Page 22 of Slander
My mother.
I go out onto the porch as she's getting out of the car. She's already got the back door open and pulling out containers, stacked three high, a grocery bag hanging off her wrist, because the woman has never once in her life arrived anywhere empty-handed, and she's not going to start at my rental in the middle of nowhere.
"Don't just stand there," Magnolia says. "Come carry something. You think I drove an hour to watch you lean on a post?"
"You could've called."
"I could've." She hands me the containers and reaches back in for more. "Then you'd have told me not to come, and I'd have come anyway, and we'd both have wasted a phone call."
She comes up the steps and stops in front of me and looks at me the way only she looks at me. Weighing whether I'm about to come apart.
She looks at me straight on, full in the face, like she's checking the work.
My eyes. My color. Whether I've slept. Whether I'm here,allthe way here, or whether the medication is dulling me.
Whatever she finds, her shoulders come down an inch.
"You look all right." She lets a breath go when she says it, slowly, like she's been holding it since she pulled in the drive.
"I'm all right, Mom."
"I know you are." She pats my cheek once, hard, almost a slap, the way she's done since I was a boy. "Now give me a fresh cup of coffee. I've been in that car since seven, and you know what I’m like without enough caffeine in my system."
A total bitch, but I don’t tell her that.
While I make a fresh pot of coffee and help her with the rest of the stuff from her car, she unpacks half her kitchen into my fridge.
A pan of something, a stack of something else, a Tupperware of the cornbread she knows I'd crawl over glass for. She talks the entire time, the way Bodul talks, filling the air so I don't have to.
"Your father's knee is acting up again and he won't see anybody about it. Stubborn old goat. You'd think I married a mule." She stacks the cornbread where I'll see it. "Everly and Regnor are bringing the baby around to Sunday dinners now. You should see those grown men, Njal, the whole clubhouse goes to pieces every time that child so much as yawns."
She straightens, pins me with a look.
"And Runes asked about you. Don't make that face—he did. He asks every week."
I lean against the counter and let all the information settle in, and it's good. It's so simple and good to have her in the room that my throat goes tight with it, and I have to look down at my coffee.
"And your brother," she says, and her voice changes, just slightly, the way it always does on Bjorn now.
"How is he?"
"He's getting there." She turns a container a quarter turn on the counter so the label faces out, busywork, the thing her hands do when her heart's involved. "He's not where you are. He won't do the program. Says he doesn't need it." She looks up at me."He needs it. You… you both needed it, way earlier, and I should have realized it."
"He'll get there when he gets there. I can't do it for him."
"I know that." She says it sharply, then softer. "I know. I just hate watching one of you find the road and the other one still standing in the trees."
I don't have anything to say about that.
I came out of the same dark Bjorn's still in, and the only reason I found the road is I hit a bottom so far down there was nowhere left to go but up. I wouldn't wish that on anybody, least of all my own twin.
"He'll get there," I say again, because it's the only thing I've got that doesn't hurt her worse.
She reaches up and brushes my hair back off my forehead, like I’m eight years old again.
Her eyes are wet, but she's not going to let them spill, because my mother has never cried in front of us, if she can help it.
That's when the dog hits the side door.
