****

Jeremy

I close my eyes and pull in a big breath before perching the tray against my hip with one hand and lightly knocking on the door with the other. After LaTasha fell asleep, I got up and showered, wanting to wash the scent of sex off me before I went into have a long overdue talk with my mother.  It’s only about eight-thirty and the night nurse doesn’t come in until ten. So, I figured now would be as good a time as any to have this conversation I’d wordlessly promised LaTasha I would.

“I’m awake,” a weak voice sounds off on the other end of the door.

After turning the knob and pushing the door open, I step inside. Just before I turn to close it, I see her eyes open in apparent surprise. Normally, it’s LaTasha who checks in on her at the end of the night, bringing her nightly medications. A wave of guilt moves through my belly at that reminder. LaTasha’s been here for two weeks, helping to take care of my mother between nurses and still working on her writing. I should be doing this shit. I shake my head, disappointed in myself.

“LaTasha’s resting, so I brought your medication and some water and juice. Is cranapple still your favorite?” My voice is even and calm despite my underlying tension. It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve spent many of my formative years in foster homes where showing any emotion besides gratitude garnered you a beating. The act of hiding my emotions worked in my favor in the military, in business, and even as a Dom.

“Yes, thank you.” She looks as if she wants to say more, but only opens and closes her mouth a few times before finally opting to remain silent as if more words from her will cause me to disappear or something.

I place the tray on the hospital table and push it directly in front of her. Unscrewing the water bottle, I hold it up to her lips, so she can take her two pain pills. She eagerly sips the juice, and for a moment, a memory resurfaces. I must have been about six years old and had to be brought home from school by a classmate’s parents as my mother had forgotten about me again. Having my own key, I let myself inside the two-bedroom house we were living in at the time. I made my way to her bedroom, finding my mother dressed in a pair of jeans and button up shirt, looking as if she’d slept in those clothes. I briefly remembered her wearing the same clothes the day before. The dazed look on her face told me she’d just awakened.

“Jer-Jer,” she smiled and slurred. “Good, you’re home. Here,” she thrust a hand with wadded up cash in it. “Go to the store and get me a bottle of cranapple juice.”

The store was a few blocks away. At the time it felt normal, but now, as an adult, I realize it was much too far to send a six-year-old boy by himself.

“I wasn’t a very good mother to you.” Her words penetrate my memory.

“No. You weren’t.” I don’t see a need to lie to make her feel better.

“I could make a thousand excuses. My daddy was terrible. I never had real parents myself. I was young when I had you.” She waves her hand in the air. “All true, but the real deal is I had no business being anyone’s mama.”

Some honesty. I can respect that. I know it to be true and I’d come to that conclusion long ago. When I finally went to Ms. Janice’s foster home, I learned what a real mother was supposed to be like. No, my biological mother wasn’t it. Ms. Janice and my father were the two best people in my young life. I finally sit in the chair next to her bed and pull it closer.

“Not everyone’s meant to be a parent.” That was said without any malice.

She nods. “Your father, though…” She trailed off.

I crinkle my brows, confused at the lightness I heard in her voice as she mentioned my father. Was that admiration?

“What about him?”

“He loved you from the moment he found out about you.” She lowers her head and looks down at her hands in her lap and bites her lip. 

Her words punch me in the gut. It isn’t anything he hadn’t told me himself when I first went to live with him, up until the day he died twelve years later. But hearing her say it still affects me although I don’t react outwardly.

“How did he find out about me?” I ask, wanting to hear her version of how it went down. I already knew my father’s side of the story.

“I saw him again at a party or some type of banquet about four years after—”

“You dumped me in foster care.” The accusation in my voice causes my mother to flinch. Shamefully, seeing that reaction causes a feeling of satisfaction in my gut.

“Yes.” She nods. “I was there with someone else,” she continues.

Her first husband, as my father had told me this story already.

“I saw your father there with another woman and well, I was jealous.” She shrugs. “I started drinking and when I saw him go into the bathroom, I cornered him when he came out. He tried to act like I was nothing; telling me what we had was over and I needed to get over it. He was right, of course, but that only angered me. So, I spat out that his son said hello.” Continuing to look down at her hands, she shakes her head.

Sitting back in my chair, I simply observe her, beginning to feel sorry for her. Once I move past my own anger, I begin to see this woman for who she is.

