Glitter and Glue (18 page)

John is working the flight to Singapore the day Milly first comes to me to ask for help. Seventeen weeks. That’s how long she held out.

“Can you read my story? We have to have someone check it before we turn it in.” She’s not happy to have to call on me but she has no other options.

“I’d love to,” I say, setting aside my journal.

“You write a lot,” Milly says.

“You don’t have a diary?”

She shakes her head.

“It’s fun. I just write down what happens every day.” She looks unsatisfied. “So that way, after July, I can remember you. And your crazy brother.”

“And Evan.”

I smile. I can’t help it. “Yes, him, too.”

She holds out her paragraph about Tasmania.

Every now and then, when I had a really good paper, I’d ask my mom to read it. I did not ask because I valued her feedback. I asked because I wanted praise, her praise, which was hard to come by. But it never worked. She bypassed artistic merit and centered on everything I considered small-minded and beside the point: spelling, grammar, punctuation. She considered my incisive analysis of
Macbeth
, “Not So Fast, Lady McB!,” a massacre
of the English language.
What are all these dashes? What’s wrong with commas? Why so many parentheticals?

Milly’s Tasmania paper is one sentence with a dozen conjunctions.

“It’s excellent!” I lie to Milly, thinking,
How hard was that, Mother?

“Thank you!”

But I can’t help it. “Let’s just fix the spelling here.” I have to edit her, improve her, and she’s not even my kid.

“No,” she says, snatching the paper before I can touch my pencil to it. “I like it this way.”

“Good. You’re right. It’s great the way it is.”

“Remember Natasha?” she says out of the blue.

“Natasha?”

“The girl—from the park—the one who thought you were my mum?”

“Oh, Natasha. Yes, I do.”

“That was so funny when she thought you were my mum. Wasn’t it?”

“Yeah—”

“I mean, you and me, we don’t even look alike. Do we?”

“You’re way prettier.”

I wait for her to say something more, but she’s busy feeling pretty. As she moves toward the door, she turns and says, “I’m working on a project for you in art.”

“Me? Really?”

She nods. “Everyone is making something. Because of Mother’s Day.”

“Oh,” I say, barely able to find my voice. “We can give yours to your dad.”

“He won’t be here on Friday.”

“But he’ll be here Sunday.”

“The tea is Friday.”

“The tea?”

“The tea at school. That’s when we give out the presents. You’re going to be surprised.”

I already am.

That Friday, I go to Milly’s classroom. I sit in the back near the door, careful not to block the view of the real mothers.

Mr. Graham welcomes us and explains that the children have been working very hard the last few weeks, thinking about the “special people” who take care of them. I hold Milly’s stare.

“We’ve been talking about all the ways we can show appreciation,” Mr. Graham goes on.

“Like not whingeing,” a boy in Milly’s class says, making all the mothers, and me, chuckle.

“That’s right!” Mr. Graham says. “And we’re very excited to share our gratitude with a poem. Are we ready?” I’m not. Is Milly? “Okay. Here we go.”

“Mothers …” says the first girl.

“…  sing us songs …”

“…  feed us vegetables …” Mothers elbow each other and wink at their children as they perform.

“…  and take us for pizza …”

“…  and treat us to bikkies!” adds the boy who called out
not whingeing
, drawing another big laugh.

“Mothers read to us …”

“…  take us to the park …”

“…  to the movies …”

“…  to the library …”

“…  to dance class …” Milly says, unfazed. As I exhale, a
few moms turn to me with a nod of appreciation for the situation. We are all impressed with Milly.

It’s not until after I put her to bed that night that I can bring myself to think about my mother and the reams of things she did for me that could and should have softened me. What is it about a living mother that makes her so hard to see, to feel, to want, to love, to
like
? What a colossal waste that we can only fully appreciate certain riches—clean clothes, hot showers, good health, mothers—in their absence.

On Sunday morning, I hear John and the kids in the kitchen whispering. An ad on the television says, “This year, make sure Mum knows how much you need her!”

A moment later, the new Milly appears at my door with toast and tea, two homemade cards, and a present wrapped in newspaper. Martin comes in behind her with a picked flower. All the crusty chapping on his lips is gone. I did that.

They sit on the end of my bed, waiting for me to try the toast and sip the tea.

“So good, thank you,” I say.

“Read the card,” Milly says.

Happy day to Kelly. From Milly
. That’s all it says. Inside, she’s drawn a stick figure waving to me. I open the present. A brown polka-dotted ceramic disk.

“It’s a chocolate-chip cookie,” she explains.

“Of course it is. Thank you so much. I love it,” I say, squeezing her knee. I should get out of bed, but I’m afraid to face John. How can he stand this charade?

“Would you care for some fruit?” Milly asks in a waitressy voice.

“I would love some.”

She hops off the bed and heads to the kitchen.

“Are you going to the hospital?” Martin asks me.

“What? No—”

“I don’t want to come see you in the hospital.”

“You won’t have to. I’m not going to the hospital. I’m not sick—”

“But I said to Daddy that next year I was going to make you a vase, and he said you won’t be here next year.”

“Oh! That’s because I have to go home, remember? I can’t live here. I have to go to the United States. Where my parents and my brothers live.”

“When will you be back?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“See!”

“I don’t know, because Australia is super far away from America. But I can write you and call you and send you photos and—”

“How will you get home?”

“On an airplane.”

“In the sky?”

“Yes, in the sky.”

Milly returns with a bowl of pineapple chunks.

Martin reaches for the bowl. “Can I have some?” For Martin, it’s pineapple first, Keely’s departure second.

“Don’t eat Keely’s fruit,” Milly snaps. “Go in the kitchen if you want some.”

