Page 46 of Gone Tonight
“At first I thought it was either Parkinson’s or a shift in mood,” Charlie had told me. “I looked it up and handwriting shifts can be symptoms of either.”
“At first?”
He’d nodded. “Now I know it’s a change in mood.”
I was fascinated. “How can you tell?”
“He stopped wearing his wedding ring a week ago.”
Everyone assumed Charlie and I were a couple before we even kissed for the first time. We hadn’t been dating all that long before my mother broke the news: We had to move again.
She gave me a single day to return to school and say my goodbyes. When I got home that afternoon, she’d sold or given away our beds and couch and the rest of our furniture to neighbors, and our remaining belongings were packed in the back of the Bonneville.
It was almost like we’d never lived in Lancaster at all.
I glance at my mother now. She’s still staring up at the apartment from the passenger’s seat. I wonder what memory she is lost in.
If my mother has researched Alzheimer’s disease, she would know more recent memories are typically the first to disappear. It would make sense that her recollections from this time in her life would be relatively unmarred.
“Tell me again why we had to leave.” It’s a struggle to keep my voice from cracking. Charlie, Aliyah, Chelsea… we kept in touch for a little while after I left, with promises to call every week and visit, but by eleventh grade we’d drifted apart. They’d moved on while I’d floated backward.
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.
