Riding with Holly

It is Friday afternoon, and I am anxiously waiting, kneeling on the couch backwards to look out the living room window. I keep my eyes peeled on the driveway, waiting for her, for Holly, my mother. My two older brothers, Danny and Michael, are elsewhere, at this point knowing better than to bother waiting around for her. She is supposed to pick us up every other Friday evening at five o'clock, and return us home, clean and fed, on Sunday afternoon. That's the arrangement, but it rarely goes that way. Sometimes she is gone for weeks, sometimes months. Many Friday nights have ended with me still kneeling on the couch waiting for her until it grows dark outside and I finally leave my post, disappointed beyond belief. But at eight years old, I'm still young and dumb enough to wait. I still believe her when she says she will come. And on this particular night, she does. When her car pulls into the gravel driveway, we say our goodbyes to granny then rush out the door to pile into the maroon sedan with fabric interior, kicking aside the trash piled up on the floors. The smell of cigarettes clings to the seats and the ceiling but I don't care. It smells like her and I breathe it in. She is here, like a summer thunderstorm, no bra in a black floral dress, blue eyeliner around her green eyes, hair pulled back into a ponytail with unruly bangs falling over her eyes. She's really not beautiful, but she's cute, and I take in the sight of her as if she is a miracle. She had been lost to me for so long, and so every time I see her I wonder if it will be the last. I examine her closely, the fine curly hairs on the nape of her neck, the butterfly tattoo stamped on her shoulder, the rose one on her ankle. I drink in her laugh, the way she holds the steering wheel as if she would drive us all away from here. But instead, she drives us to McDonald’s for our Happy Meals, blaring 90s hit country with the windows down to let out the perpetual cloud of Marlboro smoke. Tonight she is not drunk yet. She is functioning, happy, talkative. She asks about our lives, our friends, how school is going, what we have been reading and learning about. As we crawl through the drive thru line Mom lights another cigarette, and then another, the smoke pouring out the half down windows, the boys already arguing. One by one she tosses our Happy meals into the back seat, and relishes in the few moments of silence as she pulls out onto the main road, heading to the grocery store.

She takes us to Super Savers to pick up food for the weekend. List in hand, she directs us to get the following items:

-2 juicy juice 48 oz cans

-1 package store brand individually wrapped “cheese” slices

-2 for a dollar boxed Mac and cheese

-3 large cans of tuna fish

-1 bag frozen peas

-1 jar of generic creamy peanut butter

-1 loaf wonder bread

-3 bags of store brand cereal

-2 gallons of whole milk

We spread out across the store, hurrying back to mom with all of the additional items that we found along the way, candy and cookies and chips. The things she knows she's supposed to say no to, but won't. Half of the groceries she pays for with "coupons" that I later learned are wic checks, the other half with food stamps. My father, I'm sure, would rather his children starve than be on government assistance. But my mother isn't above it. Any money she makes with the odd jobs she picks up goes straight to the bartender, and so this government food is a godsend.

When we get back to her apartment, the boys push past mom as she unlocks the door, fighting to be first to the Nintendo controllers. Mom's place is a free-for-all. The two rules are: “Be quiet” and “Don't kill each other”. I hear mom let out a deep sigh. She is already exhausted by us. I help her put away the groceries in the cabinet, which are nearly bare to begin with. By Sunday we will be hungry and at each other's throats. And she will be back from wherever she ends up disappearing to, in time to make a large batch of casserole concocted with canned tuna and frozen peas and boxed mac and cheese. She will order us each into the bath before heading back to granny's. Tonight, she looks at me in the yellow light of her dingy two-bedroom apartment, and stops for a moment, her sad eyes resting on my face. I wonder if it hurt her, to look at a miniature version of herself mixed with a man she used to think she loved. I now wonder how I could have expected her to love me at all, knowing how hard it was for her to even love herself.

She brushes my overgrown bangs out of my eyes, looking me up and down; gawky and scrawny, average in every way except for the one thing she and I have in common: unspoken pain that hardens us against love.

"Let's go for a ride." She says suddenly, sliding the last of the groceries unceremoniously into the pantry.

"Where?" I ask, my eyes lighting up, yet my insides steeling against inevitable let-down.

She shrugs "I don't care, let's get an ice cream or something".

I hesitate, glancing toward the boys’ bedroom. "Just us?".

