"Liar Liar"

“Look, I don’t know what you saw but there’s nothing to tell. We kissed one time, nothing more. We are just friends, Amelia.” She shrugs her shoulders as if we are discussing ice-cream flavors and not the gut and heart of another person—poor Mr. McGee.



When I was five years old my mother picked me up in the middle of the school day. I was reading a book about how tadpoles become frogs and I wanted to know how it would end, but my teacher walked over to my desk and whispered “Amelia, are you feeling okay?”


“Uh-huh.”


“Well, your mom’s waiting for you in the front office. She says you have a doctor’s appointment.”


“Okay.” I feared going to the doctors and worried the whole walk down the long corridor to the main office that the day would end with some sort of sharp needle.


Mom stood at the entrance to the office in a dangerously high pair of navy blue pumps and a matching suede mini skirt. A tight-knit cream sweater hugged her tiny chest. It didn’t matter that it was February in Houston and close to eighty degrees outside. If my mother wanted to wear a cashmere sweater, nothing was going to stop her.


“My baby,” she opened her arms wide and I skipped into them.


“Am I sick, mommy?”


“Yes sweetheart, but mommy’s going to take you to the doctor and make it all better.” She turned to the old women in the office who were probably jealous that I had a mother who looked like a movie star.


“Feel better, dear,” one of them said and smiled like it hurt.


I was still nervous about my mysterious ailment. I didn’t like the tears in her eyes or the way she kept her head down as we walked to our station wagon.


But when we got inside the car, mom was smiling and jumping up and down in her seat. “Oh Amelia Bedilia sweetheart, we’re going to have a girls’ day out!”


“You mean I’m not sick?”


“Of course not honey!” She held my face in her hands like I was all that mattered in the world.


“You mean you lied?”


“No, I fibbed.” She turned on the car. “Mommy watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off last night and got inspired.”


We went to the Galleria—a gigantic mall replete with expensive stores. She bought me a silver bracelet and enough sparkly and beaded clothing to play dress up for the rest of my life (if I’d never grown past my petite five-year-old body). I was Skipper, Barbie’s kid sister, and loved the way I looked beside my mother who was only a good foot taller than me. I felt like her blond-haired counterpart. It was wonderful.


We ordered pepperoni pizza for lunch. “Don’t tell your father.” She winked a lash laden with mascara at me. And all I could think of was how great it was going to be when I grew up and became just like her.


“Ooh, let’s have ice-cream, mommy!” It was not a question. She may have been a mother on the outside, but she was all kid inside.


I remember feeling a little wave of uneasiness hit me on the line for Haagen-Dazs. But I was five and didn’t know about listening to a body’s warning signals.


Halfway through my three scoop sundae another jolt hit my stomach. But this time it wasn’t so gentle. “Mommy, I feel sick.”


My mother’s eyes bulged from their sockets. She picked up our packages and held them against her like she needed protection, from me. “Quick, let’s go find a restroom.”


I got up and followed her as quickly as my rubber legs would allow. Where was my best friend? “Mommy?” I tugged on her sweater, and she jumped away.


“You’ll be fine, sweetheart. We’re almost there.”


But my stomach had other plans. Right at the entrance to the mall’s restroom I vomited, chunks of pepperoni and cheese scattering on my mother’s cashmere sleeve and expensive shoes. It seemed like forever before I realized that most of the debris had landed on me.


Mom’s mouth looked like it had swallowed super-glue. I watched the muscles in her fine jaw-line spasm as she pointed to the bathroom and then a sink. She handed me a fistful of paper towels and walked to the sink farthest from me. There she took off her shirt and pulled out one of my new sweaters. She toddled over to my sink and pointed to the bag. The entire time there were little more than grunts from my mother who had turned a sallow yellow.


The next time she spoke it was on the phone with my father’s school. “Tell him it’s an emergency.”


It was my dad who put a cold cloth to my head and fed me a diet of liquids until I’d graduated to starchy solids. It was my dad who came to hold me when my fever spiked up in the middle of the night.


After a few days I was back to normal. Mom must have known this because there she was in my bedroom again, unafraid to hug and kiss me. Dad made his famous oatmeal for us before he went to work and mom served it with one of her silly accents, making us laugh until I didn’t mind so much the way she’d clenched her jaw at me.


But I’m not five anymore and I do mind. Sam Fluchter is the most dangerous kind of woman. She puts a person under her charismatic spell just long enough for you to care, long enough for you to believe that you are the center of her world. But then she leaves you. Sometimes because of illness, sometimes because of death, sometimes because she just feels like it. And you want to forgive her because you love her so much. How many times can you forgive before a scar forms?


“You know Vinny wants more than that.”


Mom lets go of my balled fists and stares at her hands. “What about what I want, Amelia?”


Poor, poor Mr. McGee. The man has no idea what he is in for. I know, with an irrefutable certainty, that my mother is going to break his heart.