His mother died, and we moved mine in. “Mothers are not interchangeable,” he reminded me. “Still, she might make you feel less orphaned.”
“Again, not interchangeable. Don’t expect too much.”
The first night, Mom kept looking over the upstairs balcony. “Probably wondering where she is,” my husband snorted before he rolled over on his side.
“She’s always had insomnia,” I argued, knowing he had already stopped listening. I was the actual insomniac, and my husband should have remembered that, after all the nights I spent in the guestroom listening to smooth jazz radio. I bet you wonder where I’ve been, I hummed to myself.
The next morning, my husband said, “Mother would never do that,” as my mother and I played flicker football with a crumple of paper.
“This mother never did, either,” I said, as we snapped the paper back and forth across the kitchen table to the accompaniment of giggles. “But look at her now─she thinks it amuses me.”
“I like to play!” Mother said.
That night, we took her to see the neighborhood Christmas lights, and she exclaimed “Beautiful!” for both the tasteful and the garish. “My mother always said less is more when it comes to decorations,” my husband said.
“This mother is an artist, remember. She can find beauty in the most unlikely things.” He continued to compare our mothers. “Well, they weren’t twins. What do you expect? A mother is a mother is a mother?”
Apparently.
I found myself humming a line from that song─my friends wonder what is wrong with me ─as I waited for his mood to change.
During the next few weeks, Mother’s relentless cheeriness began to relax my husband. Not so much that he took to kissing her hand, pulling her up from the couch and dancing her into dinner. Or taking her to the park or the coffee shop where a waitress might whisper to him, “You take such good care of your mother.” But what he did do was certainly not nothing.
You’ve tried everything, but you don’t give up.
One day my husband came home to find my mother had made a sketch of his mother, using an early photo of her as model. It was a delicate drawing, in sepia lines that captured a child’s innocence, her openness to the future.
“She thought you might like this,” I said. He traced the lines on the paper as if they were skin, and smiled softly. He didn’t hear my mother come up behind him until her arms were already wrapped around him. He turned to return her embrace.
When he began to whirl her around the kitchen, I thought about that song again.
Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and the novels of Bombay Trilogy. Her most recent writing appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Book of Matches,100 Word Story, Does It Have Pockets? Switch, Your Impossible Voice, and other journals. She has had work in several anthologies including a Best of the Net. Visit her at her Substack Chapters.
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