Best Kept Secret (38 page)

“Like I said, Mom,” I begin, “I know that my drinking must have brought up a bunch of ugly memories for you. Things you haven’t thought about in a long time.”

She nods, a tiny movement.

“My heart aches knowing you had a mother who treated you like that. Who treated
herself
like that. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot. And I have to wonder, if she had had a family who supported her, if her mother was in her life and had offered her the kind of love and acceptance that she needed, maybe she could have gotten well.” My voice breaks and I have to wait a moment before I can go on speaking. “I can’t change who she was to you. I can’t change what she did. But maybe you can give to me what her mother couldn’t.”

“What do you need?” my mother asks, her voice barely above a whisper.

“I need you to believe in me, Mom. That I’ll find a way to manage this.”

She unwraps her arms, lifts up her hands slightly—a gesture of surrender.

“So, what did you tell Mr. Hines?” I set up internal emotional scaffolding, bracing myself for the worst possible outcome.

“I told him I think you should have Charlie,” she says. “I told him you are the most tenacious person I know, and when you set your mind to accomplishing something, you don’t rest until you’ve given it everything you’ve got. I told him I can’t imagine you doing anything less than that when it comes to recovering from all of this.” I see the truest sense of pride in her eyes. Something deep inside me finally relaxes, a tight grip letting go.

Closing the gap between us, I slip my arms up around her shoulders, resting my chin on her shoulder. “Thank you,” I whisper in her ear, the feeling of tears thick in my throat once more. I’m beginning to suspect there is no end in sight to this new weepy tendency of mine. “Thank you so much.”

My mother hesitates a moment before hugging me back. She’s surprised, I think, to have me display such affection. She reaches up, presses her hand against the back of my head. “I’m not very good at showing it, I know, but I do love you, Cadence. You’re my daughter.
I’ll do whatever I can.” She pulls back and looks at me. “In fact, I already have.”

I tilt my head and squint at her. “Uh-oh. Should I be nervous?”

She smiles. “Not at all. Derek told me you listed the house for sale.”

I nod. “I can’t afford it.”

“Well, I can. I signed the offer yesterday. I’m hoping you’ll let me buy it, and you can rent it from me at an extremely reasonable family rate until you’re back on your feet. Then, you can either buy it back or find somewhere else you and Charlie want to live.”

My jaw drops. “You want to be my landlady?”

“If you’ll let me.” She grabs my hand and squeezes. “You and Charlie have been through enough in the past couple of years. The stress of moving is the last thing either of you need.”

“I don’t know what to say, Mom. Are you sure?” I run a few quick calculations in my head. If she buys the house for what I’m asking, I can use the profit to pay off all my credit card bills. Living off my wage from the cafe won’t be easy, but if she’s serious about charging an extremely low rent, I might actually be able to bounce back from financial catastrophe.

“I’m positive,” she says. “What good is all my hard-earned money if I can’t help my child when she needs it?”

“I don’t know what to say. Thank you.” My eyes fill, and Charlie chooses this moment to come bounding back from the kitchen, interrupting us. The wooden door that sections off the two rooms swings wildly back and forth. His face is messy with smears of cream cheese, his eyes are bright. “I need help, Mom!” he says. Amazing. At least my child has no issue with asking for assistance when he needs it; I’ve done that much well with raising him. “I want some milk but the holder thing is really full and I don’t want to pour it and make a mess even though I know spilled milk isn’t anything to cry over, I still don’t want it to spill.”

My mother and I both laugh, wiping our eyes, but it is she who
steps forward first. “I’ll help you, sweetie. Can you get the glass down you want to use?”

He doesn’t answer her. Instead, he regards us with a quizzical look. “Why are you crying? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, sweetie. Nana and I are fine.”

“Grown-up stuff again?” he asks, sighing with an edge of informed exasperation far beyond his years.

“Yeah, but it’s the good kind of grown-up stuff,” I say. “Guess what, monkey? We don’t have to move!”

“Really?” he exclaims. “I get to keep my room?”

“Yep.”

“What about my toys?”

“Those, too.” I reach for my mother’s hand, pull her along with me toward the kitchen. “C’mon, I hear that sesame bagel calling my name.”

Charlie turns and races in front of us, beating us to the kitchen. “Bagels don’t talk, Mom,” he says.

“Are you sure?” I say, winking at my mother, who is smiling, still holding my hand. “I just heard the plain one ask for peanut butter and strawberry jam instead of cream cheese.”

“Mo-om,” he groans. “Stop it.”

“What?” I say, my eyes wide, innocent. “Maybe it’s allergic to dairy, like your cousin.”

He laughs, his head thrown back, mouth open wide, a bright and beautiful sound that reaches inside me and makes me happy, too.

My mom leaves around two o’clock, promising to call me during the week. “I mean it,” she says, hugging me at the front door. “And make sure you get those papers signed with Derek, so we can get the ball rolling on the house.”

Charlie and I occupy the rest of our afternoon together baking his favorite chocolate chip cookies. I let him drop the butter, sugar, and eggs into the mixer; I handle the messy job of adding the dry
ingredients. He sneaks a couple of handfuls of chocolate chips when he thinks I’m not watching. I let him get away with it.

