Nowhere but Home A Novel - By Liza Palmer Page 0,124

bit.”

I walk away from the church and stop at the DQ for a double-dip swirl. I take the side streets, licking my ice-cream cone and observing life in North Star. I feel cleansed. Baptized, almost. I finish my cone just as I make the final turn down the tree-lined street to where the shack used to be.

In the light of day I can see that it’s all but gone now. The Hall of Fame, just next door, is closed. It is Sunday after all. I walk through the dirt toward what’s left of the shack. My sandals are already wrecked, what’s a bit more? The rotted-out shack is now just fallen planks of wood that once were walls. They lean haphazardly against the concrete wall at the back of the property line. I shift and move the planks around trying to unearth something that I don’t even know I’m looking for. And yet I find it. That old plank Mom nailed to the front of this shithole is just as rotted as the rest of them. WAKE. Four letters. No punctuation. I brush off some of the muck, but think better of it as splinters and spiders threaten to attack at any moment. The branded name is blackened and deep into the wood. Scarred.

“Now I’m just being melodramatic,” I say to myself, trying to look around the little piece of land with fresh eyes, just as Merry Carole told me to.

I feel nothing. No swell of emotion like I felt back in the cemetery. I look out to the street in front of the shack, getting reacquainted with the view I stared at day in and day out as a kid while I worked behind that take-out window. And that’s when the emotion chokes me. When I think about that kid. The kid who waited and tried to be enough for a selfish, feckless parent. I’d watch down that street for Mom. I remember trying to look busy and proficient as she walked up only to have her shove me aside and tell me I was doing it wrong. I search my memory bank hoping to find some tender nugget of a memory of her and can’t find a one.

I’ve heard people talk about loving their kids or friends or parents, but not liking them. As if love is this inalienable right that trumps a person’s bad behavior and neglect. Our society needs parents to love their kids. We joke about how hard parenting is, but there’s an understanding that parents would do anything for their kids. It’s heresy to suggest anything different. As I stare out at that street, that unchanged street, I realize that I’ve been wrong this entire time. Just like the movies I’d studied about the Small-town Girl in the Big City, I’d fallen for the mythology of the incompetent parent who makes good in the end. As I stand in the ruins of what Mom once built, I know I won’t find some secret letter where she finally proclaims her undying love for Merry Carole and me. I’ve tried to fit my mother into society’s idea of what a parent should be. And within those parameters, I’m cast as the monster. I’m the unlovable child.

What happens if I switch the paradigm?

What happens if I finally see my mother for who she was? A woman so incapable of love that her entire life was about what she wanted, how she’d been wronged, and how the world owed her. Merry Carole and I were just two rusty nails her dress got snagged on as she searched for her real life. This isn’t some big philosophical discussion about parents and children at all. It’s about one woman. One inexcusable woman who saw people as stepping-stones. Including her own kids. As the ideas run through my head, the leaves rustling in the tiniest of breezes, I feel a coldness run through me.

A woman whose life was only about what she wanted, how she was wronged, and how the world owed her.

The words bump and ping around in my head. How did I not see that these patterns repeat themselves? I’m sure Mom felt the same about her mother. I remember hearing terrible stories about the woman whose recipes I now make by heart.

So here I am. Staring down the same street I did when I was a kid. Who am I waiting for now? Who am I trying to look busy for? Who do I think is going to