Page 56 of Maybe Some Other Time

Thelma didn’t know how these things worked in the future.

Should she call? Text? Ring the bell and grovel?

No, she made it pretty clear. There had been accusations that everyone was pranking her.

When it finally sank in that, yes, that was a real FBI office and those were real FBI agents, Gretchen refused to speak to anyone.

Unfortunately, Thelma was informed that was often how things worked when someone found out about time travel against their will.

Thelma surveyed the living room, thinking of the perfect place to put up a tree with all the trimmings. I think they have some stuff up in the attic. She would head there as soon as she unpacked her things.

She hadn’t even made it halfway up the stairs when Robbie stumbled through the front door, mouth slightly agape as he realized his mother was home.

“Hello,” she greeted, still on the stairs. “I just got back about fifteen minutes ago. Do you need me to move the car out of the garage?”

He continued to stare at her as if she were a ghost.

“I said hello, Robbie.”

Something melted the time between them. With a grunt, Robbie hung up his coat and went into the kitchen.

Thelma followed, if only because she was tired of his rudeness.

It’s been almost nine months. He can acknowledge me!

How much effort did it take to say hello?

For the Lord’s sake, he didn’t have to like her.

God knew the only reason this grown man was tolerating her was because of their blood connection and whatever sense of guilt he was still capable of after sixty years of festering resentment!

“I was about to make some dinner.” She addressed Robbie, who washed his hands in the kitchen sink.

“Was thinking about shepherd’s pie, since there’s chicken in the fridge that needs to be used.

Guess I can use the instant potatoes to save me time.

” She wasn’t the biggest fan, but mashed potatoes took too much effort right now, and she wasn’t about to ask Robbie to help her when he was already in a mood.

To heck with it! He was always in a mood!

“Anyway, do we have fresh milk in the fridge? I haven’t had a chance to check. I only know about the chicken because it’s the frozen one I told Megan not to touch, so I’d have something to cook when I got home. You two are absolutely miserable at shopping when I’m not around. How did you even—”

Robbie smacked his wet hands against the edge of the sink. “Do you ever shut up? ”

His voice shattered any placid vibrations in the house.

Thelma stood by the dining table, frozen like the ice in the freezer, as if that was how they found her after sixty years.

Frozen, preserved, in my stupid car. Now she thawed, only to find that her son had lived a whole life of cracking resentment.

“Robert William Van der Graaf.” Her need to assert some authority in the situation came naturally, as if she had been a full-time mother since the day this man sprang from her womb nearly nine years ago. “How dare you speak to your mother like that?”

He turned his whole body toward her, water still dripping from his fingertips as he leveled the most callous gaze to have slapped a mother on her cheek.

“You are not my mother.”

Thelma swallowed. She was winded, but not yet tumbling to the floor, ready to dissipate into the cold air as if she were fine china obliterated into dust. “Fine,” she squeaked, frustrated that she couldn’t address this retired man the way she truly desired.

Nobody talks to me like this. Certainly no old fogeys like him.

Certainly not her own living, breathing son.

After everything Thelma had done for him in the eight years they had together…

“If that’s how you want to think about it.

If I’m not your mother, then why am I here in this house? ”

“I don’t know!” Water droplets flew across the kitchen as Robbie tossed both hands up in disgust. “You’re my niece. Let’s just stick to the story. Come and go as you please. Do whatever you need to do. Just don’t go pretending you’re my mother.”

Thelma gently gripped the back of one of the dining chairs. “What happened to your mother, then? Where did she go?”

His grunt was louder than his words. “She’s gone! Left one night. Never came back. Probably dead.” He couldn’t look at her anymore. “Let her stay dead.”

Dead. That’s what Thelma was. In a way, she thought of herself as the same.

The old me is dead. She died earlier this year.

Whatever “year” it was. 1958. 2018. It’s honestly the same.

She had been a fuzzy caterpillar who wrapped herself in the cocoon of the Impala and went into stasis, deconstructing her entire body, her very soul, until she reemerged as a modern woman who got to live a new life.

