I knock when I reach the door because this home doesn’t feel like mine anymore.
She answers and chides me, telling me I never have to knock, that I’m always welcome, and that she has baked seven-layer bars yesterday because she knew we would win.
“I wanted to have your favorite dessert ready and waiting.” She scurries into the kitchen and brings a plate to the table. “Coffee?”
“I always want coffee.”
“Espresso. Double?”
“But of course,” I say, wishing our relationship was a simple as her knowing my favorite drink, and my favorite dessert. But she’s not my regular waitress. She’s my mother, and we need to go deeper than desserts and shirts and coffee.
We sit down and I take a sip, and it’s the best double espresso I’ve ever had. I tell her this and she beams. But there’s a nervousness to her movements tonight, like she knows something else is happening, like she senses an undercurrent. It’s not about whether I fell in love with her agent anymore. Even so, I want her to know it’s over.
“I broke up with Noah.”
“Me too!” she says, like we’re sisters sharing secrets.
“But not because of you. Not because you were mad at him.”
“Mad doesn’t even begin to explain it,” she says, and she is back now to in-charge Jewel. She is a chameleon, my mother.
“It doesn’t matter, Mom. I broke up with him because I was involved with him for the wrong reasons. I wanted to have something you would never know.”
“Darling, we don’t need to keep secrets from each other. You can tell me anything.” She reaches her bejeweled hand across the table, her sparkly sapphire threatening to blind me as it catches a beam of the setting sunlight from the living room window.
“Mom, listen to me. You asked me to keep secrets my whole life about your relationships. You asked me to keep secrets and you asked me to tell lies. And I hated doing it. So I went out with Noah.”
“Hayes,” she says quietly but insistently.
“Noah, Mom. He’s Noah to me. But the point is, that’s how deeply it affected me, how you lived, what you did. I can barely have a normal relationship with anyone, not a boy, not a girl, because all I know is how to cover up.” She starts to protest, but I hold up a hand. “I broke up with him because it was the right thing to do. And I told Lane the truth about how I felt, or didn’t feel, about him. And I told dad the truth when he asked me about Noah. And it felt great not to lie.”
I grip her hand tighter, like I can channel into her some of this strange newfound courage I’m gaining as I try to live without a safety net. She squeezes back, like she wants it, like she wants what I have now. The capacity to change. “What I’m trying to say, Mom, is I want you to change too. I want you to stop messing around with married men. That’s why I sent those letters. But now I’m asking you directly.”
I stop talking. I wait to see something in her eyes, maybe an acknowledgment, maybe a willingness to hear me. It’s not there yet, so I ask a question. “Can you do that, Mom? Can you please do that?”
Her face is stony, but behind her facade I can see cracks and fissures. Maybe I’m getting through to her. Maybe all I had to do was ask. The strongest sense of hope fills me and I’m flooded with reminders: how she helped me with homework, how she went to every lacrosse game, how she cheered the loudest, turned off her phone and only had eyes for me. How she was there for me. I hold on tight to that hope. I hold it close in my hands, like it’s a delicate baby bird.
My mom shakes her head and her voice is weak, like a child’s. Because she is the child. “I can’t stop,” she says. “I don’t want to stop.”
I put my head in my hands, and press my thumb and my middle finger against the corners of my eyes.
A voice inside me, maybe in my head, maybe in my heart, says Let her go.
I push back from the table. I give her a kiss on the forehead.
“Good-bye, Mom. I love you,” I say quietly, pushing past the lump in my throat as I stand to leave. She stays seated at the table, and this is it. This is the end.
A tear slides anyway, as I shut the door behind me.
On the stoop there is another letter waiting for me. It’s under the doormat again. I pull it out and open it quickly. It’s the Beethoven this time, “Immortal Beloved,” again. There’s a new line that’s been added to it, written out in pen by the sender.
Everyone wants to know who she was—this “Immortal Beloved.”
Do you want to meet? There is a lot to say, I think. How about we meet by the Rembrandts at the Met. Tomorrow at 3:00? I was never a fan of English painters, incidentally, or English history either.
I fold the paper and jam it down into the front pocket of my backpack.
I have a feeling I know who it’s from finally, and I let myself feel a small spark of excitement in my heart. I lift my bike and walk down the steps, knowing this is the last time I’ll carry Joe from the inside to the out. I won’t be living here anymore. I’m okay with that, I think. I have to be.
I see a cab stop on the other side of the street. I watch as a man pays. Something about him looks familiar. I straddle my bike and wait. He opens the taxi door, then closes it, and the cab zips off. He looks over and up at the door to my former home.
It’s Amanda’s father.
My heart splinters as I push down on the pedals and ride away to find his daughter.