Margaret Maclnnis
Here my mother is the teenaged girl in the passenger seat beside my father. She pulls down her sun visor and rests her palms on her belly. Because she is prone to water retention, her fingers are swollen and her rings cut into her. But this is her second pregnancy. She is used to the discomfort. Fixing her gaze on her hands, she breathes deeply and intently until she is sure she can feel the baby breathing to her rhythm. She has calmed herself this way for three years, ever since she was sixteen and pregnant for the first time, sixteen and terrified, though back then there hadn’t been much time to dwell on fear. One day the doctor told her she was pregnant, and the next day, or so it seemed, she was a wife and a mother. Everything she did then, and everything she is doing now, including being in this car on her way to the Sweet Life Quality Foods headquarters in Connecticut, she is doing for her husband and her children. Her children must have a father, their father, and she believes it’s her job to make sure he sticks around. God knows she’s doing her best to keep him happy and in one piece. God knows it isn’t easy.
In the mirrored visor, she studies the dark circles beneath her eyes. She hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. Not since my father lost his job at the Sweet Life food warehouse for the third time – and “the last,” his boss had told her when she called to ask if he’d reconsider. “I’m sorry, Vicki, but he’s blown it for good this time.”
She could kill him sometimes, she thinks, shifting her gaze from her reflection to his profile. It’s as if he were the teenager in the relationship, and she the twenty-eight-year-old. In this moment he is singing along to the radio and tapping on the steering wheel as if he hasn’t a care in the world, as if the events of the past weeks hadn’t happened, as if that ambulance had not stopped in front their apartment on Main Street and rushed him to the emergency room. Feeling slightly uneasy, she considers what she’ll say and do once they reach their Connecticut destination. Her uneasiness is less about nerves and more about agitation over my father’s most recent escapade. Typically, she would have tried to talk to him over the radio as he drove, regardless of whatever drama the previous weekend had brought, but something had changed. Something had started to shift within her at the ER when the doctor dropped his bomb on her. What my mother wanted to ask my father, she knew she couldn’t. She couldn’t risk upsetting him. Her question would always remain unanswered. He would never tell her why he did what he did. Most likely, she suspected, he didn’t know the answer.