She hadn’t asked for it. And something Robbie had said in there disturbed her.

“She left…” Thelma tore herself away from the chair, intending to head to the staircase to give Robbie some space.

Instead, she wandered toward the living room, where Fiddles slowly blinked his eyes open from near the fireplace.

Thelma couldn’t give him attention, though.

“She got in her car one night and drove off into the night, never to be seen again.”

Robbie took a moment to reply. “That’s right.”

Yet he didn’t sound so sure, did he?

“What do you remember about that night?” Thelma asked. “You were very young. Barely eight, weren’t you? Second grade.”

He stomped toward the back door, but like Thelma, he couldn’t bring himself to completely extract himself from the situation. “Guess I was sick.”

“That’s right. You weren’t feeling well.

You told your parents you didn’t want to go to school that morning.

” Thelma closed her eyes, transporting herself back to that well-lit morning with Wonder Bread and mayonnaise.

Her hands knew how to deftly maneuver the kitchen and its supplies.

Everything was known to her. She had complete control and authority over that house.

Even her husband, who technically paid for everything, joked that he was the prince to her queenship.

Anything that changed in that house was run by me.

Heck, Thelma probably purchased something and told Bill to install it himself if she couldn’t do it.

Vintage green and yellow Fiestaware.

Formica furniture.

Collared shirts tucked into trousers.

Model airplanes and Howdy Doody puppets.

The Price is Right with Bill Cullen.

One little pocket in my dress.

Garter belts and squared bras.

Cucumber sandwiches. Iced tea.

“You weren’t feeling well and asked if you could stay home,” she continued in one heavy breath. “I told you no, because I thought you were faking it. When you came home later that day with a fever and those empty eyes, I felt so terrible. I should have let you stay home. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well!” He opened and shut the door just as quickly, but was still in the house. “Doesn’t matter! I lived to be at least seventy. Lived long enough to get that damned prostate cancer! Did better than Dad! Bastard croaked before sixty!”

Thelma didn’t respond to Fiddles’s mew as he hopped up onto Robbie’s armchair, making it slightly rock against her hip.

“That’s not the point, Rob,” she said. “I should have been there for you. In the grand scheme of things, missing a day of school to watch TV and play with your toys is nothing. We could have watched The Price is Right together. You would have liked the cucumber sandwiches I made for lunch that day. You could have…” She almost regretted saying this.

“When Sandy came over, you could have asked her all your questions about writing and books. You always did love your books, Robbie. Remember your Hardy Boys collection?”

There was that callous demeanor again. “Mary threw them out. Told me I was too old for them. Put them in the same recycling bag as Debbie’s Nancy Drew s. You know what else she put in the garbage?”

Thelma already knew the answer. “What?”

“Your smut we found in your stupid hope chest.” He didn’t give Thelma a chance to defend herself—not that there was anything to say. “Speaking of Sandy! Why would I want to ever talk to the woman you cheated on Dad with? She always accused him of killing you, you know!”

“But you didn’t believe that, did you?”

“How could he have done it? I was with him that night!”

“That must’ve been awful. To watch your father go through all of that with the police, the neighbors… oh, those people could be so judgmental.”

“And you weren’t there!”

“No…” Thelma approached, keeping a respectful distance between them, despite her maternal heart begging her to throw her arms around the grown man who was still her baby boy. Wrapped up in a blanket while staring at the television. “I wasn’t. I went out to the store, because I…”

She realized her fists shook at her side. Her throat choked on the truth that had been begging to come out for months.

The reason I went out that night.

“I went out because—”

Robbie filled in a blank that he had also kept close to his heart for far longer than Thelma had been alive. “Because you couldn’t take it anymore!”

Those were not the words Thelma struggled to convey. If anything, she was more shocked by that observation than by his tone.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“You think it wasn’t obvious? You were tired of us! Tired of doing all our nuclear family bullshit when you knew there were other lives you could have out there!”

Thelma gasped. It was the only sound that expressed her horror.