Free Taking Flight by Sarah Solmonson

helping her one of her business cards. “Don’t these idiots know I’m the same person who they wouldn’t sell to a month ago?” she would say when she got back in the car, trophy in hand. Mom was Pretty Woman, finally shopping in the elite hardware stores of Southwestern Minnesota.
     

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    I guess I should tell you about how bad things got, for Mom and I. I don’t know if you’re shielded from this kind of stuff in Heaven, or wherever you are now, but I think it’s fair that you know this. Because as much as I love you, you need to know that your dream had a price.
    Mom and I were left to pick up the check.
    Mom didn’t change the sheets on your bed until the day I told her I couldn’t stand the pungent smell coming from your bedroom any longer. We peeled the sheets off the bed together, and when they were clean the smell was gone and so was Mom.
    Do you remember how Mom would cook dinner every night? Remember how she wore jeans and sweatshirts with puff painted snowmen in the wintertime? Remember how Mom always had a book on the arm of the couch, one at the kitchen table and one on her nightstand?
    Remember how she used to be able to look at me without feeling sad?
    She changed slowly and somehow all at once. For a long time I equated a missed phone call or someone running five minutes late with death. (Actually, I still do this sometimes. I have found myself bracing for the worst when Dustin is five minutes late coming home from work.) Imagine the weeknight that Mom went out with Jim and Diane and didn’t answer her cell phone or return home until four in the morning. I sat in our living room with all the lights on, my knees pulled up to my chest, breathing through each terrible scenario my imagination treated me to. When she finally came in we got into our first of many, many fights. It ended when she slapped me across the face.
    I slapped her back.
    We stood facing each other, our anger so palpable that the dog had run upstairs to escape from the tension.
    It wasn’t the last time we raised our hands to one another. 
    Mom went back to work in September 2000, where she worked sixty hour weeks. She stopped cooking dinner, though on rare nights I could get her to cook her infamous spaghetti.  I savored those meals, watching her stand at the stove stirring a pot of noodles. She would always cut up mine in a bowl, long after I was old enough to know how to twirl the pasta onto a fork. I would eat slowly, because as long as we each had our spaghetti, our garlic bread, our mutual need for chocolate following the consumption of marinara sauce, we could almost be ok.
    Our three level, three bedroom house was too big for the two of us. Mom didn’t care about the house any more, but she got so angry if it was messy. The thing was, it wasn’t being lived in, and so it was never messy. But she saw dirt and smudges and filth everywhere. She hated being there but suddenly everything that we owned was something you worked so hard to give us, and since we weren’t getting anything else from you ever again, the house became a shrine. I got into the habit of coming home from school and scrubbing clean a kitchen that had been cleaned the day before, and the day before that, though nothing had been cooked to leave a mess that needed cleaning.
    But no matter how much I cleaned, when Mom came home, exhausted from work and the stress of everything that must have been weighing on her shoulders, she would survey the kitchen and then yell at me. “You have been home for three hours and you couldn’t look around and take care of this mess?” She would grab the paper towels and Windex. “I can’t do everything on my own.” Then she would wipe down the counters I had already washed.
    Dirt, even invisible dirt, was easier to manage than grief.
     
    Insomnia joined me in my bedroom, nagging me to stay awake, to think about you, to listen for Mom’s return on the nights she went out. Once I decided to stop fighting it