“Can I take some of these to Omi and Daddy?” he asks after the last cookie sheet comes out of the oven. “I can telled them I baked them.”

“You can ‘tell’ them, honey, not ‘telled.’ And of course you can take them. That’s very thoughtful of you.” I help him fill a plastic container to the brim.

“But Mommy,” he says when he sees the container, “then
you
don’t have any cookies to eat.”

“Oh, Mommy doesn’t need to eat any more cookies. Trust me.”

When I get back home from dropping him off, I sit down at the kitchen table and turn on my computer, breathing a little sigh of relief. I lean back in my seat, stretching my arms far above my head. The muscles in my back are tight and tense, but as I stretch it hits me that I was never this relaxed when Charlie lived with me. My house was never this clean, my work was never quite done. I always felt like I wasn’t good enough at anything I tried to do. When I was working I felt like I should have been with Charlie. When I was with Charlie I should have been working. I was never in the moment—I was always looking in the direction I thought I should have gone.

Something within me drops down—an elevator plunging too fast, weighted by leaden guilt for having this sort of thought. I’m not supposed to find any kind of pleasure in my child not being with me. Isn’t it a requirement for mothers to constantly pine over their children when they are away from them? Maybe I just don’t have it in me to be a parent. I shake my head, as though to remove it of these heretical thoughts.

I push away from the table, just reaching to log off and power down my laptop, when my phone rings. It’s Vince.

“I missed you at the meeting today,” he says. On the weekends I don’t have Charlie, I’ve been going to a smaller meeting in Vince’s neighborhood, telling myself it isn’t to see him, but to meet more people in recovery.

“I had Charlie,” I tell him, “so I couldn’t make it. How was it?”

“Good, actually. That gal, Trina? The one I introduced you to at the Fremont meeting? She shared a little about drinking around her kids. It was pretty powerful.”

“I didn’t know she was a mom.” My nerves suddenly jangle around inside my body. After the e-mail I sent to her, I never heard back and hadn’t seen her at any meetings. Again, it becomes apparent I need to work on my friendship maintenance skills.

“Yep,” Vince says. “Her husband doesn’t know she’s going to meetings. She said she’s still drinking, too. Trying to figure this whole thing out.”

“Why are you telling me this? I thought we were supposed to be anonymous.”

“Not always. At least not among ourselves.” He sighs. “Anyway, I really just wanted you to know I missed seeing your smiling face.”

We hang up, and I drop back into my chair, feeling guilty for not making more of an effort to get in touch with Trina. If what Vince said is true about her drinking in front of her kids, I know her pain. I can feel it as alive in me as my own. Just like Kristin felt mine. It’s then that I realize what is saving me. It’s what Andi talked about—having a group of women who get me—who don’t judge, who understand my thoughts and know why I do and say the things I do. It’s not being on my own to face all of this. It’s having someone to talk to, to call. I think about how the people in AA talk about moments in their lives when their idea of a higher power gives them a flash of clarity and they’re given an opportunity to pass on what they have learned. If I have a higher power, maybe it’s giving me a chance to offer Trina what I didn’t have the courage to ask for myself.

I don’t give myself the option to think too much about what I should do; I’d only succeed in talking myself out of it. Steeling myself with a couple deep breaths, I sit forward again, poise my fingers above the keyboard, and begin to type an e-mail.

Puffing up my cheeks, I push out a long, tired breath, reading what I’ve written twice over. It’s the most words I’ve put on a page in months. I throw out a quick, cosmic request to whatever powers that be for Trina to send me a return e-mail in the morning.

Powering down my laptop for the night, my insides are battling with an equal measure of exhaustion and elation. Thankfully, exhaustion wins out, so I make the rounds in the house, turning off the lights, going about the business of saying good night. I tumble into bed. Sleep slips in fast and easy. I want to believe it’s not exhaustion but instead the immediate side effect of deciding to do the right thing.

Since I don’t have to be at the cafe, the alarm jolts me from a deep slumber at 7:00 the next morning. I wake with my face smashed into my pillow, a tiny stream of drool leaking out of the corner of my mouth.
Lovely,
I think, wiping my cheek with the edge of the sheet.
What man wouldn’t want to wake up to this? Would Vince?
I smack the clock to get it to stop screeching at me and remind myself with a heavy sigh that I’m not allowed to date. I need to stop thinking about him that way, at least for another six and a half months, when I celebrate my first year of sobriety. Not that I am counting.

Check e-mail
is the next thought in my head. In less than two minutes, I throw back the covers, pull on the nearest set of sweats, and am in the kitchen firing up my laptop. While my computer boots up, I get my coffee started.

It’s done about the same time as my computer is warmed up. I
open the new mail option and it’s instantly as though I’ve stepped off the edge of a skyscraper. My insides plummet, terror lands with a thud somewhere down near my pelvis. I scroll down, panic twisting in frantic, zigzagging patterns throughout my veins. There’s an e-mail from Tara at
O,
and the subject is
Drunk Mother.
Oh shit.