"Yeah,” she says, “they'll be fine, I put some new video games in there, they won't even know we're gone".

I see the glow of the television pouring out of the open bedroom door, and the ringing sounds of donkey Kong let us know that the boys will be occupied.

"Have they had their meds?" I ask, knowing the answer already.

"Shit, good thinking". She disappears into the dark of the apartment to give the boys their seizure medications (which she only remembers to do about half the time), and a glass of water each, then rushes out of the room, grabs my hands and pulls me out the door and back into the car. She lets me sit in the front, and I feel like a queen.

We glide down the dark, poorly lit back roads cloaked in fallen leaves, she asks me all the questions I have been wanting her to ask. Who are my friends and what do I like to do? In this moment, she wants to be a good mom; she is trying her hardest.

"Take the wheel," she says while fishing through her large faux leather pocketbook, eventually coming up with her pack of cigarettes and her lighter.

I stretch my body across the bench seat to grab the wheel, my eyes barely over the dash. Mom takes her hands off the wheel, rests a cigarette between her lips, and wraps her hands around it as she lights it, as if she is holding her dearest possession. I shakily swerve back and forth across the deserted road.

Mom giggles as she puts one hand back on the wheel.

"Thanks baby girl" she says, giving my shoulder a quick squeeze.

For what feels like forever, we sit in half silence riding all around town, windows cracked to let the cool air in; past the library and the elementary school; past the park where Danny cracked his skull falling on the frozen pond last winter; around the huge cemetery on Clark Street.

We decide it is too cold for ice cream and stop at the convenience store for candy instead. I wait in the car while mom goes in. It is almost ten o'clock and we have been driving around for more than an hour and a half. Seven cigarettes’ time.

Mom comes back with two Hershey’s cookies and cream chocolate bars, two scratch tickets, and a purse full of nips. We share the candy and the scratchers, but the whiskey is just for her. I pretend not to notice when she snaps one open and dumps it into the rest of her McDonald’s Diet Coke, and then another. I munch silently on my candy bar as we head back to the house and find the boys sleeping in the TV light, still wearing the clothes they went to school in. Before I even get my shoes off, mom is swallowed up by the shadows of the apartment.

"I'll be right back, sweetie" she calls from the living room. Her footsteps tell me she is heading out the front door. I feel her pulling away from me again, the time we shared together already fading. I am desperate to reach her before she goes, for I do not want our time to be over just yet.

"Where are you going," I plead, following her into the small entryway where I sleep. I flip on every light I can find along the way.

"I just gotta go see a friend for a second," she says, but I know very well it will not be a second. It will be hours, and I will lie awake waiting for the sound of her keys jangling as she slips by me and into bed in the wee hours of the morning, exhausted, drunk, and sometimes not alone. Only when she is in bed and the door locked behind her will I sleep.

"Bye, mom" I whisper as I flop onto my futon bed. She slams the door behind her without a word, and I sit for a moment in the silence of the apartment. After a moment, I get up and turn each of the lights back off, before retreating to my room. I pick a movie from the tall stack of VHS tapes on the floor leaning against the small TV Mom got at a tag sale just for me. Tonight, I choose “The Prince of Egypt”, an animated telling of the Biblical story of Moses, whose mother sent him down the Nile River in a basket to save his life from Pharaoh's death order.

It has become a comforting practice to watch movies over and over, and so on this night, like many others, I allow the characters on the screen to lull me to peace as I wait for a woman I know isn't coming. As Moses' mother sets her son down into the water and pushes the basket into the current, she sings him a lullaby; and so she sings to me too, always the same song with the same tears as she says goodbye.

I wish I knew then how long this night would stay with me,that I would always remember when I steered the car for her so she could light a smoke; the taste of the cookies and cream candy bar that I didn't have to share with my brothers; that I would never forget how it felt to love her and lose her just like this, over and over, for months and years.

But nights like these prepared me for life and for parenthood in ways I could not have fathomed. They made me the kind of mother I wished that I had had, and they built an empathy and resilience in me of which I am quite proud. My biggest fear was that I would become my mother.

I am not my mother.

But I would not be who I am without her, and I cannot ignore the stories of how she and I came to be. I have only so many of these broken pieces of her, these jagged memories ripped from time; and so I make a mosaic the best I can, and remember all the pieces of her that still live.