The Mother's Promise

by Sally Hepworth

  There was a short silence and for a horrible moment, Alice thought she’d have to explain that she was joking. Then, finally, came the stilted laugh.

  All at once Alice had a sharp longing for her father. If he’d been here, she knew, he’d have been chuckling. She thought of that strange, sad day she’d returned to her family home after her mother had died. Alice had been twenty-five. Alice’s brother, Paul, of course, had turned to his best friend Jack Daniel’s to help him through the ordeal, so it was up to Alice to support her father through his grief. He was sitting on the green velvet couch, watching a black-and-white family movie, when she got there. As Alice peered into the room, she saw him crying openly, while an image of her mother, visibly pregnant and smoking a cigarette (because you did in those days), talked to the camera. Alice tried to duck away without being seen, but her father glanced up suddenly, slyly wiping away a tear.

  “I was looking for my dirty movies,” he said finally with a shrug. “This was all I could find.”

  Humor, Alice always thought, was tragedy’s best friend. Her dad had agreed. A few years back, minutes before his own death, he’d startled a nurse in the hospital who, noticing that his chest had stilled, had leaned over him to listen to his breathing. He waited until she was nice and close before whispering “Boo!” into her ear. Alice was still chuckling a few minutes later when he slowly slipped from this world.

  Kate continued with the list. Alice tuned out until the part where she said, “If you have a living will, bring it on the day of surgery.”

  A living will, Alice thought. Try as she might, she couldn’t think of anything funny about that.

  “Sonja, one of our hospital social workers, will be in touch with you about providing support these next few weeks. And Alice? I’m here if you have any questions. My cell is on the card I gave you, and you can call twenty-four hours.”

  Alice hung up, remembering only the barest details of what she’d been told, but feeling certain that everything would be in the e-mail Kate promised to send. She was comfortingly earnest, Alice thought. Whether it was staged or not, Alice did believe that Nurse Kate would, indeed, be there if she had any questions.

  She tossed the phone onto the couch beside her and immediately it began to ring again. Alice silenced it. She didn’t want to talk any more. She planned to spend the rest of the afternoon—or at least until Zoe got home—wallowing in self-pity. But the time went quickly and before she knew it, keys were jiggling in the door.

  “Mom?”

  Alice uncrossed her legs and lay back, trying to look relaxed. “In here, Mouse.”

  It had always been such a perfect name for Zoe. She was so small and easy to miss, and inclined to scurry away when someone noticed her. A few seconds went by; then Zoe’s dainty little face appeared in the doorway. “Why are you lying down?” she said.

  Alice sat up. The girl didn’t miss a trick. “What? Can’t a woman rest?”

  Zoe’s eyes narrowed. “How was your doctor’s appointment today?”

  Alice searched for some truth she could tell her daughter—a truth that wasn’t terrifying. “Nothing to worry about,” she said eventually. “Though I do have to have a small surgery on Monday.”

  Zoe’s face paled a few shades. Since she was a child she’d been plagued with terror that something would happen to Alice, and even now, whenever Alice seemed threatened with some ailment—be it a dentist appointment or tonsillitis—Zoe was paying attention.

  “What’s the surgery for?”

  “Gallstones.” Alice hadn’t planned to lie; it just slipped out. Immediately she felt the weight of it.

  Zoe dragged in a breath. “But … aren’t gallstones, like, painful?”

  “They can be when they flare up,” Alice said, hoping she sounded authoritative. “That’s why they want to take them out—before they cause me any more problems. I’ll have to stay in the hospital for a few days.”

  “A few days?” The rest of the color drained from Zoe’s face. “So I’ll stay here by myself?”

  Zoe hated being home by herself, even during the day. It was one of the ironies of social anxiety disorder. Zoe didn’t like being by herself; in fact, she wanted nothing more than to be with people and in places surrounded by chatter and noise. Problem was, when she was in that kind of situation, she became so caught up in what everyone thought about her, she either had a panic attack or had to leave.

