Page 109 of The Frog Prince
“How about the VP, then?” I suggest, knowing it’s Mom’s favorite restaurant and usually out of her price range.
“Oh, Holly—”
“Just say yes, Mom.” My voice cracks, nearly breaks. “All you have to do is say yes.”
“Okay. Yes.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
“I’m on my way.”
*
I’m standing onthe curb in front of the Vintage Press when I spot a familiar face, a face so known to me, I feel a pang.
It’s like seeing me approach, but it’s not me. It’s Mom. Which in some ways is the same thing, because isn’t she the first person I knew? The one I identified with before I knew myself?
No wonder mother-daughter relationships are so impossible. We’re two women forever tied to each other. I am indebted to her for life, formylife, and I wouldn’t be here, foolish, foolhardy, sentimental, and foolishly brave, if it weren’t for her. I wouldn’t know how to dream or feel or be…
She sees me. “Holly!” She hugs me, then steps back to look at me and push my hair around, rearranging my bangs on my face. “What are you doing home?”
I take a step back now, away from her interfering fingers. “I needed to come home.”
Mom is still looking at me, and there’s that now familiar bewilderment in her eyes, as if she doesn’t quite know what to do with me, and I suddenly have to know what she’s thinking. What she sees when she looks at me.
“Why do you always look at me like that?” I ask her.
“Like what?” She sounds immediately defensive.
“Like that,” I say, nodding at her. “You get that expression on your face—”
“What expression?”
“That one.” And I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated with all the secrets and silence in my life, the things that have gone wrong, the things that I believed that weren’t true. “When you look at me, Mom, what do you see?”
Mom, poor Mom, gets quiet, and her smile quivers. “Love,” she whispers. “I look at you and think, ‘Wow, look at her. There’s my baby.’”
Christ.Can it get worse? Can I feel any worse? “Mom—” I break off as my voice fails me.
How can people love each other but still not feel loved?
How can we say the right words and still feel wrong?
Because Mom is saying all the things I want to hear, Mom is saying everything I’ve needed to hear, but somehow it doesn’t ease the last twenty-something years, when I needed more…
She must feel my tension, must see the struggle in my face, but she can’t cope with it. “Shall we go inside?” she suggests briskly. “Get a table?”
We enter the restaurant beneath the pretty arched awning, through the mahogany-and-glass doors, and we’re seated immediately.
“You don’t come home very often,” Mom says as the busboy fills our glasses with ice water.
“It feels funny coming home.” I wait for the busboy to leave. “None of my high school friends have been married. Not even engaged. While I’ve been married and divorced and—” I exhale. “It feels strange. They’re all Catholic, too, and you know it doesn’t help. Catholics can’t divorce—”
“They do it all the time.”
“But it’s frowned upon.”
My mom laughs. Bless her heart. She does have a sense of humor after all. “It’salwaysfrowned upon. You don’t know how many times I’ve felt frowned upon for losing your dad—”