Page 10 of All of You

At our folding table, I grab my bowl of cereal and bring it with me to my chair.

“Are you going to talk to me today?” Mom asks, cocking her head.

I pinch the bridge of my nose and squint my eyes before shooting her a dagger-filled look, tilting my chin higher.

“Not likely.” I shove a spoonful of breakfast into my mouth and decimate it angrily.

Mom pouts. “Babe, come on. I know it was a big surprise but you can’t ice me out indefinitely.”

“A big surprise?” I spit out. “That’s what you call that? A big surprise?” My voice squeaks higher in rage.

Mom sighs and looks up. Her throat tightens as she swallows and when she looks at me again there are tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry Delia. For a lot of things, but not for keeping you from him.”

My jaw hangs open as slack as my spoon in my bowl. “Are you kidding me?”

She throws her hands in the air, frustrated. “You don’t understand. You don’t know the whole story.”

Snorting, I scoop another mouthful of cereal into my mouth. “How could I? It’s not like youtold me,” I say around my breakfast.

“Fair, but I had my reasons.”

“Oh, okay Mom. Great. And magically these reasons are all, what? Poof! Disappeared and now here we are ready to make nice and air out all the dirty family secrets?”

Mom blinks back tears and rolls her shoulders. “My mother died. Last year. I came to pay my respects.”

I stare blankly at her. “What? As far as I knew your parents didn’t exist and you never paid any respects over the years under that ruse so what the actual eff Mom?”

Shegives me a seething look. “I don’t expect you to understand. But I’m telling you why we’re here.”

“A year ago? It’s taken you a year to come and grieve? How the hell did you even know she died?” I squawk.

“A couple years ago, I started reading the town’s local paper online. I saw the obituary. And yes babe, it’s taken me a year to work up the courage to come back here. It doesn’t exactly harbor any good memories.”

I put my bowl in my lap and cross my arms over my chest. “When did you leave home?”

Mom draws in a deep breath, the kind she does when she’s listening and focusing on her guided meditation tracks. “May, two thousand and five.”

I gasp mentally doing math. “But you were six months pregnant by then.”

She nods as a tear slips down her cheek. “I was. And I was terrified.”

“And young,” I add.

“And young. Barely older than you are now honestly.”

“Why’d you leave? What was so bad?”

She glances over her shoulder in the direction of the house, then back to me. “They were, honey. The tighter they tried to hold on to me the harder I worked to break away. My parents…” she sighs, “they’re big church people.” She laughs but it’s not a real laugh. “The whole damn town are big church people.” I cringe.

Mom and I are a lot of things, but church people are not one of them. That’s not to say I don’t know a lot about Christianity. Mom and I studied all the religions we could when I was little. We talked about them all. Sometimes we even spent aSunday in various churches to experience them. Explored their core beliefs and eventually came to the conclusion that, at their foundation, they’re all the same; don’t be a dick. Be kind. Don’t cheat, beat or steal. Just…be a good human being. And that’s how we’ve lived. We made our own religion and followed it together.

Genuinely curious, “You were a church person?” I ask.

She grins and nods her head. “Yup. A bonafide believer in my youth. Even went to some rad Christian rock youth concert events.”

“Mom,” I breathe, a smile curling my lips slightly, “did you have God antennas?”

She holds her hands up as if she’s an old-school antenna. “Tuning in to God was all the rage.”