Tara wanted to tell him to go, but it was never smart to get Jem riled up. Besides, she was just so tired. “I will. I will. Just give me a minute. She was my mother, you know.” She hadn’t expected to feel any great sorrow upon learning of her mother’s death. Now, tears gathered at the corners of her eyes and threatened to spill over.
Her mother had raised her in a series of tawdry apartments on Boston’s lower east side. Tara remembered the day-care centers and later the public schools. She remembered her mother lying in the twin bed with the torn pink dust ruffle, too tired or sick or sad to fix breakfast. Later she would go to work and return with hamburgers or Chinese takeout, which they would eat in front of the ancient television set. By the time she was in high school, Tara knew her mother no longer worked. Each month she would open a long white envelope, and there would be money for groceries.
The turbulent teen years brought more misery, more mistakes. She’d left home at 16, deciding she wouldn’t look back. There must be something better in life, and she would find it.
Tara pulled clothing from drawers, stuffing them in a box. She tried to pack things up without looking at them, to pretend none of it mattered. She didn’t want to recall the sad lullabies, the fits of depression, the angry words, the tears, the longing. Why is Mother so sad? Why doesn’t she love me?
Where had the years gone? She was nearing 30 years of age and had nothing to show for her life. No husband, no children, and since November, no job. She’d moved around New England in search of better-paying work, but with only a GED in place of a high school diploma, she was left with few options. And lately she’d found being on her feet for hours at a time exhausting.
Would she end up like her mother—dead at fifty of heart complications or too many pills? She shuddered and dumped a variety of bottles and magazines into a plastic tub.
She watched Jem plunk himself down in a faded armchair and switch on a football game on television. They’d met in Portland along the wharf where he’d been fishing. She liked to walk along the waterfront, to watch the boats bobbing in the water like brave little sailors ready to launch their next great adventure.
“I grew up in a place like this,” he’d said, peering over her shoulder. And that afternoon he began to describe a little place farther north along the Maine coast where there were lighthouses and lobster boats, town socials, and picnics on green lawns. Buried inside that burly, wild exterior was someone sweet, almost tender.
Did he still love her? What lay between them now seemed little more than habit or convenience. Mostly, he just took off for weeks at a time on some new venture that he was sure would make him rich and never did.
Tara opened the drawer of her mother’s scarred desk. The thin cushion covering the chair slipped as she scooted closer. Her mother had been raised in Boston by parents who boarded their only daughter at expensive schools in winter and shipped her off to relatives in summer. When her father died suddenly, leaving nothing but an astounding trail of debt, Tara’s mother had lived a year with a widowed aunt before running away with an Australian sailor.
Tara couldn’t remember the man who later became her father. He died three weeks before she was born—or so she was told. Her mother refused to talk about him and became eerily silent on the subject of her grandparents. Whoever these people in her mother’s past were, they’d taken her mother with them—along with any hope for happiness or love in her short, sad life.
Tara swallowed hard. She felt bitterness well up like bile inside her. Life was a cruel joke played on the unsuspecting.
Tara’s fingers traced broodingly over the little knobs on the desk drawer. She had been angry when she left home, determined to get something better out of life. But as time passed, her thoughts returned to those sketchy, difficult years, and the mother she had needed so much. If she had been a better child, would her mother have been happier? Would she have loved her?
She paused, arrested by the realization that during the last few years her mother had seemed more peaceful. Maybe she’d finally found relief in one of the many prescriptions that were supposed to relieve her depression.
“Get a move on!” Jem exclaimed. “I’m not hanging around here much longer.” He got up and walked a few angry paces toward her. Then, hearing the roar of some exciting play, he went back to the chair and the football game.
“All right! All right!” Tara frowned and let her eyes linger briefly on the man in the chair. He was still young, but his beautiful black hair was thinning. He hadn’t shaved and had the beginnings of a paunch. He had seemed so dashing, so confident—her knight in shining armor riding a great black horse. (A white one would have been too much to hope for.) Life would be different, and she had embraced the sensation of being loved.