“He was completely thrown off, but I just laughed and told him everything. I was pregnant when he broke things off with me. I raised his bastard son until he was ten and then dumped him in foster care so I could live my life. He was livid. He told me I was lying, but that just made me laugh louder. I told him the children’s home I’d taken you to four and a half years earlier. And…” She shrugs.

“And a few months later he found me and brought me home,” I finish her story.

“After he found you, he came and found me again, forcing me to sign my parental rights over. He told me to never contact you again and if I did he’d make me pay.”

I didn’t know about that part, but I couldn’t blame my father for that. Since the day I met him, he’d done everything in his power to protect me. Even if that meant keeping the woman who’d given me life away.

“He did send me pictures of you,” she says, turning toward the drawer next to her, but she begins coughing at the exertion.

I hand her the oxygen mask, but she insists on me getting what’s in the top dresser drawer. Opening it, I pull out her wallet. Once she settles down from coughing, she opens the wallet with shaky fingers and pulls out a small stack of photos and hands them to me. The top photo is of me when I was about fifteen on my first hunting trip with my father. The next is my high school graduation. I’m holding up my acceptance letter to Columbia. I snort at that photo. My father had insisted I take that damn picture. He was so pissed when I opted to skip college and join the marines. That’s the next photo. It’s my swearing-in ceremony. Next, there’s a bunch of photos I’d sent my father when I was stationed in Iraq and other locations abroad.

“He was so proud of you. He didn’t want me anywhere around you for good reasons.” She snorted. “But he couldn’t help showing you off.”

The slight smile on her face and reverence in her voice are clear. They’re not for me. It’s all for him.

“You loved him.” A revelation. I’d always assumed she was too selfish to love anyone; not even the son she’d birthed.

“Donald Bennett was a good man, but he was a complicated man. He was hard when he needed to be and pliant when he wanted to be. Yes, I loved him. But he loved his wife.” Still twining her fingers, she lifts her head to stare out the darkened window. It’s then I see the sheen of tears in her eyes. The ones she’s refusing to let fall. My stomach churns in knots. It’s taken thirty-five years to see my mother this vulnerable. To acknowledge her as more than the woman who birthed me, barely raised me, and then abandoned me. But as a woman who didn’t know how to love or admit that she didn’t know. “So, I did the only thing I knew how to do when he left me.”

“Hurt him by keeping his son from him,” I clarify.

She nods slightly. “His wife couldn’t get pregnant, which was her only downfall in his eyes,” she admits, mournfully.

My father’s wife had died the year before he found out about me. He’d told me once he wished she could have been my mother.

“And you kept me to hurt him, using me to throw up in his face once you finally saw him again.” My voice remained calm, steady, and detached.

She lets out a big sigh. “If I had it to do over…” She trails off, but I don’t need to hear the rest. What’s in the past is in the past. Truthfully, I know if she had it to do over again, she’d do the exact same thing. It wasn’t in her to think of anyone else besides herself. Her wants. Her needs. She kept me not out of love but to hold on to my father.

“Yes,” she says just above a whisper, making me realize I’d said that last realization out loud.

I close my eyes, replaying what’s just been said over again in my mind. I inhale and exhale, scanning my body for areas of tension where uncomfortable feelings reside. A few seconds later, I realize the burning anger in my belly that usually happens whenever I think of my mother isn’t there. The hot coals of regret, pain, and sorrow that usually spur my anger just aren’t there. What is there is acceptance. I slowly open my eyes, angling my head to look out the window first and then back to her. Her pale skin and sunken cheeks, small frame done in by the ravages of cancer are all I see. Not the woman who forgot to pick me up from school or left me at a children’s home without a backwards glance. The anger and hurt have dissipated into acceptance and gratitude. Grateful for my life, no matter the circumstances that made it possible. I’m glad to be alive and to have what little family I do, my business, and most importantly, the woman sleeping downstairs.

A long silence stretches out between us. Finally, I speak, “It’s okay.” That’s all I can summon as I pat her leg lightly. “It’s okay,” I tell her without telling her I forgive her. Even if she doesn’t want my forgiveness, she has it. I refuse to carry anymore of her burden into the next phase of my life. A lightness I’d never felt settles over me. A world has been lifted off my shoulders—a world I hadn’t known was sitting on them.

And that new lightness and acceptance has allowed me to cater to my mother unlike before. Every evening after work, I would check on her, relieving LaTasha or whatever nurse was present, spending around thirty minutes feeding her or talking with her about the latest project I was working on. I kept it up for the next three weeks. Up until the time she took her final breath as I sat by her bedside. And with that breath, any hold she or my past had over me was released.