"My Mother: The FBI Agent"

So now my mother is making us schlep over to the opposite side of the complex to ask our strange landlord for covered parking until the Corolla’s shattered window can be fixed. Allowing us to walk home ourselves is out of the question.


Sam watches Jack and me with the eye of an FBI agent. Yesterday, I went outside on the two by four wooden box that comprises our stairs down to the parking lot just to get some air, just to sit in my own skin for a minute. I stared past the Quick-n-Save across the street, past the construction site for the new condos, past the towering maples where the Long Island Sound waited on the other side. I imagined my dad emerging from a belly-shaped cloud, a knowing smile on his lips. When I closed my eyes I could smell the linen of his shirts in the air. Goose-bumps rose along my arms and a lump formed in the back of my throat.


The front door swung open. “Amelia!” My mom was standing inches away from me, her breath jagged. I felt naked, caught in the middle of something vulnerable.


“You scared me half to death! I was looking all over for you!” Mom shook her head so that wisps of her dark bob caught on the corners of her red mouth.


Our apartment is not much bigger than a little girl’s Barbie dream house so I don’t know whose home she was looking in. But this is what she does since my dad’s car accident. She is this spastic elf scurrying through our two-cubicles-posing-for-bedrooms place as if any minute Santa Claus will beckon her to load the sleighs with toys. Only no one but us walks through our front door now.


I hunger for my mother to walk out that door, alone. Only then could my tears come. Only then would it be safe to unravel.