bad daughter
I lean in to my mom for a one-armed hug. My other arm is full of everything I brought—a duffel bag, flip-flops, our little moka pot and the milk frother, an ice-filled knockoff Stanley.
“Is this a reluctant hug?” she asks, one corner of her mouth pulling up slightly—a joke, an apology.
“No!” I attempt sincerity, but it’s hard to maintain eye contact.
This is my first time at her new house; she’s moved back to Astoria, where she grew up. It’s also where my grandma was born, where my great-grandma immigrated to from Finland. The house is a small craftsman—original floors, a garden with potatoes and raspberries. A room for her sewing. It’s cute, centrally located, and manageable.
I notice a blue-and-red gnome standing sentry in the yard. I’ve never seen it before and point.
“I found that in the closet,” she says.
The fact I haven’t been here yet bothers me a little, even if it shouldn’t. I don’t like that this big thing in her life was separate from me.
*
After I settle in, which consists of placing my folded clothes on the floor of the guest room and blowing up my camping pad since there’s no mattress yet, we drive up the street to my uncle’s for dinner. I roll down the window to air out the smell of cigarettes. My mom’s glad we’re having salad because the way my uncle eats can be disgusting. I’m glad too. I imagine him sucking barbecue sauce off his fingers as if his own skin were the meal.
Once there, my mom and I settle onto two separate couches while my uncle sits across from us in a chair. All the furniture in this living room, one of three in this enormous house, is black leather.
He asks me what I think of my mom’s new place.
“I love it, but it’s weird.”
“Weird how?”
“I thought they’d be stuck in Issaquah forever.”
My mom thought so too, and we briefly discuss how my stepdad’s Parkinson’s affected his mind.
“It reminds me of when you guys were kids and you had that neighbor who would circle his yard day after day, in the same spot, until he made a ditch.”
“He was mentally ill,” my uncle points out.
“I know. It’s a metaphor. Parkinson’s made a rut in his brain, and he got stuck.”
Speaking of dead people, the other day my uncle walked through the cemetery and was surprised by all the names he recognized. Parents and siblings of old schoolmates have passed and he had no idea.
My mom turns to me. “We were forced to go to that cemetery every Sunday. Grandma was obsessed. We had to walk in and out a certain way, and we’d fill the buckets with water at the spigot and place the flowers in the buckets and clean the graves, each one, and I hated it.”
I’ve never put flowers on a grave. They’re stunned, and we decide to go after dinner.
On the way, we stop at Fred Meyer. My mom picks up and sets down each bouquet, asking me repeatedly, “What about this?” Annoyed, I tell her it really doesn’t matter. We land on two brightly colored cheap ones.
At the cemetery, she’s horrified by how unkempt the gravestones are. I rub the lichen off with the crumpled Fred Meyer bag, brush away the dead fir needles, and carefully place the flowers on either side of the gravestone, then step back to take a photo. This one says Hanna Kristina, the name of my great-grandma.
It’s my name too, and it feels wrong to see.
*
The next morning, I look up at my mom, who’s sitting on her new burnt-orange couch, leaning against the royal blue of a Marimekko pillow. She has her headphones in and is watching Star Trek, curled up with the laptop balanced on her thighs.
“Mom, can you hear me?”
She doesn’t move.
“Mom!”
“What?”
“Your breathing is really loud and sort of shallow. Have you noticed that?”
She has. It’s worse in the morning.
“Why don’t you make a doctor’s appointment?”
“I will eventually.” She puts the earbuds back in.
*
We meet my cousin, who has always seemed not quite a cousin, not quite an uncle since he’s closer in age to my mom than me, at the Big O, a dive bar outside of town with wood-slab walls lined with antlers and other oddities, like a taxidermic beaver wearing a tiny cowboy hat. There’s a yearly fundraiser in honor of a daughter who died; the money becomes an art scholarship given to local students.
I always forget that at events like this my mom will run into someone she knew growing up. Right now we’re on the back patio and she’s talking to a lady who was in the small community circus with her. The woman ignores me and focuses on my mom, so I stand there cupping my hands to my eyes, battling the glare of sun, and listen to their conversation. I interrupt occasionally when the woman asks a question my mom doesn’t hear. I repeat it to my mom, unnecessarily loud.
My cousin Jim saunters over, and, once he and the lady are introduced, she says, “Oh! Lenna’s son. Of course. I can see your father in you.”
“No, you can’t,” he answers, because the man she thinks is his father is really his stepfather.
To smooth things over, she tries, “Do you have any siblings?”
“Nope.”
“Well, technically there’s Wendy . . .” I clarify.
Jim stiffens, and I immediately regret saying anything. To him, his sister is no longer a sister.
“Uh . . . do . . . you have pets?” she asks my mom.
I laugh so hard my face contorts. My mom had to rehome her cats just a week ago. The woman’s questions are completely normal but she accidentally keeps pulling the thread of our trauma. My mom and Jim start laughing too, wildly; we’re wheezing and snorting, but the lady stays silent.
*
“When are you gonna make a doctor’s appointment?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not now?”
“I need to think about the symptoms. I’ll do it later.”
“I’ll help you with the symptoms. Let’s do it now,” I push.
I take notes on what she’s been experiencing, then send her the list. As she starts to book an appointment online, Jim knocks on the door. He’s here to take me to see his dad-not-dad, my uncle Ed, who has dementia and lives down the hill in an old folks’ home. They’ve warned me that the conversation will be maddeningly repetitive. Jim goes every Sunday and stays for only fifteen minutes.
