Chapter 63

63

My mother reinvented herself when she left me, although perhaps reinvention is being generous. I learned this when I was twelve and saw her at a diner just outside the city. She was standing between two stools at the milkshake bar asking for a clean fork in a voice I had not heard her use before. But I would have recognized the back of her anywhere—the round of her shoulders, the curve of her hips. When she was given the fork, she said thank you in a voice that sounded different than it had when she was my mother. Her words, with their superiority, had come out of her mouth as she spun on her black heels. She handed the new fork to the man she was with and he said, “Thanks, Annie, honey.” Anne was her middle name.

Later, I’d come to find out the bulky man was Richard. I’d known another man existed, the one on the phone before she left, the one who I suspected had something to do with the blood in the toilet. But I hadn’t pictured him looking this way—he was handsome but slippery, with wet hair and shiny skin, and he wore a huge gold watch. His face looked tanned from the sun although it was only March. He was nothing like my father, nothing like the life I imagined she had left me for.

I sank into the booth beside Mrs. Ellington, who had brought Thomas and me to celebrate our first-place win in the regional school science fair. She had watched us from across the gymnasium as we presented our findings to the judges, standing in front of the cardboard poster we’d made, our experiment written in Thomas’s careful cursive, with detailed pictures I’d drawn for each section. Something about ultraviolet light—I can’t remember now. But I remember Mrs. Ellington nodding along with the presentation we gave, like she could hear every word we said through the hum of one hundred students. I watched her in the distance and straightened my shoulders as I spoke, like she did. I wanted to make her proud.

I watched my mother and Richard for what felt like hours as they ate their meal and then folded their napkins like proper people did. She wore a black sheer blouse with big rose embroidery on the collar; I’d never seen her in something sexy like that. He put cash on the table before they’d even seen the bill. Mrs. Ellington glanced over at her, too, but she didn’t say anything to me then, nor I to her, and so we just had our milkshakes and Thomas talked about what we could do with our fifty dollars in prize money. I was numb with anxiety, wondering if my mother might turn her head around and catch a glimpse of me. A small part of me hoped she would. She never did, and I was mostly relieved when they left—I wasn’t sure if she would have come to say hello had she seen me. We left the restaurant and drove home in Mrs. Ellington’s car.

“You okay, Blythe?” Mrs. Ellington let Thomas run into the house while she walked me to the end of their driveway. I nodded and smiled and thanked her for the drive. I didn’t want Mrs. Ellington to know how much it hurt to see my mother. Happy. Beautiful. Better without me.

That night I got on my hands and knees before I went to bed and prayed that my mother would die. I would rather have seen her dead than as the new woman she had become, the changed woman who was no longer my mother.