It’s drizzling as I descend the concrete steps of the Western Springs Metra station. I consider turning around and hopping on the next train back to Chicago, but then I see my mom’s big black Escalade pulled up to the curb waiting for me and I know that I can’t turn back because there’s a chance she saw me too.
As I approach her car, I get a view of her license plate and am reminded of how fucking stupid it is: ESCALADY. She thought it was so funny and clever when she got it changed. That was back when she had a sense of humor, however lame it may have been. Back before my dad died. She’s always been cold, but after my dad passed away, whatever warmth she did have iced over completely.
I sigh and get in one last good eye roll before climbing into the car.
She’s applying a second coat of that hideous coral lipstick she loves so much when I get in, and she doesn’t look away from her task to say hi to me. “Hello, Olivia,” she greets me, eyes still locked on her reflection. She closes up her tube of lipstick and puckers her lips in the sun-visor mirror, making sure they’re perfect before she flips it back up.
“Hi, Mom,” I reply.
She turns to me, and I can see where the blush she’s wearing has begun to cake into the fine lines on the apples of her cheeks. “I’m so glad you could make it.” She pauses, glances in the back seat, realizes I’m by myself. I feel my pulse quicken. “Where’s Brad?” she asks, and I can already hear the disappointed inflection in her voice.
“He’s sick,” I tell her. She stares at me for a moment. I maintain an even expression, though the back of my neck has begun to prickle with sweat.
“Well, that’s too bad,” she finally says, and I can tell she hasn’t decided whether or not she actually believes me yet. “I was really looking forward to seeing him again.”
“I know,” I say. “He told me to tell you he’s sorry he couldn’t make it, but he wanted you to have this since he wasn’t able to come.”
I reach into the backpack I brought with me and pull out the expensive bottle of white wine that Brad had left at my apartment prior to dumping me. I hate white wine, and I knew that my mom wouldn’t believe my “he’s sick” bullshit that easily, so I figured this was the perfect opportunity to put this disgusting pinot grigio to use.
Her face lights up. “Oh, he remembered! At our holiday party last year, he and I were talking about how much I love a good pinot grigio,” she tells me, as if I wasn’t standing right next to them when this conversation took place.
She smiles sentimentally at the bottle and for a minute, I think she might start crying. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Now, when I eventually do tell her that Brad isn’t sick, just sick of me, she’s going to be even more upset.
“This bottle isn’t cheap either,” she continues. “That boyfriend of yours sure does have good taste.”
“Yep,” I reply. I stuff the bottle back inside my backpack, and my mom checks her reflection one last time in the rearview mirror before driving away.
.
I sit in my childhood bedroom while my mom straightens up and prepares appetizers downstairs. I didn’t offer to help, not because I didn’t want to, but because my mom likes everything done how she wants it done, so I would’ve just ended up getting in her way. And also I kind of didn’t want to.
I grab the flask of Jameson I brought with me out of my backpack and take a swig. Today is my dad’s birthday. Every year since my dad died, my mom has hosted these really strange birthday parties for him where she invites all of my parents’ friends and our extended family over, and we all have dinner and tell our favorite stories about my dad, and to cap the night off, my mom brings out a huge birthday cake, candles and all, and we light it and sing happy birthday to him, and then my mom blows out the candles. It’s really fucking weird. I take another swig from my flask.
Sighing, I lean back on my elbows and glance around my room, a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. Posters of bands like Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, Rage Against The Machine, and Nirvana are hung up all over my walls. My wooden desk is graffitied with stickers from Zumiez and Sharpie drawings done by teenage me (a marijuana leaf, a hand holding up a middle finger, the words fuck the system). If I were to open the drawers of my dresser, I’d find countless pairs of ripped-up skinny jeans and a whole bunch of wrinkled band T-shirts. I thought I was a real badass back in the day, rimming my eyes with heavy black eyeliner, smoking Newports out my window at night after my parents went to sleep, dying my hair pink then blue then purple with Manic Panic hair dye, then teasing it so it stood an inch high on my head.
My mom hated it. She wanted me to be the cheerleader or the girl in AP classes or the girl on the speech team when I was in high school. Instead, I was the girl who got caught smoking a joint in the bathroom, the girl who ditched school one day to go lose my virginity to this skater kid named Matt on the couch in his parents’ garage.
Ding dong.
I hear the doorbell ring downstairs, meaning the first guest has arrived. Fuck. I take another long swig, then pop a piece of gum in my mouth to mask the whiskey smell.