I climb up into his truck, brushing off the dog hair and praying the dirt won’t stain my white pants. We drive past the park I walked to the other morning, really just a splotch of grass, and he tells me that without Medicaid Ed’s care would cost $18,000 a month.
“How! That’s so much.”
“Yeah, it’s a joke. And there won’t be any coverage at all when I sell the house.”
It doesn’t make sense to me why Medicaid is tied to the sale, or why he’d sell Lenna and Ed’s house if it is, but I don’t ask questions. Money is touchy. Some in my family have little, while my mom’s brother, who inherited the family business, is wealthy.
“Maybe he’ll die soon; it’s no life anyway,” he adds. “But probably the stubborn sonuvabitch’ll live to be a hundred.”
After typing in the code at the entrance, he waves me through. “See?”
I see. It’s as he said—the hall reeks of shit and urine.
I’m astonished by how much older my uncle seems. His hair has thinned to a layer of white down. He’s missing his front teeth, and his body is so small and shrunken, so pale, that he looks like a deep-sea creature that has unfairly been brought to the surface.
I remind him who I am, Teri’s daughter, and he begins his usual line of questioning: How old are we? What day is it? How long has Lenna been gone? What about Grandma? He tells us he’s not allowed to walk on his own because they’re worried he’ll fall and break something again. “They push me in that buggy.” He smiles, showing us the soft pink of his gums, and jabs a thumb toward the wheelchair in the corner. “Good food and programs here, though.” Then he lifts his eyes once more to the TV.
*
My mom is in her garden, weeding. She wears overalls patterned with painted flowers and her long, graying hair is tied in a bun. She looks both old and very young.
When she comes inside, she wants to go through a box she brought from my aunt’s that’s full of my great-grandma’s things. The wet, earthy scent of mildew wafts through the room as she opens it. I stand and crack a window. There’s fine china inside, covered in a thick film of gray-brown dust. Some dishes are broken.
“Oh my god,” my mom says, fuming. “I found these neglected in her basement!”
My mom has always wanted these dishes. Her grandma was her favorite person and she was her grandma’s favorite person and “everyone knew it.” When Grandma Hanna died and my grandma and aunt went through her house, my mom was in college, in Arizona, so she couldn’t come and didn’t get anything.
“Well, that can’t be true,” I interrupt. “We just saw her gravestone and it said 1990, which was three years before I was born. Also my dad’s told me he remembers being at the hospital with you when she died.”
She stares at me.
“It’s a false memory,” I insist.
*
My uncle and a family friend and her husband are coming over for dinner. Not Jim, though, because my uncle isn’t speaking to him. Everyone in the family has someone they’re not speaking to.
I watch my mom’s aging hand pick up a red plastic spatula and smooth out the ricotta layer of lasagna. I glance at my own to see if there are similarities. Maybe a little in the fingertips.
Then I go upstairs to get ready. I change out of my pajamas and slump to the carpet, lean against the wall. Being in this unfamiliar bedroom, in a house my stepdad will never see, in a house I’m in only because he’s gone, is surreal.
*
After dinner, I place the glasses in the dishwasher and my mom shows Sari the old copper Finnish teapots that were also in the box with my great-grandma’s china. She explains that she’s wanted these her entire life but when her grandma died, she was in Arizona so . . .
“No, that’s the false memory, remember? You couldn’t have been in college. It couldn’t have happened like that.” My tone is a knife’s edge.
Sari looks at me, uncomfortable. I turn away in embarrassment and try to reframe what I said. “I mean, it’s funny how a false memory can be so strong.”
*
“I probably told myself I was in Arizona because the truth was too sad.” The guests are gone, and my mom is backlit by the soft halo of lamplight. “I don’t want to accept that they didn’t think of me.”
“Maybe Lenna didn’t want you there because she felt jealous you were your grandma’s favorite.”
“Maybe,” she says. “But what about Mom?”
“Well, you were away, sort of. You were in Washington, and—”
“I would’ve driven down. Anyway, I outlived them and now I have the dishes, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”
A couple of weeks ago, my mom contacted her therapist because she was having a difficult time alone at the Issaquah house, which she’s still in the process of selling. She felt unsure, doubted whether she could handle everything.
“But I’m proud of myself too,” she emphasizes.
Upstairs on the camping pad, I start to cry—hot, heavy tears impossible to stem.
I think of Sari’s expression when I snapped at my mom. I have never, not once in my life, questioned how much my mom loves me, yet I’m mean to her and rigid, my body holding a resentment I can’t fully name. I picture her hands and worry I’m running out of time to be a good daughter.
*
I wake up, make coffee, work a little. I pack, then load everything into the car.
My mom’s still not awake.
I knock lightly on her door and enter. She’s under a mound of blankets. She has a mask over her eyes to keep out the light and a mask over her nose and mouth with tubes that snake across the bed to the CPAP machine. I reach down and gently press her shoulder. In one sudden, startled movement, she tears everything off her face and squints up at me.
“It’s already nine?”
“Nine fifteen. I’m heading out.” I bend down and hug her.
As I leave the room, I tell her, though I’m now really speaking to the hallway, “I love your new house. I love how you’ve decorated.” Then I lift my voice for a last, cheerful “Bye, Mom!” hoping beneath the words she hears everything I can’t bring myself to say.
Loved this
this was very moving, I like how you broke this up