Dave's Mom

There were three ways to enter my mother's house: the back door from the alley, the garage through its sticky keypad, or the formal front, all porch and deadbolt and pointless pretense. I chose the front. I rang the bell once, loud and solid. There was a pause, a shuffle, the scrape of her feet across faux-wood laminate.

She opened the door in a faded gray tee and slim black leggings, holding a phone in one hand and, in the other, a pink glass mug of what she called "detox tea." She was smaller than I remembered. It'd only been a few months, but time had a way of compressing her, shrinking her back into the woman she used to be, the one who cowered and apologized to a drunk husband even years after he was gone.

Her eyes, hazel, shot through with a bloodshot webwork, scanned me up and down. She tried a smile. "Dave? I thought you were—"

"Busy. I know," I said, pushing past her into the foyer. The house had the dead, still smell of lemon cleaner and whatever soap she used to bleach the world into submission. "Put that down. I have something for you."

For a moment, I wondered if she’d just slam the door in my face, lock it, and call the cops for a wellness check. She stood still, balancing all her weight on the balls of her slippered feet, not wanting to commit to either a flight back into the living room or an advance into the foyer where I waited. Her hand held the mug so tight I could see the whiteness of her knuckles through the fine, crepe-y skin; the cup quivered a little, sending faint ripples through the viscous, herbal liquid. I could taste the sourness of her indecision, sharp and teetering between maternal obligation and the dread that came from my unexpected visit.

She parted her lips, jaw working around something—a question, a protest, a memory. Maybe she’d say, "You can’t talk to me like this," or maybe, "You need to leave." Instead, she just inhaled, a thin, juddering breath, and let her eyes fall to the floor in surrender.

I didn’t bother with further pleasantries. I walked into the living room, the cheap carpet swallowing the sound of my steps. I heard her set the mug down with a muted clink, then a nervous shuffle as she tapped at her phone. Maybe she was texting someone, or maybe the phone was just a talisman, something familiar in her clammy palm to keep her tethered to the world outside this house and this moment. I waited, counting backwards from ten, until I heard the soft click as her phone screen darkened. The silence that followed was thick, almost gelatinous.

She hovered in the periphery, arms folded tight across her chest, eyes flickering between me and the framed family photos that lined the narrow hallway. I watched her try to summon the brittle composure she wore around company, but here, confronted by me—by the adult version of the boy she couldn’t control—her entire body broadcasted nerves. I could see the tremor in her forearm, the way her fingers worked at the seam of her leggings.

The house was just as I remembered: sterile, aggressively clean, curated to look lived-in but never actually comfortable. She’d kept the fake succulents on every surface, the dustless shelves lined with knickknacks purchased on clearance. Everything here was a monument to her capacity for endurance, to her ability to perform normalcy even as the rest of us had drifted away or flamed out.

"Sit," I said, gesturing at the bench by the kitchen’s island. I didn’t bother asking. She started at the bluntness of my command, every muscle in her face registering the insult, but she obeyed with only a small, pained smile, perching herself on the very edge of the seat. I let her wait while I rummaged through my backpack, the zipper’s rough burr magnified in the hush of the room.

From the bag I drew a coil of rope, the kind you’d find at any hardware store, but doubled, looped, and already knotted at one end. She stared at it, blinking rapidly, a flush blooming from her collarbone up to her jaw. I placed it, deliberate and heavy, on the counter between us.

She looked at the rope, then at me, then back at the rope, her lips pressed into a thin line. "What’s that for?" she asked, the words flat, as if she already knew the answer and was only giving me a chance to say it out loud.

"You’ll see," I said, meeting her stare.

Eyes blinked incomprehension. "What—"

“Strip,” I said. Voice flat, inflectionless, the way you tell a dog to sit. The word landed between us like ...