Giving my mom a moment, I walk straight toward the windows. They’re floor to ceiling, looking out over the portico and the luscious gardens Mom herself used to tend and grow until she hired gardeners. Working with her, digging in the dirt, and listening to her talk about how she cares for her roses and myriad other shrubs was the highlight of my week when I was a little girl.
Bonus points because it meant I didn’t have to be stuffed into frilly, scratchy dresses, and could wear sweats and sloppy boots. It was the one time I didn’t get scolded for making messes and dirtying myself up.
It’s the one memory I have of loving being with my mom. Seeing her not care about manicures and makeup and her next hosted volunteer event or ladies’ luncheon.
I think about all of this, hands clasped together in front of me, wringing madly while trying to figure out what to say.
Mom beats me to it.
“For the longest time, when I was a little girl, I grew up with Nana thinking that love made the world go around. She lived so freely, didn’t care about much, and while I know you love that about her, as her daughter, it often meant we didn’t have food on the table. She’d be out, having the time of her life with friends and forget to do my laundry and go to the grocery store. Your grandma has always had a personality greater than life but I learned very early on that her personality often overtook her sense of duty and responsibility.”
Yeah. Definitely a different dimension. I’d scan for a portal but I’m too stunned by what my mom is saying. I spin and face her, putting my back to the windows and for the first time in my life, I’m struck by the grief and guilt weighing my own mom down as she sits, hunched over on the chair, a fresh glass of wine from the library’s small bar area untouched in front of her.
“I didn’t want children,” she says, staring at the wine. “I didn’t know how to care for someone else, and I’d spent so much of life having to take care of me, hiding how bad things were, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted that responsibility.”
“Mom.” I have nothing left to say. Her pain is palpable, and yet, she somehow manages to skewer me at the same time.
“I won’t apologize for making something of myself. For changing who I was to have what I wanted. Nana believed college wasn’t for people like us. Told me I lived with my head in the clouds and that I was always destined to be just like her, and I fought it. From the moment I could leave her home, I fought those words of hers with every breath I took.”
My shoes have frozen themselves to the wood floor. My thoughts have fled. I am staring at Mom, listening to her twist a version of Nana I never saw.
“You never told me.”
“She’s your grandmother. She loves you. You deserved to have that relationship with her without my interference or my preference.” She grabs her wine, glass shaking as she brings it to her lips. “Doesn’t mean it’s easy for me to be around her.”
So much of this makes sense now that I can look back. The irritation Mom always showed when she would take me to Nana’s as a little girl, like she was climbing the walls and searching for her escape route the entire time we were there before she eventually refused to take me back there. The home I always assumed was falling apart simply from age, but perhaps it was Nana’s neglect. She certainly wasn’t the world’s best housekeeper by any means.
How much of my growing up had I imagined to be different than reality?
“Why tonight? What happened today that made you blow up and decide to tell me?” Because she wasn’t going to. She’s acted like Roman living here is copacetic and completely normal when it’s anything but.
Her lips thin, and for a while she doesn’t say anything, just looks out to her now professionally landscaped gardens with that glass of wine clutched in her manicured fingers like a lifeline.
“She barged into my room earlier, letting me know her thoughts on Roman and the rehearsal dinner. Which isn’t any of her business. And frankly, I only invited her to this wedding to be polite, but she’s been completely unreasonable ever since her arrival. Harping about every little thing she learns as if it’s her right.”
“Unreasonable,” I mutter. “Because she loves me and maybe she’s thinking about my feelings in all of this when you aren’t?”
She flinches, and that familiar frustration with my mom bubbles like molten lava.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demand. “Why didn’t you bother to give me a heads-up instead of just saying my presence is expected. You couldn’t have at least warned me?”
“You left him. I didn’t think you cared.”
“Because he cheated on me… with the woman he’s marrying… who was my friend! And you didn’t think I cared? Or might be embarrassed? But no…” I flip my hand in the air. “You offered to host his freaking rehearsal! Here! In my house!”
“My house,” my mother says, calm as a can be. “And what was I supposed to do when Teresa asked for our help?”
My breath leaves me in a rush, limbs still burning with anger and frustration. “I get wanting to help Teresa. Hell, I feel for Norman and her, and yes, even Roman. But did you think about me at all in this? Because no offense, Mom, it seems to me that in your determination to end up nothing like your neglectful mother, you sure as hell became exactly like her.”
“I gave you a stable home. I made sure you had everything you could possibly want growing up and you throw it in my face?”
“All I wanted was a mother who acted like she gave a damn about me, who supported me, who encouraged me. And strangely enough, you just said yourself those are the exact same reasons why you don’t like your own mom. So tell me, how exactly are you two different?”
I’m done. I am absolutely done with this conversation. We can talk in circles for the rest of the night and she’ll never see. “As for the rest of what you gave me… that’s far down on the list of priorities to knowing your own mother actually likes you.”
I leave the library and head straight back to the dining room.
Nana and Klaus are the only two left at the table but the silence is thick as cement and hardening by the moment. I head straight to the bar and pour a glass of wine. The bottle shakes in my hand, wine almost spilling over the rim of the glass as I fill it.
“Shit.”
A warm hand covers mine. Klaus’s scent envelops me as he presses his chest to my back. “Let me get this for you.”
“I… thank you.” I rest against him and let my head fall back to his shoulder.
If I could stay here, like this, resting against his strength and warmth for the night, it’d be perfect. Too bad this erupting volcano isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
It’s only getting started. I can only hope we’re not all burned in the lava’s wake by the weekend’s end.
“I take it that didn’t go well?” He speaks quietly into my ear, only loud enough so I can hear and at her chair, Nana acts like we’re not in the room.
“Not great. But it explains some things, I guess.”
“We can grab this bottle and go outside, or go get drunk in your room.”
Oh, to be able to wash away tonight’s revelations with alcohol. What a divine plan.