“Olivia, would you come down please?” my mom calls from the bottom of the stairs. “Aunt Donna and Uncle Raymond are here!”
Aunt Donna is my dad’s sister and she’s a real fucking bitch. She works at the DMV and is allergic to just about everything (dogs, cats, dust, peanuts . . . the list goes on). When I was twelve, I asked my parents to buy me a kitten for Christmas, and they were going to except that Aunt Donna convinced them not to. She came up with all these excuses about how I wasn’t responsible enough to take care of a cat and how my parents were the ones who would end up having to clean up after it. But I knew that she really didn’t want us to get a cat because she was allergic and didn’t want her eyes to get all red and itchy every time she came to visit. I never forgave her for that.
I trudge down the stairs, already wishing that I would’ve told my mom that I was the one who was sick and not come at all. When I reach the bottom of the staircase, Aunt Donna and Uncle Raymond are standing there waiting to greet me.
Aunt Donna’s mousy brown hair is tucked behind her head in a tight bun. She always wears her hair like this, as if she’s embarrassed to have it or something. She’s got this ugly ruched top on that I bet the JCPenney saleslady told her would hide her stomach, but it really just accentuates it.
“Hi,” I say to her.
She pulls her chapped lips up into a strained smile and says, “Hello, Olivia.”
I turn to Uncle Raymond, a bald, bland man, and say hello to him too. Then we all file into the kitchen and sit around the table, my mom and Aunt Donna sipping that pinot grigio I brought, and my Uncle Raymond and I each sipping one of the Blue Moons that he brought. My mom and Aunt Donna chat away, but both Uncle Raymond and I sit in silence.
.
One everlasting hour later, all the guests have arrived and my mom has moved everyone into the dining room, where we all sit around the dark stained mahogany dining table.
My mom lets everyone know that dinner will be served shortly, and she rises from her seat next to me to make her annual toast that she begins all of these birthday dinners for my dad with. The room falls silent and all eyes go to her, standing there with her wine glass in hand and a sad, far-off look in her eyes.
“As always, I’d like to start by thanking all of you for coming,” she begins. “I can’t believe it’s been four years already. Roger would be forty- eight today.” She smiles a small, sad smile, and her eyes become glassy with tears. “I just know that he’s looking down on all of us gathered here together, and he’s smiling. I am so grateful to all of you for coming here to celebrate Roger’s life with me. When Roger passed, he took a piece of me with him. I truly don’t know how I would have gotten through it if not for all of you, which is why today, I’d like to go around and give out a personal thank you to each person who stuck by me during this difficult time.”
She begins going around the table, giving out personal thank yous to everyone, beginning with Aunt Donna, then moving to my grandma, then to her snooty country club friends. I start to zone out, not having any interest in listening to my mom’s artificial gratitude, but then she looks down at me and says, “And lastly, I’d like to thank my beautiful daughter, Olivia.”
My cheeks go warm at the sound of my name. What could she possibly have to thank me for?
“I know that your dad’s passing hit me pretty hard, so I wasn’t really able to be there for you when it happened. You handled it so well, though, and were so strong. You let me grieve and held it together for me, and I really admire you for that. I always thought that you got your strength from you father.”
I stare at the table in front of me, my shoulders squared, chest thumping. She admires me? She probably didn’t mean that. She’s probably just saying it so everyone else will admire her for what a kind and humble mother she is.
“Well, I won’t bore you all with my babbling on anymore,” she laughs. “Happy birthday, Roger.”
“Happy birthday, Roger,” everyone at the table echoes, clinking their glasses together with the people beside them. We all take a sip, and then the neighbor boy that my mom hired to be the server for the night comes into the dining room, rolling a tray of food in with him.
.
We’re on the second course of the four course meal my mom has prepared for us and so far, nothing too terrible has happened. My mom and her country club friends have carried on vapid, gossipy conversation, and I’ve mostly kept quiet, only speaking when responding to a question my mom or one of her friends directed my way. I managed to only roll my eyes twice while listening in on their talk of some lady at the country club named Polly who never lost that baby weight and that new restaurant with that divine gluten free flatbread and that poor Judy whose babysitter is sleeping with her husband. In my mind, I imagined stuffing one of the whole wheat dinner rolls into each of their mouths so that they’d all just shut the fuck up for a few minutes.
Now, as we finish up our kale salads and prepare for the salmon that is coming next, Karen spoon-feeds yogurt to her baby, who sits in a high chair that she brought from home next to her seat.