  Unfortunately, staying at a friend’s place wasn’t an option. Apart from an attempt at a sleepover when she was ten (which didn’t end well), she’d never slept anywhere but in her own home in her entire life.

  “Maybe you could ask Emily to stay with you?” Alice suggested.

  Zoe’s cheeks flushed.

  “Mouse?” Alice pressed. “What is it? Did you and Em have a fight?”

  “Worse,” Zoe said. “She wants me to go on a double date.”

  Alice’s heart plummeted.

  “I mean … I can’t go, obviously,” Zoe continued. “But if I don’t, Emily can’t go either. It’s an all-in kind of thing. I don’t know what to do.”

  Zoe was fighting back tears and Alice felt a little like crying herself. Not Emily! she wanted to shout to the universe. Not today. What else are you going to take from us today? The arrival of Emily had been a godsend. Since their friendship had started, Zoe had, well, not exactly transformed, but improved. She’d started sitting in the cafeteria during the lunch hour instead of by herself outside on the lawn, and at home she spent hours holed up in her room with Emily, hunched over their cell phones, like normal teens. Occasionally Alice had even heard Zoe use the lingo, like “douche” or “cray-cray” or “I literally can’t” (though immediately she would blush, giving away the fact that it hadn’t come naturally). On the weekends, Zoe and Emily sprawled all over the sofa watching movies while scrolling through Instagram or Facebook or whatever was hip these days. Once Zoe caught her watching them and called her “creepy,” which only made Alice happier. She was the annoying mom! It was all she’d ever wanted to be. It was unthinkable that it could all be taken away from them because of (the lack of) a double date.

  “What’s the worst that could happen?” Alice asked.

  For years they’d played this game when Zoe was afraid to do something. Alice would ask her to come up with the worst thing that could possibly happen; then they’d compare it to something much worse. (“I could fall over and land on my face,” Zoe might say, to which Alice would respond, “Which isn’t bad at all compared to…” “Drowning in elephant poop,” Zoe would finish.) At worst it made them laugh. At best it gave her the courage to do whatever it was she was afraid of.

  “I could be humiliated and lose my best friend,” Zoe replied.

  “Which would be terrible,” Alice agreed. “But not bad at all, compared to…”

  “… something happening to you.” Zoe stepped forward and gave her a sudden, impromptu hug. Talk of gallstones had obviously affected her. Alice tried to swallow, but her throat had suddenly swollen shut.

  Zoe pulled away.

  “What if I come with you?” Alice joked. “I can wear a disguise and sit in the row behind.”

  “Mom!”

  “Or I could hang out in the foyer?” Alice grinned.

  “No.”

  “Or maybe,” Alice said, her smile slipping away, “you can actually do this?”

  Alice nodded at Zoe with what she hoped looked like full confidence. She knew that, at best, Zoe would be back within the hour. At worst she wouldn’t make it out the door.

  “Without you, you mean?” Zoe asked.

  A lump rose in Alice’s throat. Could Zoe do it without her? Zoe looked at her expectantly and finally Alice smiled and nodded. Yes, you can do it without me, her smile said. But she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

  8

  At 6 P.M., Kate looked in the mirror, assessing. Her hair, recently cut to shoulder length, fell in carefully constructed haphazard waves. She wore patterned s
ilk pants, a black top, and ankle boots. An oversize beaded necklace to add some festivity. It was, after all, a special occasion. She was rounder, she decided, around the jaw. She’d gained a little weight—two pounds to be exact. Not much, but enough to make it real.

  Lately, it seemed, Kate’s number had been two. There was the husband, who was on his second marriage, with two teenage children of his own. Two years of trying for a baby followed by two years of fertility treatments. Two pregnancies, followed by two miscarriages. But this was the third time. Kate hoped that, as the saying went, the third time was the charm.

  She turned to the side and pulled her top down so it was taut over her stomach. “What do you think?” she said to David as he entered the bedroom. He glanced over at her for only a second before heading toward the bedside table.

