The Distance

It was the ending of a typical day of battling mixed number fractions and the social horrors of the junior high lunchroom. As I got off the bus in front of my house, the sun blinded me and distracted me from the abnormality of Mrs. Christian not being in her front yard and waving as I walked up my driveway. That oddity was out weighed by the fact that I had to maneuver between my mother’s and father’s cars that were normally not there when I got home.

I heard their strained voices, my father’s mostly, as I walked closer to the house. “How,” was the only word I could make out that he kept repeating.

My mother’s responses were too muffled to understand.

The screen door screeched from its rusted hinges and immediately quieted my parents. As I walked through the door, my father’s steel blue eyes broke away from my mother’s and bored into me. I stopped.

At a loss for words now, he turned back to my mother. His eyes walked over her as if he was taking one last picture of her with him. He turned and walked out of the house, causing the screen door to sing more squeaks of pain.

My mother walked over to me and gave me a long hug before kissing my forehead.

I winced at the forgotten familiarity of such affection that hadn’t been bestowed on me in years. Mostly due to my father telling her to stop treating me like a baby, and him telling me to act more like a man at the ripe old age of eleven.

“Let’s go outside,” she said, leading the way to the backyard.

We walked through the overgrown grass, that was an immediate reminder to me that spring had finally been solidified. The coming weekend, and every one of them for the next six months, would be started skirmishing with the antiquated lawnmower that was well past retirement age. “Shit,” I thought to myself.

My mother leaned against the decaying ruins of my childhood swing set. Something in the distance commanded her attention. She stared.

Being distracted by the awakening nuisances of spring, and quickly recalling that snakes were among those, I grappled for my mother’s attention. “Momma.”

My mother wiped something away from her face before taking a long inhale. She walked over to the dilapidated swings and sat down on one. Her long, brown hair cascaded down her back as she turned to look at me and said, “Swing with me, Jakey.”

The screech from the swing competed with our rusted screen door for the highest pitch as my mother parted the air on her ascends. The wind brushed her hair back so that the sun could kiss her reddening face.

I sat on the swing beside her, but didn’t join her return to nostalgia. Men don’t swing.

The distance again commanded her attention and slowed her trip to fond, freeing memories. She looked back at me again as her motion halted. “I have to go,” she said to me and the distance.

“Where, Momma,” was all I could think in response.

“I don’t know,” she said flatly, still peering into the distance.

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know,” she said again.

She reached over and smoothed my hair through her finger tips. “I love you,” she said to me and the distance.

“Can I go with you,” I asked, thinking more about the possible escape of the coming weekends of lawnmower skirmishes.

“No, baby,” she said to only me.

I felt the tears inching up my throat, but widened my eyes so that they wouldn’t fall. Men don’t cry.

My mother backed up on the swing before allowing herself into one last ascend to part the sky. She jumped high and opened her arms wide as she leapt from the swing at the top of the sky. 

I followed as she made her way back into the house after her flight, still not allowing the tears to break into a display of crumbling manhood. I looked back into the distance that kept occupying my mother’s mind. The silhouette of Mrs. Christian stood in a window. She lifted her hand to send over the wave that she had forgotten to give me when I got off the bus earlier. I turned away.

My father stormed back into the house as we entered, causing the rusting screen door to screech even higher. His face etched with depended anger lines as my mother smoothed my hair on last time and planted the kiss that I can still feel on my forehead.

He was already a broken man before that day. He often drank too much, cussed more than a sailor in a whore house, as my grand mother put it, and was prone to throw things when he surpassed the point of his frustration. But, looking back now, that broken man was shattered on that day.

There were others who stood in my mother’s place over the years. They occupied that same space in the bed next to my father, and tried to guide me towards the path of righteousness during my years of rebellious acts to mask my pain. But they never replaced the rightful place of my mother. They never replaced her cascading brown hair, green eyes that could stop a train in motion, and heaven ascending spirit.

“How,” I now heard myself asking as my father did on that day. 

As I cleaned out my mother’s place, I didn’t expect to find this letter. The letter that explained the distance, and the reason why my mother didn’t know where she was going on the day she left.

“I am broken,” the first line of the letter read. “It’s too quiet without you here. I miss you and just wish I could be with you. Have you forgotten me yet? I know I will never forget you.”

Each word of the letter cut through me and freed the tears I held back on that last day I saw my mother. They were my words, yet I hadn’t wrote them. They were the words from the distance as I watched her swing into the sky. They were the words of Mrs. Christian who never again waved at me from her front lawn as I got off the bus.

On my knees, I cried for my mother who finally got to live her truth in this tiny apartment far away from the small town that could never understand her spirit and her love. I cried for my father who couldn’t comprehend the predicament he walked in on when coming home early from work on that day. I cried for Mrs. Christian who lost the one person that told her she was special. And I cried for the little boy that couldn’t  understand why his mother was leaving him behind.