the kitchen cuckoo clock, signaling the half hour. I look at my watch. “I have to go. Oh, Ma, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said that. I’m just … I don’t know, I guess I needed to yell at someone. I’m sorry.” I stand, reach for my coat.
She takes our plates to the sink, starts running water.
“I’m really sorry. I’m a jerk.”
“It’s all right. You’ve got a lot on your mind. I know you’re not yourself.”
I stand watching her. I don’t know what to do. I’ve got to go.
“I’ll see you later.”
“Sam?” She shuts off the water, turns to face me. “You’ll find this out when Travis gets older. But your children never really grow up for you.”
I start to say something, then stop.
“You protect your children. You must always protect them.”
“From what, Ma?”
“From everything that’s sad, or wrong, or scary. I mean, you try. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“But … That’s not what I believe. I believe children are entitled to the truth.”
“How much truth, Sam?”
I don’t answer. What is the answer?
“I know I embarrass you, I’ve always known that. But I have to get through life in my own way. It pleases me to be happy. And it pleases plenty of other people, too. Yes, it does. Louise, for example.”
“Are you serious?”
“Louise does not have a problem with me. She loves me very much. She may not tell you that, but she does.” I stare at my mother’s carefully made-up face, and suddenly I see that same face many years ago, shortly after my father died, when she came out of the bathroom after having been in there for a very long time. “Now!” she said. I was sitting in the hall, spinning jacks, and I looked up at her. “I think this style is much better, don’t you?” She showed me some modification she’d made to her hairdo, and I nodded, then returned to my jacks.
What occurs to me, now, is that what my mother had been doing all that time was weeping. With astonishing quiet. And that when she was done, she’d washed her face, fixed her hair, put on lipstick, and then gone out to the kitchen. She turned the radio on low and made dinner so that it would be ready when it always was. And then she smiled and chatted empty-headedly or fussed at her daughters all during dinner, preempting any kind of real conversation, preempting any questions, and then she put her daughters to bed, still smiling, still dispensing random advice about this and that, and her daughters squirmed and rolled their eyes and felt their love lessen year by year, eroded by embarrassment, by a terrible, defeating kind of resignation that told them she would never be different. But what did Veronica do after she put us to bed? I wonder now. And I imagine a mother who took a mask off her face, then pushed hard into a pillow to weep for the loss of her husband, for the loss of the life she was supposed to have, for the only man she ever—I actually gasp, thinking this now—loved. And it comes all at once to me, it comes at this instant, that my mother simply lost too much and repaired herself in the only way she was able; that, in fact, she is continuing to repair herself, hour by hour, the pendulum of the cuckoo clock swinging in the light and the dark of all the days that have passed since my father died at this same brown wooden kitchen table.
“Ma,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what, honey?” There it is, the vacant brightness in her eyes, evidence of the invisible amputation that I have missed forever, until now. She comes over and hugs me. “Don’t be sorry. I’m just fine. You tell Louise that, all right?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll tell her.” And then, “Want to come to dinner tomorrow night?”
“Not tomorrow. I’ve got a date with a new fellow.” She makes a giddap sound. “A Charlton Heston look-alike and I’m not kidding. It’s his son that I want you to meet, by the way.”
“Okay.”
She blinks. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I … He is divorced, honey, a couple of times. Well, three. But he doesn’t have any children. And he—”
“It’s all right. I’ll meet him.”
I slide my coat on. My arms feel unreal to me, sewn on. At the door, my mother says, “His name is Jonathan. J-O-N-athan, that kind. I’ll have him call you.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t rush anything, now. This is just