I reached down, moving my dessert fork and coffee spoon a bit to the right. When Ryan looked over at me, I expected to be called out again, but instead, this time, she just gave me a smile. Then she turned her head away so I could arrange the vase, candy jar, and candle as well.
I’d heard a lot of words used to describe my mom both before and since her death five years ago. “Beautiful” was a big one, followed closely by “wild” or its kinder twin, “spirited.” There were a few mentions each of “tragic,” “sweet,” and “full of life.” But these were just words. My mom was bigger than any combination of letters.
She died in 2013, on the Monday of the first week after Thanksgiving. We’d actually spent it together: me, my mom, and my dad, even though they’d been split up at that point for almost five years. First love against the backdrop of a summer lake resort makes for a great movie plot or romance novel. As a working model for a relationship and parenthood, though, it left a bit to be desired. At least in their case.
I was so little when they split that I didn’t remember the fighting, or how my dad was never around as he finished dental school, leaving my mom to take care of me alone. Also lost to my memory was an increase in my mom’s drinking, which then blossomed into a painkiller addiction after she had wrist surgery and discovered Percocet. By the time my consciousness caught up with everything, my parents weren’t together anymore and she’d already been to rehab once. The world, as I remembered it, was my post-divorce life, which was my dad and me living with Nana Payne in her apartment building in downtown Lakeview and my mom, well, anywhere and everywhere else.
Like the studio apartment in the basement of a suburban house, so small that when you fully opened the front door, it hit the bed. Or the ranch home she shared with three other women in various stages of recovery, where the sofa stank of cigarettes despite a NO SMOKING sign above it. And then there was the residential motel on the outskirts of town she landed in after her final stay at rehab, where the rooms were gross but the pool was clean. We’d race underwater across its length again and again that last summer, her beating me every time. I didn’t know it was her final summer, of course. I thought we’d just go on like this forever.
That Thanksgiving, we ate around Nana’s big table with the good china and the crystal goblets. My dad carved the turkey (sides were brought in from the country club), and my mother arrived with Pop Soda, her nonalcoholic drink of choice, and two plastic-wrapped pecan pies from the grocery store. Later, I’d comb over that afternoon again and again. How she had that healthy, post-treatment look, her skin clear, nails polished, not bitten to the quick. She’d been wearing jeans and a white button-down shirt with a lace collar, new white Keds on her feet, which were as small as a child’s. And there was the way she kept touching me—smoothing my hair, kissing my temple, pulling me into her lap as I passed by—as if making up for the weeks we’d lost while she was away.
Finally, there was crackling chemistry between my parents, obvious even to a child. My dad, usually a measured, practical person, became lighter around my mother. That Thanksgiving, she’d teased him about his second and then third slice of pie, to which he’d responded by opening his full mouth and sticking out his tongue at her. It was stupid and silly and I loved it. She made him laugh in a way no one else could, bringing out a side of him that I coveted.
It was getting dark when I went down with her in the elevator to meet her ride. It bothered me for a long time that I never remembered this person’s name, who picked her up in a nondescript American compact, gray in color. Outside the lobby door, my mom turned to face me, putting her hands on my shoulders. Then she squatted down, her signature black liner and mascara perfectly in place, as always, as she gazed into my eyes, blue like hers. People always said we looked alike.
“Saylor girl,” she said, because she always called me Saylor, not Emma. “You know I love you, right?”
I nodded. “I love you too, Mama.”
At this she smiled, pulling her thin jacket a bit more tightly around her. It was always windier by our building, the breeze working its way through the high-rises, racing at you. “Once I get more settled, we’ll do a sleepover, okay? Movies and popcorn, just you and me.”
I nodded again, wishing it was still warm enough to swim. I loved that motel pool.
“Come here,” she said, pulling me into her arms, and I buried my face in her neck, breathing in her smell, body wash and hair spray and cold air, all mixed together. She hugged me back tightly, the way she always did, and I let myself relax into her. When she pulled away, she gave me a wink. My mom was a big winker. To this day, when anyone does it, I think of her. “Now go on, I’ll make sure you get inside safe.”
She stepped back and I took one last look at her, there on the sidewalk in those bright white sneakers. Nana had been in cocktail attire for dinner and insisted my dad wear a tie and me a dress, but my mom always followed her own rules.
“Bye,” I called out as I turned, pulling the heavy glass lobby door open and stepping inside.
“Bye, baby,” she replied. Then she slid her hands in her jacket pockets, taking a step back, and watched me walk to the elevator and hit the button. She was still there when I got in and raised a hand in a final wave just before the doors shut.
Later, I’d try to imagine what happened after that, from her walking to her friend’s car to going back to the motel, where the pool was empty and her little room smelled of meals long ago prepared and eaten by other people. I’d see her on her bed, maybe reading the Big Book that was part of her program, or writing in one of the drugstore spiral notebooks where she was forever scribbling down lists of things to do. Lastly, I’d see her sleeping, curled up under a scratchy blanket as the light outside the door pushed in through the edges of the blinds and trucks roared past on the nearby interstate. I wanted to keep her safe in dreaming, and in my mind, even now, I slip and think of her that way. Like she’s forever stayed there, in that beat between nighttime and morning, when it feels like you only dozed off a minute but it’s really been hours.
What really happened was that a couple of weeks later, as I was thinking of Christmas and presents and Santa, my mom skipped her nightly meeting and went to a bar with some friends. There, she drank a few beers, met a guy, and went back to his house, where they pooled their money to buy some heroin to keep the party going. She’d overdosed twice before, each one resulting in another rehab stint and a clean start. Not this time.
Some nights when I couldn’t sleep, I tried to picture this part of the story, too. I wanted to see her through to the end, especially in those early days, when it didn’t seem real or possible she was gone. But the settings were foreign and details unknown, so no matter how I envisioned those last weeks and hours, it was all imagination and conjecture. The last real thing I had was her standing on the sidewalk as I pushed the elevator button, her hand lifted. Goodbye.
Middle of the night phone calls are never good news. Never.
“Bridget?” I said, sitting up as I put my phone to my ear. “Is everything okay?”
“My grandpa,” she managed to get out, her voice breaking. “He had a stroke.”
“Oh, my God,” I said, reaching to turn on the bedside lamp before remembering that it, like most of my other stuff, had already been packed. It had been a week since the wedding: Nana’s flight was midmorning; my dad and Tracy were leaving that afternoon. The next day, the movers would come. All that was left was the bed itself, a couple of boxes, and the suitcase I’d