Mom would stick us in her car and off we’d go. If it was evening time, she’d take us out to eat over in Winner, which was a bigger town and had a Culver’s. We’d get hamburgers and French fries and share an order of onion rings. Calli’d sit in her high chair and Mom would break off tiny pieces of her food and lay them on the tray in front of Calli. It was funny watching Calli try to pinch those tiny bits of food between her fingers. Sometimes she’d miss, but still stick her fingers in her mouth, hoping to get a taste of something. Afterward, before we’d leave, Mom would buy me a big thick Oreo shake all my own. She’d buckle me into the backseat and I’d settle for the long ride home, sucking on my shake. Winner wasn’t all that far from Willow Creek, but Mom would take what she called the scenic route and we’d drive and drive and drive.
One night after driving and driving, I was jerked awake when our car bounced down the side of the road, in and out of a ditch. Mom stopped the car on the edge of the road and turned back to Calli and me.
“You okay?” she asked. I nodded yes, even though she couldn’t have seen my face in the dark.
“I spilled some of my shake, though,” I told her.
She handed me some napkins to wipe up my pants and then laid her head on the steering wheel. “I’m sorry,” she said, but not really to me. “I’m sorry, I’m just so tired.”
Then she started the car up again and we went on home. Dad was sleeping in his chair, beer cans everywhere. I bet if I had counted them there would have been at least twenty-one, plus the dark brown bottle sitting on the end table. Mom didn’t bother picking up all those cans that night. She walked right on past them, saying something about how “he can just pick up after himself from now on,” and took Calli and me on up to bed.
From then on, if Dad started digging around for his bottle from the closet, he could never find it. This made him furious, but after a while he’d just stagger around until he found another beer in the refrigerator and then he’d settle back into his chair. Once in a while, when Dad started acting kind of scary, Mom would put us in the car and take us over to Winner, but we never drove around for as long as we did that one night she went off the road. She’d pull into a park area, lock our doors and close her eyes for a while. “Just resting,” she’d tell us. On one really cold winter night we got to stay at a motel in Winner. It didn’t have a pool or nothing, but it had cable and Mom let me flip through all the channels as much as I wanted to. Mom just sat on the bed with me, holding Calli, trying not to cry.
I hope I’m not doing the wrong thing. I hope that Petra doesn’t die because of what I am doing; I hope that she isn’t already dead.
Now Dad and I are just sitting here, all bloody, looking at each other, waiting for the other one to make a move, but we don’t. Not yet.
ANTONIA
Ben has not returned yet, so on top of everything else, I need to worry about him, as well. The comments from the Gregorys didn’t help matters, either. I know Ben, he wouldn’t hurt the girls, and I know Griff, he just plain doesn’t find kids interesting enough to spend very much time getting mad at them. Besides, the number of beer cans strewn around the house this morning was much less than normal, well short of his mean drinking. If he’d gotten to the mean drinking stage I would have been much more concerned.
Louis has not returned my call. I know he is busy with other aspects of this case, as well as his other duties, but I am surprised that he isn’t here. Louis has always been there for me, except when he left for college. Even I know that me asking him to stay was asking too much. Louis was there when a fifth-grade bully was terrorizing me when we were nine, he was there when I had a panic attack about presenting a speech for my tenth-grade literature class, and he was there when my mother died.
Even though my mother and I were so different, had so little in common, Louis knew that the loss of her was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. He knew that those hours that my father and I spent nursing her while she lay in bed, rotting from breast cancer had left a deep-seated imprint on me. Louis would drive me to the public library in order to check out whatever book my mother had requested I read to her, while a morphine pump deadened some of the pain.
My mother was a great reader. I was not. I liked books; I just didn’t have time for them. Between school, working at the convenience store and spending time with Louis, I never made the effort to read. My mother was always placing books on my bedside table, hoping that I would pick one up and have a wonderful discussion about it with her. I never did, not until she got sick. Then, out of guilt more than anything, I began to read to her. One day, near the end, my mother asked me to find her old copy of
One afternoon, about three weeks before my mother died, she patted the mattress on the hospital bed that we had brought in when we knew that she was going to die. I lowered the metal bar that prevented my mother from falling out of bed and gingerly sat next to her.
“Come closer, Antonia,” she said to me. My mother never called me Toni, it was always Antonia. I moved in closer to her, careful of the tubes that ran into her arm. It was so hard looking at her like that. My beautiful, beautiful mother who always smelled of Chanel before. Now a different smell, sour and old, hung around her. Her hair, once a golden-blond, now was dun-colored and lay lank on her shoulders, her face pale and pinched with pain.
“Antonia, my Antonia,” she whispered. I secretly loved it when she called me that. “I just wanted to tell you a few things, before…before—” She swallowed with great effort. “Before I die,” she finished.
“Mom, don’t say that,” I squeaked and before I knew it the tears were falling. How I hated to cry.
“Antonia, I am going to die, and very soon. I just didn’t get enough time with you,” she sighed. “The boys, they’ll be all right, but you, you I worry about.”
“I’m okay, Mom,” I sniffled, trying not to let her see me cry.
She took my hands in hers and I played with her wedding ring like I did when we were sitting in church when I was little so many years before. The ring spun loosely on her ring finger, she had lost so much weight. Her hands looked as if they belonged to a much older woman, the blue-tinged veins thick and protruding.
“Louis is a nice young man,” she said.
“Yeah, he is,” I agreed.
“Antonia, I won’t be at your wedding…” she started.
“Mom, please don’t say that,” I begged. My nose ran thickly and I had to pull a hand from hers to wipe it. “Please don’t talk like that.”
“I won’t be at your wedding, so I want to tell you a few things about being a wife and a mother.” She waited patiently until my sobs became quiet, wet hitches of breath. “People say that being a mother is the most important job you will ever have. And it is very important. But it is even more important, I believe, to be a wife, a good wife.”
I must have looked at her skeptically, because she started to chuckle at me, but the laughter caused her too much pain.
“I don’t mean you have be a floor mat. That’s not what I mean at all. I mean, who you choose to walk with through life will be the most important decision that you will ever, ever make. You will have your children and you will love them because they are yours and because they will be wonderful. Just like you.” She wrinkled her nose at me and grinned. “But who you marry is a
“Did Dad do that for you?” I asked. Night was settling in and the shadows made my mother look much softer, much younger, and less like she was dying.
“He did. I had such simple dreams, though. I just wanted to be a wife and mother. That’s all, really. You
