mom having anything to do with a condom is disgusting. “They’re not a hundred percent, you know.”
She glares at me in response. “Since when did you become a sex education teacher?”
“Why don’t you have an abortion?” I offer.
“Never.” She rejects the idea quickly and lowers her hand to her belly. “Out of the question.”
I’m unsure what to say to her next. She sits there all mopey, like she wants me to make things better or say the right thing—but what? “You’ll be okay”? “You’ll make a great mom”? I look to the door, wishing someone would come to rescue me. Someone older and wiser and optimistic.
I try to think of what my mom would say to me if I told her I was pregnant. I wish I were. I wish I had sliced open my skin and pulled out that birth control capsule five months ago. I wish I had Michael’s baby in me right now. Is that what my mom was doing—trying to hold on to someone?
“We’ll get through it, Mom,” I say to her, but then instantly regret my words. I should have said You, not We. You will get through it. Because if she thinks I’m taking care of some baby, she’s got another thing coming. I have my own problems. I start to feel really angry. Like, Screw you for dumping this crap on me. You’re an adult. You should know the answers.
She takes my supportive comment as an invitation to complain. She says she wakes up every morning feeling like she just wants to crawl back into bed. She says she can’t even walk past the fridge without gagging. And she’s so tired, she can barely stay awake after noon. Part of me worries that she’s drinking even though she promised she would stop and even though I checked all the cupboards and her drawers and there
was no sign of anything.
She sighs again. “Oh … I just don’t know what to do.”
I get up to walk out ’cause I’m so angry and I don’t want to have a fight. As I pass her, I say, “I’ll get extra hours at the clinic.”
“It’s okay, Hon. It’s my problem. I’ll figure something out.”
I shake my head and roll my eyes. Whatever. I know these complaints mean she’s going to stop working soon. “Well, I’ll get some more hours anyway,” I say, and walk out.
I have no faith in her working it out. And I won’t go to a shelter again. And I won’t take care of her like I did after Bradley died and my mom vacated her body for about a year, and returned all patched up from therapy. This time I’m old enough to do something about it. This time I’m not going down with her.
Forty-Two
Up, up, up.
Syphilis keeps straining against his rock. Doomed to the eternal attempt with no reward.
Up, up, up out of bed I get.
It’s strange, but the worse my mother’s life gets, the more inspired I become about my own. It’s one thing to mess up my own life, but I’ll be damned if I let my mother screw me up because of her mistakes. “You decide to be happy,” Uncle Freestyle tells me.“It’s a decision.” I’m not entirely sure I agree, but for some bizarre reason I get the notion that maybe all the recent events of my life can be seen as necessary things that are forcing me off a certain road and onto another that (unknowingly) is leading to success. Maybe my mom’s pregnancy is just the thing I need to kick me in the butt and get me to move into action.
Sometimes I wonder where these bursts of optimism come from, the ones that get me out of bed the first time my alarm goes off even though experience has told me that there’s no point, I’ll end up in the same place I started from. But like Ms. Dally says, we make our bed each day knowing that we’ll only mess it up again that night. Sometimes the only point to anything is the attempt, because the alternative, never trying, can only lead to inevitable doom.
I start to make plans to move out, get a second job, maybe even have my own apartment. At school, I tell Ms. Dally that I want to make a resumé so I can find work to fill the gaps in between my veterinary clinic shifts. When I say this, it’s like I just told her she won a thousand dollars,