Karen is only thirty-four, more than a decade younger than my mom and exactly one decade older than me, and she had one last baby after getting remarried to her new husband because they wanted a child of their own. She already had three children with her first husband, so this little guy is her fourth. The thought of having four children makes me feel physically ill, but Karen told my mom she wishes she could have had one more.
“Oh Karen, he is just precious,” my mom gushes as she watches her dab the baby’s face with a napkin. “Olivia, isn’t he just precious?” she asks me, and I know that this is her passive aggressive way of reminding me that I don’t have a precious child of my own for her to fawn over.
“Yep,” I reply flatly. “Super precious.”
My mom turns back to Karen. “How old is he now?”
“Twenty-four months,” Karen replies, her face beaming with pride over this pudgy, sticky-fingered human that she’s created.
“He’s fucking two,” I utter under my breath before I can stop myself.
Karen’s big blue eyes go wide, and she lets out a polite, nervous laugh. “Pardon me?” she says, even though I know she heard me.
“I said your baby is fucking two,” I repeat, loud enough now that Aunt Donna all the way at the other end of the table looks up and shoots me a disapproving glare.
I feel my mom tense up beside me, and she begins to apologize profusely. “I am so sorry, Karen,” she says. “Please don’t mind Olivia. She can be very . . . temperamental.”
Karen’s mouth still hangs slightly ajar, and all the other guests at the table try to hide the fact that they’re all watching this play out. They sneak glances out of the corners of their eyes, then turn back to whoever they came with to whisper about Linda’s temperamental daughter.
I feel my mom’s bony hand land on my shoulder, and I know that I’m about to get a stern talking to about how to behave around company. “Olivia,” she mutters to me through her teeth. “A word, please?”
She turns back to her guests, flashing them all a wide Miss America smile, assuring them that there is no need to worry, that everything is just fine. She’s always been great at keeping it together in front of company, no matter how pissed off or upset she is. It’s one of the many traits I didn’t inherit from her.
She rises from her seat and stares down at me until I rise from my own. Then I follow her out of the dining room and into the living room, where she keeps her shrine of my father.
Against the wall adjacent to the one with the entertainment center is a large wooden table topped with candles, a vase full of roses (the flowers that my father brought my mother on their first date), and framed photos of my parents together. A photo of them at their high school prom together, my mom wearing a big pink dress. A photo of them on their wedding day, my mom wearing an even bigger white dress. A photo of them in the hospital right after I was born, my mom wearing her favorite coral lipstick and a light coat of mascara because apparently giving birth isn’t even a good enough excuse not to look perfectly presentable. And on the wall behind this table hangs a large photo in a gold frame of my parents and me on Christmas, back when I was only eight and not a massive disappointment. We’re all wearing matching shades of red, and I’m smiling a tight, closed-lip smile because I was missing a tooth at the time and my mom said that the gap in my teeth was unsightly, that she didn’t want me to expose it in the picture by smiling with my teeth.
My mom walks over to this shrine of hers and stands right there in front of it to begin her scolding. I stand next to her as she stares at her wall of photos, letting out a deep sigh.
“Olivia,” she begins, turning to look at me, “I don’t know what to do with you anymore. I just don’t understand why you feel the need to be so rude all the time. It’s your father’s birthday, for God’s sake. The least you could do is be respectful. Your father and I raised you better than this.”
I roll my eyes. I wonder how long it would take me to walk to the train station from here. It’s only about two miles away, three at the most. It shouldn’t take me more than forty-five minutes. I wonder if it’s still raining out.
“Olivia,” my mom snaps. “Are you even listening to me?”
“What’s there to listen to?” I remark, and I feel stupid because I actually let myself start to believe that maybe my mom really did secretly admire me like she said she did in her little speech. “I’ve heard this a thousand times. I’m rude. I’m temperamental. I’m not polite enough. I don’t dress nice enough. I curse too much. I don’t even know why you still invite me here if you hate me so fucking much.”
I cross my arms over my chest and stare back at her, with her neatly ironed dress and her tall, hairspray-hard hair. Her green eyes, the same peridot color as my own, are narrowed at me, and her coral lips are pressed into a tight line.
“Olivia, I do not hate you,” she says. “I just wish that you weren’t so . . . unpleasant all the time. It’s as if you enjoy setting me off or something, like you’re just looking to get a rise out of me. I hope you don’t act this way around Brad.”
My stomach dips at the sound of Brad’s name.
“God bless that man for putting up with these attitudes of yours. He may find them cute or charming, but I don’t.”
“Well, apparently neither does he, because he broke up with me,” I blurt out.
