Missing Mom Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t…” Mom smiled, faltering. Before dinner she’d draped the white feather boa playfully over her shoulders but now it was slipping off. “…actually didn’t like animals. Very much.”
    “Not animals, Mom. Strays!”
    Clare was smiling brightly. I knew I had to help her, she’d blundered leading us to this subject. We would tease Mom to deflect her attention, make her laugh with embarrassed pleasure. Telling of her weakness for strays: the cosmetics saleswoman who’d begun to weep during her sales spiel, confided in Gwen how lonely she was, promptly Gwen invited her for dinner, the woman had a “breakdown” and wound up staying the night, and in the morning, Dad was the one to ask her please to leave. Even worse, there was “Cousin Darlene”—a remote relation of Gwen’s from Plattsburgh who arrived unannounced and disheveled with a six-month infant, telling a terrible story of her husband abusing her, and threatening her life, and naturally Gwen made her welcome; and within a few days Darlene was running up long-distance telephone bills, leaving the colicky baby with Mom for much of the day and expecting Mom to cook and clean up after her, until again Dad had to intervene, contacted Darlene’s family in Plattsburgh to please come get her. “‘Cousin Darlene’! She’d be here yet, camping out in my old room,” Clare said vehemently. “She’d stolen from her own family. She wasn’t even married. That baby didn’t have any father.”
    Faintly Mom protested, “Oh, but whose fault was that? A baby doesn’t choose…”
    “And last summer? I dropped by the house here, and there’s this Ozark-looking individual, I swear his arms were covered in tattoos, in a muscle T-shirt and what looks like swim trunks out in the yard pretending to mow the grass. Except the mower kept sputtering. I asked Mom who on earth this person was and she tells me Reverend Bewley ‘spoke up’ for him, he’s a parolee from Red Bank of all places.”
    “Oh but just for some small thing, really,” Mom said, blushing, “like forging checks, or…”
    “Auto theft, Mom! Burglary! Who knows what else he did, he never got caught for! Your precious Reverend Bewley is as naive as you are! And, get this,” Clare said in triumph, “his name was ‘Lynch.’”
    “But Clare, a person can’t help what his name is…”
    “‘Lynch’ was his first name! ‘Lynch’ was certainly a name the man could have changed.” Clare’s eyes glistened with righteous fury, she had the rapt attention of the table. The mood of the moment was wayward and comical. Mom blushed with a kind of embarrassed pleasure at such chiding. I could see my father’s figure hovering in the background as often, when Clare and I were visiting with Mom, having coffee or herbal tea together in the kitchen, or on the patio, I’d become suddenly aware of Dad as he stood in a doorway seemingly wanting neither to join us nor to leave us; content with listening in, getting that gist of what was so entertaining to his three girls as he called us fondly, without wishing to participate. “…so I’m with Mom in the kitchen and we aren’t hearing the lawn mower, and I go outside to investigate, and there is this ‘Lynch’ in front of the garage where there was oil spilled on the concrete he must have spilled himself, and what is the man doing?—I couldn’t believe my eyes, he was practicing slipping and falling. Falling! This guy, in his late twenties, one of those skinny hard-muscled guys, scrubby little goatee and sunburnt-looking face, sort of positioning his hand on the ground, and lowering himself, preparing to fall hard, turns out Mom had hired him for yard work in some ‘Christian Fellowship Out-Reach Program’ sponsored by Reverend Bewley, and what’s he doing but practicing an ‘accident’?—so he could pretend he was hurt, and blackmail Mom? Sue Mom? So I call out ‘Excuse me, mister, just what the hell do you think you’re doing?’—and