Free The Shortest Distance Between Two Women by Kris Radish

and then ask her mother When . When is a family allowed to branch out and have its own brunch? When can you really be considered a grown-up and start eating at the adults’ table? She longs to take the scissors and run with them so fast that she will qualify for the Olympics.
    But what she does instead is take in a breath, a breath so large that it is a wonder she does not lift right up and bump her head against the ceiling. Then she says what she always says and that is, “I’m sorry, Mom,” and drops her head.
    Emma decides out of exhaustion to just skip around the truth and sort of lie, something she has never been very good at. She tells her mother that she’s just been tired (which is true), that work has been hard (which is also true), that she’s been worried about hergardens and will call Debra about the theme by the end of the week—which is only half true.
    Breathe, Emma, breathe .
    The half lying doesn’t work well and Marty cuts her off just after she says, for the second time, it must be her work schedule making her so cranky, by gently putting her hand over Emma’s mouth and saying, “Shhh,” as if Emma were a baby.
    “It’s okay, whatever it is,” Marty assures her.
    “I just told you what it was.”
    “Honey, I’m not stupid and I’ve also been your age, so that gives me a bit of a leg up on some, not all, but some of the things that might be floating through your mind and life.”
    Really, Emma wonders. When you were my age you were struggling with an ill husband, a mess of children, financial disasters, and a future that appeared uncharted and unmanageable, the other side of comfortable and totally the opposite of what was being discussed in McCall’s magazine.
    “Maybe you know more than I do, Mom, but it seems like if you dissected our lives the parts that are similar wouldn’t add up to much of a pile,” Emma responds quietly, suddenly embarrassed that her mother had to come check on her.
    Marty laughs. Sometimes her laugh is predictable, like after someone tells a joke, or when Marty gets some kind of fabulous news about one of the grandkids, or when she finds out that the godlike daughter Erika has received yet another promotion, or better yet, may be coming for a visit. But when Marty laughs like this, unexpectedly, when no one else in his or her right mind would laugh, it throws Emma into an emotional tailspin.
    “What is so funny, Mom?”
    “You are, my darling,” Marty manages to say as she leans forward so that she can put her hands on Emma’s face. “You think just because some people think I’m an old lady that once I wasn’t yourage and once I didn’t feel and wonder and dream and imagine how some things could have been different?”
    “I haven’t thought about it that much but our lives, well, they seem like night and day in so many ways.”
    “I’m talking about the feelings of a woman, Emma. I was forty-three once, too. I had dreams and longings and plans and that has everything to do with being female and nothing to do with the year I was born and the fact that I am your mother.”
    Dare she ask? What dreams? What did you want, Mother, that you didn’t have or couldn’t reach? What made your heart ache and yearn? What would possess you to get up and leave a family brunch? What would make you lie in the yard and want to do nothing more than caress the back sides of your lovely ferns? When was the last time you ran with a scissors or any sharp instrument?
    Emma cannot bring herself to ask these questions out loud because then she would have to ask herself the same questions. She would have to get up, walk into her bedroom, close the door so that she could look into her own eyes, down her face, past her sinking breasts, beyond her waist and to the top of her toes. She’d have to look at herself and then most likely go and lie down somewhere in her yard and think about the answer.
    “I’m sorry, Mom. Really,” Emma admits.
    “Don’t be sorry, dear.