Her face goes stone cold. She says nothing. I glance to my right, look into my beaming eight-year-old eyes, and wish I could be that young again. Wish I could just start over and maybe not fuck things up as much this time.
“What did you do?” my mom finally says, her voice barely audible. I turn back to her. “What?” I remark.
“What did you do?” she asks again, raising her voice. “You must have done something. What, did you cheat on him? Pick fights with him like you do with me? What was it?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I hiss at her, and I want to tell her how I actually tried this time. How I apologized after yelling at him instead of just pretending it didn’t happen. How I smiled and made small talk when I met his parents on Thanksgiving. How I did everything I thought I was supposed to do to make it work. How even at my best, I still was not good enough. But I know she wouldn’t believe me, anyways, so instead I save my breath.
“Well, you must have done something,” she replies. She shakes her head, crosses her thin arms over her chest. “Brad was so good for you. He had a job, he was polite and respectful, he was well educated . . . I thought you were really going to turn your life around with him.” Her eyes cloud over with disappointment. “I should’ve known it wouldn’t last.”
“Well, if you love him so much, then you fucking date him,” I snap. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to you talk about what a fuck-up I am, though. I’m leaving.”
I shove past her and run up the stairs into my old bedroom to grab my things. When I reach my backpack, I immediately go for my flask of whiskey and down a long sip.
“Jesus Christ,” I hear my mom’s ice cold voice from behind me. I turn to find her standing in the doorway, arms crossed over her chest, disgust crinkling her brow. “Is this why he broke up with you? Are you abusing substances again?”
And I want to scream, cry, yell, rage, but I don’t. Instead, I press my lips together and squeeze my eyes shut. I breathe in deeply through my nose and try to ground myself like Anna taught me in our last therapy session. I hold my breath, count to five, then let it out, slowly, through my mouth.
“What are you doing?” my mom asks me.
But I refuse to tell her I’ve started going to therapy, so instead, I open my eyes, take another deep breath, and grab my backpack, slinging it onto my back. My hands are shaking at my sides, and I wish that my mom would just go back downstairs so I could leave in peace, but she remains blocking the doorway.
“Please move so that I can leave,” I say to her.
She stares back at me, not budging. “Why did you lie to me?” she asks.
“What?” I remark.
“You told me that Brad was sick, that that was why he couldn’t come today. Why did you lie to me?”
I feel my eyes roll. I just want to go home. I can’t be here anymore. I can’t stand here and talk to my mom about Brad. That little breathing exercise only works so well. I can feel myself ready to break, though, and I don’t want to do it here.
“I’m not talking to you about this right now,” I reply, keeping my tone low and even. “Now please move so that I can leave.”
“I’m not moving until you answer my question. Why did you lie to—” “Because it’s easier than telling you the truth!” I snap before she
can finish getting her full question out. “Look how you reacted when I told you Brad and I broke up! You immediately blamed me just like you always do. I knew you would react that way, and I didn’t want to make today even more unbearable than it already was going to be.”
She stares back at me, her lips forming a tight line. “Well, you did say that he broke up with you, so it’s only natural for me to assume that you must have done something to cause him to do that,” she finally says. “And that’s rather rude of you to call you father’s birthday unbearable.”
I feel the tightness closing in on my chest, and I know that if I don’t leave, I will boil over and erupt. “I’m done talking to you about this. Please. Move.”
My teeth are clenched behind closed lips and my nails dig into the palms of my hands. She hesitates for a moment before shaking her head and turning around to go back downstairs. I stand there in my room for a moment after she leaves, allowing tears to well up in my eyes. Only for a moment, though. A moment is all that she gets from me. She deserves no more than that.
I blink them away and descend the stairs. I can already hear my mom, back in the dining room, laughing amongst her guests. I imagine her coming back into the room and smiling that pageantry smile of hers, apologizing to all of them for the disruption, assuring them that the disruption has left now, asking them to please don’t let that ruin the rest of their evening.
I roll my eyes and slip out through the front door.
It’s still raining, so I pull the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head and pull on the strings until it tightens around my face. I drink my whiskey as I walk, but it doesn’t feel like it’s doing its job. I keep drinking it anyways until the flask is empty and my skin is buzzing and my rage has dulled to just a phantom of anger.
Alexis Bowe is an emerging writer from the suburbs of Chicago. She enjoys writing from a strong female perspective, and many of her stories touch on women’s issues. In addition to writing short stories, she is also in the process of writing her first novel. When she isn’t writing, Alexis enjoys traveling all over the country to attend concerts and music festivals. Her work can be found in Hair Trigger and Hair Trigger 2.0.
