Things You Save in a Fire - Katherine Center Page 0,18
shutters and window boxes—all brightly, lovingly hand-painted with folk-art reds and pinks and oranges. The tiny front yard overflowed with real flowers as well, in a colorful, tangled jumble, draping over the picket fence.
Yep. This was Diana’s place.
She’d lived in Rockport for a full decade, but I’d never visited. She kept on inviting me, and I kept on declining.
Some part of me had never wanted to see the life she’d left us for.
Now, here I was, moving in.
I stood at the garden gate, but I couldn’t seem to make myself walk through it.
The sheer cuteness of her painted house felt disingenuous. The world might pass this sweet-looking house and decide that an equally sweet person lived in it. But I knew the truth. No amount of painted flowers could cover the truth. She was still the person who’d left us. She was still the person who had disappeared when I really, really needed her.
She was still one of the greatest disappointments of my life.
I tried to get oriented by looking around at the town’s sheer, unadulterated, almost aggressive New England charm.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t been warned. According to Diana, if you’d ever seen a movie that featured a “charming seaside village” for any amount of time, it was Rockport. She could rattle off ten of them in as many seconds. And her house, she swore, was at the epicenter of the cuteness—in a historic fishing village nestled on a narrow jetty called Bearskin Neck that curved out into the harbor.
She’d described it before, of course. I just hadn’t been paying attention.
Quaint little dollhouse-like stores decorated with weathered wooden buoys sold everything from T-shirts to jewelry to ice cream. Shutters were painted cheery pastels, and planter flowers bloomed everywhere. It was too idyllic to be true, and next to my big, hot, multicultural, gritty, authentic, beloved home city of Austin, this place felt absolutely fake.
Yet it felt like my mom, too. She herself was charming, and well groomed, and lovely. I could see why she would feel drawn here. It felt like her in a way Texas never had. I felt a surge of jealously toward this adorable town and all it had to offer. It had gone up against Austin, and won. But the real loser was me.
Just then, the front door opened. And there she was. My long-lost mother. Not literally lost, since, technically, we made an effort to see each other from time to time.
But lost all the same.
It had been a year since I’d seen her—for coffee, the last time she’d been passing through Austin—and I felt the familiar sensation that seeing her always gave me in the years since their divorce. A particular kind of numbness that happened when my heart wanted to flood with all the things people feel about their mothers—but I flat-out refused to let it.
There she was. The lady who had always been my mother. Exactly the same.
Except, wearing an eye patch.
It was so strange to see anyone in an eye patch, let alone my own mother. Then there was the patch itself, homemade out of blue calico fabric with flowers—which was even more off-putting than the fact of it in the first place. Who had a homemade eye patch?
That had to be the eye with the mysterious ’oma, of course. The sight of the patch made her situation—and by extension mine—seem real for the first time.
It also made her seem a little larger than life.
Or maybe that was just her.
I reminded myself again that she was only Diana. Of course, our parents get an extra dose of importance in our minds. When we’re little, they’re everything—the gods and goddesses that rule our worlds. It takes a lot of growing up, and a lot of disappointment, to accept that they’re just normal, bumbling, mistaken humans, like everybody else.
Her hair was grayer now, and she wore it in a short bob that curled forward under her ears. She’d never been a big one for makeup. She wore the same canvas apron she’d always worn, with a lifetime’s worth of smears and drips of glaze on it in every color known to nature, over wide-leg linen pants and a linen shirt that were both somehow the exact right ratio of wrinkled to pressed.
I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. I could say that without softening toward her, couldn’t I? That was just a cold fact. She was beautiful.
But also, for the first time in my life, I thought she looked old.