Page 30 of Married in Michigan
“You’ll tell me someday?” Mom asks.
I smile at her. “Yes, I’ll tell you everything, someday.”
“No sex you don’t want.” She squeezes my hand as hard as she can. “Promise.”
“I promise, Mom.”
“No taking off your clothes.” She’s working really hard to make this clear and concise. “Unless youwantto. For you.”
“I promise.”
She blinks quickly, and I know she’s fighting emotions. She doesn’t like crying any more than I do, because she’s a tough-ass chick, and when you’re fighting for your survival day in and day out, working your ass to the bone to provide for your loved one, emotions are a liability. “Don’t visit.”
I frown. “What?”
“Call me.”
“I mean, I’ll do both. But of course I’m going to come see you as often as I can.”
“Don’t need you.”
A knife to the chest. My turn to blink. “Mom. Yes, you—”
“No.” She waves a hand, limp and weak, barely able to lift it above the bedspread, but her voice is strong. “You’ve done enough. Love you. Forever.”
I can’t hold it back. “Dammit, Mom.” I wipe at my eyes. “I’m visiting you. I’ll have to go away, I don’t’ know where or for how long, but I’ll come see you as much as I can. You’re my mom. My best friend. My only family. You can’t get rid of me.”
“Your life.” She squeezes again, hard. “Not just about me. Won’t be a burden.”
Anger barrels through me, though this is an argument as old as Mom’s MS. “Goddammit, Mom. I’ve told you—you’re not a burden.”
“Iam. Work all day, every day. Visit me in your free time.” A pause for breath, and to sort through the words. “No friends. No boys. No dates.”
I rest my head back against the couch. “I don’t want to get into this again, Mom.”
She lets go of my hand. With visible exertion she struggles to sit up. Turns to face me.
“Mom, what are you—”
Breathing hard, wobbly, she takes both of my hands in hers. Her dark brown eyes are set deep in her sickness and exhaustion-sunken cheeks; her weathered African-American skin is sagging and wrinkled even though she’s barely twenty years older than me. She stares me down as only she can, shushing me into silence without a word. She doesn’t have to yell or scold—it just takesthatlook, which not even MS can take from her.
“Makayla Poe.” My full name—shit. “You have to liveyourlife.” She squeezes my hands three times, three times again. “Not for me, not anymore. Promise.”
“I can’t promise you that, Mom. I can’t and I won’t.”
“Whatever it is you’re about to do,” a pause for breath, for thought, struggling for clarity of thought and speech, “you do it foryou. Not me.”
“Mom—”
“Promise, Makayla.”
I blink back tears, and nod. “I promise.”
I’ve never lied to her, and I’m not lying now. I know I’m going to do it, and it is for her. But doing it for her is doing it for me—she slaved her life away until she physically couldn’t get out of bed anymore, until she needed a wheelchair to get to the bathroom, until her hands were numb and lifeless, for me. Provided everything she could. For me. Saved pennies so she could move us out of Detroit to a safer community up here, so I could have a better education, so I could have a chance at a life that wouldn’t include early pregnancy, drug addiction, incarceration, gangs, and who knows what else. She left her family, and we could never afford to go back down for visits, and then one by one her mom, sisters, brother, they all passed away one by one, until it was just her and me, alone up here, and it was all for me.
And then she started losing feeling in her hands, and woke up one morning blind in one eye, and the tables were turned. I never thought twice about having to quit school to go to work. There was rent to pay, groceries to buy, and then medicine and treatments for Mom, and then canes, and then walkers, and then a wheelchair, and then a nursing home. She took care of me, so now I’m taking care of her.
There’s no question.