Brother, his wife and child, Girl, her two children, and her nanny all went to dinner with Mother and Stepmother. The restaurant was busy, and the server was doing the best he could, but the food was slow to arrive. Stepmother argued with him about a coupon and made him get his manager to ensure she got a free margarita that she didn’t want and tried to convince Girl to drink instead. Their table was scrunched against the wall, and the server had to stretch awkwardly to serve everyone, but he didn’t complain. Stepmother refused to sit next to Girl’s nanny, and refused to speak to her at all, not even replying when asked a direct question. Stepmother didn’t lower herself to talk to the help.
“Stepmother must be really mad to leave a tip like that,” Mother said to Brother and Girl as they were leaving. She looked embarrassed. Afraid. Mother clearly didn’t want to be there when the server saw his tip. Brother was in culinary school—preparing and serving food was his livelihood, but moreover, it was his passion. He had the word “SERVE” tattooed on his left bicep. Brother glanced at the check and calculated the correct tip and threw some bills on the table. Unfortunately, Stepmother saw him and went nuclear. When Stepmother yelled at Mother like she was a disobedient child, Girl went nuclear as well. If you had cut her, Girl’s blood would have glowed orange with hate. But as always, she said nothing. Her fear was greater than her rage.
“How can you let her talk to you like that?” Girl asked Mother while Stepmother went to get the car.
“It’s not her fault,” she said. “She has no filter because she’s bipolar.”
“Mom, she’s verbally abusive.”
Mother drew back, her face angry. “It doesn’t bother me. I have learned to let it roll off my back. It’s not her fault. It’s her disease. It doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t need you to defend me.”
To be loved by Mother, Girl could not say a word against her one true love.
Mother rode her motorized scooter to the grocery store to do their shopping, in case Stepmother needed their only car. Stepmother didn’t like grocery shopping, and besides, Mother couldn’t trust her to come home with anything on the list—she had a habit of wandering store aisles, coming out with bags of things that “looked interesting” and nothing for dinner. Mother made it clear, though, that Girl had no right to complain about it. Mother liked her life the way it was.
“I have never seen someone more determined to be happy than your mother,” one friend told Girl. “She makes a conscious decision and that’s the end of it.”
notes from the fourth wall
fierce love and loyalty wrapped in a blanket of annoyance and discontent
Here’s something that is hard for me to admit: my stepmother loves me more than just about anyone else in my life. At Christmas this past year, she bought me a hand-blown glass ornament with a tree inside, a melding of tree and sky in one continuous line. It was exactly the sort of thing I loved, more perfectly suited to me than the blue, fuzzy loungewear my mother picked out. But my stepmother spelled my name wrong on the gift tag. She spelled it L-A-U-R-A, which might be a little piddly detail, but her misspelling my name has enraged me since I was old enough to read and notice such things. My mother always tells me I’m being silly, that we all know she can’t spell and I should get used to it. It would be fine if only she were illiterate, but my stepmother has a master’s degree, so in my opinion, there’s no excuse for misspelling a name that has only four letters. Worse still, my brother married a woman named Laura, so that letter U is the only thing that keeps my name my own, as we are both Lillibridges. Do you see how it always goes astray? I was trying to tell you the story of how my stepmother went out of her way and bought me a beautiful present for Christmas, but then my bitterness took over. This is often how it is when I try to tell stories about her.
I know that she loves me, maybe as much as she loves my mom. When she and my mother broke up for a year, my stepmother still sent me emails, and that year she bought presents for my kids all by herself and not only mailed them on time but wrapped them, something my grief-wounded mother could not manage to do. I was still her child, even though she walked away from my mother.
I always thought that if they broke up, I wouldn’t miss her. Yet, during their separation, I found myself unexpectedly sad. I didn’t write her letters or God forbid call her on the phone, but every now and then, I’d snap a picture with my phone and send it to her. When I was in Morgantown, West Virginia, at the bar where they broadcast the Mountaineers football show, I sat at the anchor’s desk, snapped a selfie, and sent it to my stepmother, since WVU was her alma mater. When the kids were particularly cute, I’d send her a picture of them. When I was in Tennessee, I took a picture of a jar of moonshine and sent her that too, because I remembered her story of going up the holler with her friend Dorothy and getting shot at by moonshiners. It was one of my favorite stories when I was young, because my stepmother trotted out her deep West Virginian accent when she told it and there were real bullets and everything.
When I try to describe her on the page, I think of her