He hops up.

“Martin!” I stop him. “Do you know what I’m saying? About going home?”

“Yeah,” he says as he rolls out of my room. “You’re going in the sky.”

What does
going in the sky
mean to Martin? Is that where his father works, his father who is standing in the kitchen in sweatpants and slippers? Or is that where his mother went?

That afternoon, the kids are out back playing and the air inside is muggy with unsaid things, things like
Mother’s Day sucks
. John is doing paperwork at the kitchen table. Pop wanders in and out the backdoor with bits of laundry. Evan said he was heading over to his father’s house to hang out with his brother and sister, his mysterious other life, but he’s still here. I try to get an adult conversation started—there was news about terrible riots in Los Angeles this past week—but no one bites.

Why don’t they leave each other? What keeps these men here, pressed up against each other? Surely Pop could find more conversation and activity in a retirement community. Evan could move in with Thomas, drink beers and watch late-night TV and be young. John could pack up the kids and sell this house and start again.

Standing in the hall, adjusting my headphones to get ready for a walk, I catch Evan folding the red wool blanket in the living room and realize that he has not stayed for Pop or the kids. This is not an obligation, the tragic fulfillment of a bedside promise to his mother. He stays because this is where she was. He stays to be near her. These are her things—the sofa that followed her from apartment to first house to second marriage, the photos she chose to keep, her recipes, her blanket. To leave Lewiston is to leave the only place where he might sit for a morning in her favorite spot or smell her scent on a pillow or come across her gardening gloves and secretly slip his hands into them, opening and closing his fists in fantastic synchronicity with her memory.

If my mom died and I couldn’t call her up inside myself, I’d
pull on a pair of elastic-waistband pants, pour a touch of Smirnoff over ice, and phone a girlfriend to play cards. If that didn’t work, I’d try reading a library book on a beach chair, and if that didn’t work, I’d take her rosary beads and shake them like a shaman until she came back to me, until I could see her and hear her and feel her again.

By ten
A.M.
, Evan and I are in our chairs, ready for the show. Eden’s rapist has yet to be found. Cruz continues to repress his rage publicly, but when no one’s around he’s crazed, sure it was her doctor.

As the credits roll, I lean back and sigh. “If they don’t sort this out before I leave—”

“I’ll have to write you with the updates. Did you book your flights?”

“Yeah, next Tuesday.” Five nights left, Evan. Tick tock.

He raises his eyebrows like he’s just taking this in for the first time, and I nod. For a split second, I think I might lean into him.

“So I was going to tell you, I found my old art portfolio from uni.”

“Can I see?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Now?” I nudge.

“I guess so. Okay. Yeah.” He stands up, so I do, too. “After you,” he says, and I head outside, past the lemon tree, across the driveway, alongside his Scirocco. I stop at the door. We’re both nervous.

“Here?” I ask, pretending I don’t know where I am.

In his room, he unzips a giant black folder and spreads out
his school drawings on the mattress. A motorcycle, cylinders, city streets. More than some sort of passion or point of view, his work communicates a desire to complete the assignments to his professor’s satisfaction. Deeper in the pile are drawings of the human form. A hand, a back and neck, bent over, hair hanging over like a waterfall. No faces. Faces are hard, I bet.

“Do you have anything you did outside of class?” I ask, digging for classified information.

“A few. Not sure where.” He doesn’t want me in his private portfolio, and maybe that’s as it should be. It’s not right to drag someone’s insides out into the daylight, take a long look, and then walk on, leaving him to dart around scooping up his papers and pictures.

“Oh, actually,” he says, surprising me, “I have one drawing.” He pulls out a sketch of a bird’s nest. His pencil marks are light, the paper undented. It’s beautiful and oddly sad.

“This is really good, Evan. You should hang this in the living room.”

“John wouldn’t want my art in the house.”

“Come on.”

“I promise you.”

I try to say something nice about John, like how he gave Tracy and me a ride downtown last week, but Evan shakes his head and says John recently asked him to start contributing for groceries.

“Did you ever get along?” I ask, and he exhales, the way people do when they’re about to say the thing that’s been going unsaid.

“We used to do okay. I mean, I can’t say it was so obvious to me what Mum saw in him, but I probably wasn’t very excited about her dating anyone.”

“And then …”

“When Mum got sick, he … there were so many decisions, and I knew a lot about her situation because I read a lot about tumors and cancer treatments, and my friend’s mum is a nurse, so I knew about different options and medications, but he didn’t talk to us, me or Pop. He’d come home from the hospital, go in their room, shut the door, and come out with his decision.”

I ask why John had all the power.

“He’s the husband.”

“Right, of course. I was just thinking …” I don’t know what I was thinking, other than that Evan’s life as her son went back twice as far as John’s life as her husband, and maybe that should prequalify Evan.

Though if my mother ever has a fatal disease, my brothers and I will have no say whatsoever. For that matter, neither will my father. She will not allow us to be the ones to withhold her medication, turn off her respirator, let her die. As far as she’s concerned, those decisions are hers alone, and she’s made them, along with every detail of what happens after. At her funeral, someone talented will sing “Ave Maria,” the long version. There will be a program, but no photo. Between her birth date and the day she died, there will be an extra long dash, because
Let me tell you something, Kelly, it’s what happens in the dash that matters
. She will be cremated, unthinkable as the process is, and the ashes from that fire will be spread in three places: the woods near our swim club, the backyard at Wooded Lane, and the beach off Thirty-fourth Street in Avalon. She will be let go peacefully into the hands of a God who knows her full name and every hair on her head and who will deliver her to the field in heaven—the green, green grass of home—where Libby, TJ, and Slugger wait for her with her brother, Tommy.