“I’ve seen your mother wear the same expression for too many days for me to count when she was just as pretty as you are now,” she says with a slight giggle.
I think about her backhanded compliment. Everyone says I look like my mother. I’ll take it because I think my mother is beautiful. I don’t know if I look like my father because I’ve never seen him in my seventeen years. My mother never wanted to talk about him, so I stopped asking after I turned ten years old.
He helped create me, but that’s about all he has ever done for me. He did enough to my mother by getting her pregnant with me and leaving her after she told about the pregnancy. We weren’t good enough for him to stick around and bear the responsibility of raising a child. My mother was so hurt over him leaving her, she couldn’t even bear to tell me about the selfish bastard.
“Oh wow, I love this gorgeous campus,” she says sitting up in her seat as we turn into the school’s entrance.
“Just take me back to my school in New York, please,” I beg as I stretch my left arm over to her steering wheel to grab a hold of it. She slaps my hand in a flash, then jerks the steering wheel to the left and grazes the freshly cut grass bordering the road. She huffs and gets the car back in the lane and continues driving. She turns her head toward me frowning.
CHAPTER THREE
“Aleta, dear, I’m too old for this,” she says gripping the steering wheel with both hands.
Do I feel sorry for her? No way. I want my mother to come and get me. I want to go home. I don’t even know my grandmother that well to even like her yet.
If she wasn’t related to me, I think I would have told her to ‘shut up, old lady’, but she is my mom’s mother, so I’ll give her some respect for now.
“I understand how you feel, dear. This is not fun for me either,” she says as she slowed the car down to a crawl around the winding lane.
My grandmother looks straight ahead as she reached over for my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. I appreciate the gesture and long for it from my mother. So, I don’t pull my hand away from her. I look down at her tanned hand scanning her thin aging skin wishing I could transform it into my mother’s younger hand.
I can feel the tears trying to form in the corners of my eyes. I refuse to let them fall. I cannot let my grandmother see me fall apart like a little girl. I’m almost a grown woman and she should allow me to live on my own. I could get a job back home. I have to get back to my home. I have to leave with my mother and go back to the way things were before. I want to get out of this hot state, dammit.
I’m not saying my life back in New York was the best, but it is all I know. My mother and I lived alone. We relied on each other. My father was nowhere to be found to help us, so that made us stronger. She was tough in a nice kind of way. If you pushed her, she pushed back. She told me to never allow my back to be pushed up against a wall and fight off all assholes.
At night when I’m falling asleep, the only thoughts I have are why did she leave me.
Now, she is no better than my absent father.
I’m used to not having my father around, but now I have to wonder where my mother is hiding.
Why would my mother run away from me?
She is too old for such a selfish and childish act. My mother is not that old, but she is in her early forties I think. She never talked about her age, so I don’t know. Maybe, she is just forty at the most. I don’t believe she planned to have me, but she did and we were supposed to survive together against the world. She loved me and I felt it through my heart. She is the only family I have ever known.
There were some times when my grandmother called her and she put me on the phone with her. It was always the regular conversations you would have with an acquaintance on the street.
She would ask how I’m doing and how was school. That’s about all I ever knew of my grandmother. I never talked to my grandfather on the phone because my mom said he was quiet. He stayed to himself.
My mother would go into her bedroom and close the door to talk to my grandmother. I didn’t care because I was not interested in their boring conversations. I never knew the woman and only cared about the dolls she shipped to me for my birthdays and every Christmas. I did love playing with them until I became too old to care about dressing them up and propping them up on my bed. My mother told her I was a teenager now and money was all I wanted, but I never saw those gifts.
I guess she needed the money more than I did anyway. She probably saved it up just for the trip we took down here and now for her solo adventure. I wished she would have prepared me for her disappearance from my life.
She could have at least let me know she was leaving me with her parents. She could have let me prepare for this heat and sun ahead of time. I don’t know if my grandparents even knew she was leaving me with them.
Did they see her sneak off in the middle of the night?
They don’t know her as I do. She has not lived with them in decades.
It is supposed to
