I was alone at a lunch table again.
“One of the waitresses at work accused me of stealing. The owner believed her. Either that, or he just wanted to keep sleeping with her on the side. He told me I could leave on the spot without collecting my last paycheck or he’d call the police.”
I already know this story.
“Why didn’t you fight back? If you’d let him call the police, maybe she would have gotten fired.”
My mom shakes her head. “The world doesn’t work that way.”
“But why did we have to move so far away? Why did we have to move at all?”
My mother sighs and leans her head back. Then she tells me something I don’t know. “I was already a month behind on rent. And remember the Bonneville needed new tires? I was getting hit with a lot of bills. I couldn’t keep my head above water. And when I got fired, I knew there was no way I’d ever catch up.”
I feel a flash of guilt. I gave her such a hard time back then. While I was discovering the sweet thrill of holding the hand of a boy I liked, my mother was grappling with incredible financial stress. She’d already been slim, but she must’ve lost another ten pounds during that time, and she has never put them back on.
“So we skipped out?”
She nods. “We had to move far enough away that I wouldn’t bump into our old landlord on the street. I still owe him six hundred dollars.”
I turn away from her and look out the window again. I can almost see Charlie walking me home that last day and leaning in for a kiss goodbye, then pulling away and using a fingertip to slide his glasses back up his nose. I watched him walk until he turned a corner and vanished.
My heart is breaking all over again.
I’d thought this place could be a portal into understanding my mother better. But this setting yields nothing but sadness.
“Should we keep driving?” she asks.
I nod. When my mom suggests going by my high school or checking to see if one of my old friends is still living in the same house, I tell her I’d rather not.
We end up picking up subs from a deli we used to like, but it’s under new ownership now and the food doesn’t taste the same.
We eat in the car, and when we’re done, Mom gets out to throw away our trash.
I watch her pause as she walks down the sidewalk to give a homeless man the half of her sandwich she didn’t eat. Guilt sluices over me. Maybe I’ve been focusing on the wrong memories.
My mother is the only person in my life who has always been there for me. When I wanted to win our elementary school’s spelling bee, she endlessly quizzed me without ever once revealing how boring it must have been for her. She stayed up half the night running up and down the stairs to the laundry machines in our apartment’s basement to wash my comforter and sheets when I had the flu and threw up on them. She always made sure I had enough before she ate so I never went hungry, even though I suspect she did, many times.
Given that context, my fears about my mother seem crazy. She never tried to hold me back from going to college—on the contrary, she’s the one who sat down with a calculator and crunched numbers until we figured out a way to manage the tuition by me attending classes part-time and living at home. She seemed genuinely excited when I told her about my job offer from Johns Hopkins pending my graduation.
How can I suspect my mother of such a horrific deception?
And yet, I can’t shake it loose from my mind.
She returns to the car and opens the passenger-side door, then slides back into her seat.
“Anyplace else you’d like to go?” she asks.
I think for a moment. “Let’s drive by your old restaurant.”
She instantly shakes her head.
The idea gains momentum in my mind. “C’mon, Mom. We can go in and see if that jerk still owns it. He screwed up both our lives! Don’t you want to get a little revenge?”
The more I think about it, the angrier I become. If my mother hadn’t been fired, we might’ve found a way to stay in the apartment. I wouldn’t have lost my friends and Charlie.
My mother is staring at me. “What kind of revenge do you have in mind?”
“I don’t know, we can start by calling in a complaint to the health department about seeing rodents in the kitchen.”
I can’t tell from my mother’s expression if she likes my idea, so I throw out a few more.
“If we want to get really nasty, we could find out if he’s still married and tell his wife about the waitress. Oh—and we can post terrible reviews online.…”
My mother interrupts me. “He’s probably long gone, Catherine. Even if he isn’t, that’s all in the past. I’m not going to mount a campaign to punish him for something that happened nearly ten years ago.”
“But let’s drive by, and we can—”
Just like that, I feel my mother’s temper surge. It’s a force field that blocks my words and causes me to shrink away from her.
“Knock it off!”
My mother exhales. Then she says, more softly, “I never want to see that place again.”
I feel deflated as we drive home. We listen to the radio and make an occasional comment about traffic or the weather, like strangers in a ride share. When we stop at a gas station, my mother buys a couple of Tootsie Pops from the mini-mart inside and hands me a raspberry one, my favorite flavor. But things still don’t feel right between us.
My mom takes over the wheel after we get gas, and I rest my head against the window. Fatigue settles over me as the low buzz of the wheels against pavement lulls me into a dreamlike trance.
Then a memory flash jerks me back to full consciousness: The night before we moved from Lancaster, after I’d cried myself to sleep, I awoke abruptly.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, but when they did, I saw my mother pacing the length of our tiny apartment, from the living area into our bedroom and back again. She’d already told me the bad news, that we had to leave because of the allegation against her at work. But there must have been something else weighing on her. Something terrible enough to keep her relentlessly pacing through the night.
There was one other thing she did, too. Every time she neared our window, she paused and peered out.
I study her profile now as she briefly maneuvers into the left lane to pass a slower-moving car. My mother is an attractive woman, but she never calls attention to her looks. Hers is a quieter beauty. I used to urge her to grow her hair out from its short bob—it’s so lush and shiny—but she never would, and now I’m glad. The simple style suits her. She wears no makeup, beyond an occasional swipe of mascara and her beloved cherry ChapStick, which means I can see every laugh and frown line and freckle on her face.
Her appearance is transparent. But my mother keeps secrets.
For the first time in my life, I’m keeping some from her, too.
I’m beginning to think the trip to our old neighborhood wasn’t a waste of time.
My mother refused to drive by the steakhouse. But I remember its name: RJ’s. I can still visualize the logo. Those burgundy initials encircled in gold were emblazoned on the plastic bags she occasionally brought home with extra food from the kitchen.
If my goal is to trace my mother’s story backward to her roots, maybe RJ’s is the first step on the path toward the truth.