong with me. It got so bad that your dad scared I might do something drastic to hurt you girls, so one day he had a friend of his come pick you both up for a few days. When I heard that he’d taken you away from me I was furious, and sank into an even darker depression.”

  “I think I remember that. We went out for ice cream and saw some movie at the theatres,” I said, the memory bubbling back to the surface. It had been a great day, but it was strange too. I couldn’t remember who had taken us to the movies but we got all the ice cream we wanted and all the snacks at the movies any kid could ask for.

  “I know now that he was just trying to protect you, but at the time I wasn’t in a good place mentally. I lashed out. I hit him, hurt him and he took it. He never hit me back, though he should have. I deserved it. I was absolutely monstrous to him and no matter what I did or said he would not abandon me. But he also couldn’t force me to see a shrink, not without committing me and I don’t think he had it in him to do that.

  “Maybe things would’ve been different if he had.” Tears trailed down the soft lines in her face. She looked so tired.

  The waitress came back with our drinks and our coffee and vanished again. She had taken one look at my mom and correctly read the table.

  She’ll be getting a large tip for that.

  A sip of coffee and a moment to steady her nerves was all my mother needed to pick up the story. “When I realized I couldn’t push him away. When I realized how hard I tried to push him away I completely lost myself. I felt so useless and so terrible for being so cruel to your father that I tried to kill myself. I went to the old railway bridge and jumped off.”

  Jemma and I both stared at her. Neither of us had ever heard this before.

  “Of course, the bridge wasn’t nearly tall enough to do the job properly. I wasn’t aware of that at the time. It was only after I jumped that I realized I didn’t want to do this after all. I ended up breaking my leg and my hip. I laid there in the freezing shallow water for what felt like hours. Eventually your father, out of his mind with worry, found me.

  “The pain was immense. There’d been complications from being in the water and the way my bones broke. By the time they were done with the surgeries, my left leg was more metal and pins than actual bone. And the pain afterward was like nothing I have ever felt since.”

  “So they gave you something for the pain, and you got hooked,” said Jemma filling in the story for her. It was one that was, unfortunately, becoming more and more common in America.

  Mom nodded. “Afterwards I tried to quit cold turkey but I couldn’t do it. I started to steal from your father, from our savings, from your college funds. I did every terrible thing he must have told you and many more things that were worse that he never even knew.”

  Her hands shook and her lip quivered with the emotional weight of the memories she was dredging up. Against my better judgment, I felt a stab of sympathy for her. It wasn’t her fault she was an addict but I was still so angry.

  I didn’t know if I could ever get over it.

  But more than anything the story frightened me. The way she treated Dad made me think of Thomas and how he’d react in that situation.

  I couldn’t imagine him laying a hand on me no matter how cruel or violent I got. I wanted to believe something like that could never be a problem for me. For us.

  “It was one relapse after the other. I burned through thousands upon thousands of dollars on drugs and rehab clinics. I tried. I really did try to get clean but I wasn’t strong enough.

  “So, one day I was jonesing for a fix something fierce. It felt like there were fire ants in my veins. I needed a hit, just a taste. Most of our valuables were already sold, pawned, or hidden from me so I wouldn’t do the former two.” Her words caught in her throat and she covered her mouth to block a sob from coming out full force.

  Her shoulders shook and she took out some napkins to dry her eyes and blow her nose. She was working herself up to something big. Something she felt she had to do, and I found myself leaning forward with rapt attention.

  I didn’t want to but I suddenly had to know what happened. I had no idea any of this happened but I do remember a few years when we barely seemed to have money for anything. I always thought the bookstore hadn’t done very well when I looked back on it.

  Now I knew.

  Her sobbing slowly tapered off. Jemma reached her hand across the table and held her hand sympathetically. I wasn’t ready for that yet. I might never be.

  With a tiny, trembling voice my mom continued. “There was nothing worth much in the house by that point. Nothing I could find at any rate for the short period of time your dad was asleep. He’d check on me regularly, but he couldn’t take care of two children, with Jemma barely a year out of her diapers, work, and deal with an addict of a wife.

  “He had to sleep sometime, and that’s when I’d usually go in search of a fix. That was when I hit the lowest point in my life. Nothing I’ve done before or after that has been any worse. It was just a flicker, a thought that I entertained for a split second…but it was enough for me to see the monster I was, and the harm I would cause to my precious family.”

  “What did you do?” I meant it as a question but it came out harsh and grating, accusatory.

  “There was nothing, and I mean nothing I could sell. I thought about finding some way to sell the copper in the air conditioner but didn’t know how to take it apart. I was standing over your bed.” She tilted her chin towards me, but wouldn’t meet my eyes. “And then the idea hit me like a bolt of lightning.”

  Her words unraveled into choking, gasping whimpers.

  My fingers gripped so hard onto my knife and fork the tips started to turn white. I was just about to ask again, a bit gentler this time when she continued.

  “I wondered…just for a moment, how much I could sell you for.” Her tear-stained face locked onto mine and behind every crease, every line and lurking in the dark depths of her eyes, I saw the ghost of those words haunting her still. “And I knew then that I had to leave. That I had even thought of it was sickening. I left that night. I just walked out with the clothes on my back and I never turned around.”

  My whole world felt like it was crashing down around my head. I wanted to hate her even more for what she had thought to do. How disgusting and sick it was, but it was clear just the thought of it alone had been enough for her to spiral into something worse.

  In a way, I understood. An absent parent would be better than the mother she was building up in my mind. A parent willing to sell their child…it made my skin crawl.

  And yet I couldn’t help but feel pity for her. She had tried to do what she thought was right, even when it was clear she had long since lost the ability to tell the difference.

  I sat there, stunned. It wasn’t every day your parent tells you they thought about selling you for drugs. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

  It was too big. Too horrible. My mind wasn’t able to process it, much less what could have happened if she had been weaker. If she had gone through with it.

  My mother took the si
lence as her cue to leave.

  We didn’t want her there anymore. It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable conclusion to reach. For some reason, and I still don’t know why, when she got and walked past me I reached out and grabbed her wrist.

  The motion felt familiar, like something out of a dream. “Don’t go,” I said. “Sit. Tell us how you got sober.”

  She completely broke down into a sobbing wreck. When she went back to her seat I swore her bowed shoulders were a little less rounded than before. I couldn’t imagine what it must have done to her to have walked around with the weight of that on her shoulders all those years.

  16

  Thomas

  I hadn’t heard from Claire all day. Not even a text. I was starting to get worried. It probably didn’t mean anything, no doubt meeting her mom again had taken a lot longer than she thought. Maybe she was still there with Jemma.

  I should try calling Jemma.

  “Stop.”

  I looked up at Sam’s raised brow, her soft blues pinned to my hand hovering over my phone. I’d set it out between us in what was quickly becoming an evening habit after her shift was over when things were relatively slow.

  Unlike yesterday, we had a slow trickle of people coming in. Sam watched them with a cup of coffee and a french twist, her new favorite treat.

  “You’re obsessing.”

  “It’s been nearly seven hours, Sam.”

  “Let the woman be. She probably left her phone home, or it’s on do not disturb. Most likely thing? Forgot to charge it all the way and it died on her.”

  “That sounds like a problem you’re intimately familiar with,” I said, casting a pointed look towards the phone charging next to the register. “Besides, Claire’s too much into planning to let that happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a backup battery in her purse.”

  Sam squinted at me looking me up and down long enough that I was starting to feel uncomfortable. She broke her gaze and shook her blonde head. “Nope. I don’t see it.”