  “You look enormous,” he said without missing a beat. “It’s definitely twins.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s not twins.”

  “Honey,” he said, “every woman wishes she could look like you when she’s pregnant. When Hilary was pregnant with Jake, she looked like she’d swallowed a watermelon. And that was just in the first trimester!”

  This was David’s favorite story about his ex-wife; he sometimes teased her about it when she came to pick up the kids.

  “More like four watermelons,” Hilary would agree wearily. “What those kids did to my pelvic floor!”

  David and Hilary had this sickeningly well-adjusted relationship for the sake of sixteen-year-old Jake and fourteen-year-old Scarlett, who divided their time equally between their parents. Perhaps the most sickening part was that even Kate liked Hilary. When Kate had become pregnant the first time, Hilary—and her new husband, Danny—had sent flowers. The second time she’d pumped Kate’s hands warmly and wished her the best of luck. They hadn’t told her this time. Twice bitten and all that.

  As David reached for his iPhone on the bedside table, Kate spun around. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to have a game of Pokémon Go with the kids. What?”

  Kate was glaring at him. “You’re not playing now! Dad’s coming to dinner, remember?” She looked at her watch. “Any minute.”

  Right on cue the doorbell rang.

  Grumbling, David returned the iPhone to the bedside table. Kate glanced in the mirror. She looked calm and together, the opposite of how she felt. Strange as it was, she always felt uncomfortable—nervous even—around her father. Almost as uncomfortable as he seemed around her.

  By the time they had walked downstairs, Jake and her father were having an awkward handshake, and Scarlett was attempting to answer a question about her “studies.” Kate’s dad had no idea how to talk to teenagers, and he had a habit of deferring to interview-type questions about college that kids always hated. Jake and Scarlett were polite and they endured them, but Kate knew they found her father hard work.

  “Hi, Dad,” Kate said. She raised her arms to give her father a hug, but at the same time he dipped to kiss her cheek. Finally they both stepped back and he thrust a bunch of flowers at her. “Oh, these are nice,” she said, taking them. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Her father nodded brusquely at the floor.

  “Nice to see you, William,” David said. His friendly voice seemed to warm the air around them. He shook her father’s hand and this time the connection worked out. “Come on, let’s get you a beer.”

  Kate trailed behind them to the back room. Every time she saw her father, like a fool she hoped it would be different. Even now as an adult, long after the proverbial ship had sailed, she hoped for some kind of connection with her only living parent. And every time she was left bereft when it didn’t eventuate. Whenever people heard that she’d been raised by a single father, they always said the same thing: “You must be close.” And Kate always responded, “We are,” because what else could she say? He was a perfectly nice man. He wasn’t abusive or neglectful. How could she admit that she rarely had anything to say to him? That he seemed to have even less to say to her.

  According to her grandma—his own mother—her father had always been aloof, even as a baby. “Didn’t suckle well,” her gran was fond of saying, and also, “William never talked much.” That was perhaps the hardest part. When her dad was uncomfortable, he went quiet. When Kate was uncomfortable, she talked. It baffled her, how different they were.

  “You’re like your mother,” her gran had always told her. Kate had no idea if this was true (her mother had been hit by a car while cycling to work when Kate was only two) but Kate liked the idea that they were similar, even if it made her absence a little harder. Tonight, especially, Kate longed to have her mother present—the night she was going to announce that a grandchild was on its way.

  “Where should I sit?” her dad asked when they reached the dining room.

  “Wherever you like,” Kate said. She was used to his habit of immediately sitting at the dining table when he arrived—even though part of her always wondered if it meant he was eager to get the evening over with. She fetched two beers and a platter of dips from the kitchen, where the kids were already hiding out, side by side, staring at their phones. Scarlett looked up guiltily but Kate just smiled at her. When she returned to the dining table, David and her dad were sitting side by side. Her father kept his eyes down, running his fingers over the table’s surface as though admiring something new, even though he’d sat at this very table a dozen times.

  “So … how was your day?” Kate asked, sitting down at the head. “Did you do anything special?”

  “Read the papers.” Her dad took a cracker and dipped it. “Drove Arthur to pick up his truck from the shop.”

  “And how is Arthur?” Kate persisted. Arthur, her father’s oldest friend and another Stanford professor of artificial intelligence, was perhaps the only person on the planet who had less to talk about than her father (other than artificial intelligence, of course). Still, you never knew. Perhaps Arthur was more interesting than she thought.

  Her father frowned. “He’s … Arthur.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I guess he is.”

  They drifted into silence once again. Kate was racking her brain for another topic of conversation when her dad turned his back on her and launched into conversation with David. And that, she supposed, was the end of that.

  When her dad visited, he often spent the entire evening talking at David about something dull and intellectual, which wasn’t a problem exactly, apart from the fact that generally David had no idea what he was talking about. David had gone directly to work from high school and then started an office-cleaning business that had, over the last thirty years, grown from him and a mop to a national organization—one of the top twenty in the U.S. “You don’t need brains to be a success” was one of David’s favorite sayings, which always made her father bristle. “Just common sense and hard work.” Sometimes Kate wondered if her dad had anything to talk about other than his career. If he cared about anything else.

  She hoped he might care about one thing.

  “Well,” Kate said, when conversation came to a natural pause. “We invited you here tonight for a reason. We have some news.”

  The kids had joined them at the table a few minutes earlier. There must have been something in her voice, because Jake, who’d been digging into the eggplant dip, froze. Scarlett looked up too, a note of interest registering on her face.

  “As you all know, we’ve been trying for a while to have a baby. We’ve had a few false starts along the way, but we’re excited to say”—she shot a look at David—“that I’m pregnant.”

  It was a strange thing announcing a pregnancy after two miscarriages. Kate could actually feel the excitement swell in the room and then immediately recede, as if everyone was afraid to feel it. Although it made her sad, Kate understood. She hadn’t allowed herself to be excited until now. Everyone just needed a minute to catch up.

  Scarlett was the first to respond. She came over to Kate and hugge
d her with such painstaking gentleness that it brought tears to Kate’s eyes. “I’m keeping everything crossed,” she said into Kate’s ear.

  Beside them, Jake hugged David. As he moved to give Kate a peck on the cheek, she noticed a cautious smile on his face.

  Kate shot a furtive glance at her father. He was yet to react, but that was his way, always measured.

  “Pregnant?” he said finally. “Again?”

  Kate nodded, conscientiously ignoring the again part. Her stomach reached new levels of activity—clamping, stretching, churning. Waiting. “Twelve weeks tomorrow.”

  He weighed that up for a moment, frowning. “Tomorrow? But … aren’t you supposed to wait until twelve weeks to announce?”

  The silence in the room carried for a beat. Kate was about to laugh nervously, to make a joke, to do something, but David beat her to it.

  “The expectant mother can tell her family any time she likes, William,” David said, the cheeriness of his voice notably absent. “And the correct response, I believe, is ‘Congratulations.’”

  David’s mouth set in a thin line. Scarlett’s and Jake’s eyes flew back and forth between David and her dad. The low, dragging feeling in Kate’s belly became heavier.

  “Yes,” her father said quickly. “I’m sorry. Congratulations.”

  “I’ll get dinner,” Kate said, standing.

  * * *

  An hour later Kate squirted a long line of liquid soap into the sink and watched the water turn to bubbles. Dinner hadn’t lasted long. The atmosphere had been tense and eventually her father had excused himself, before even dessert had been served. Kate felt the tears come to her eyes but she chased them away with a steely thought. Who cares? she told herself. What did it matter?

  Anyway, what had she expected? That her awkward old dad would suddenly become Pa Ingalls upon hearing he was going to become a grandfather? No, she hadn’t expected that. Hoped, but not expected.

  “What are you doing, Kate?” David said, appearing behind her. He entered the kitchen slowly, as though with each step he might chance upon a rogue grenade.