The Baby Wait

Love might be a given, but respect wasn’t. She’d never managed to earn my respect.

Fear nagged at me. Would Meredith one day look at me in this way? Could I be a good enough mom to earn Meredith’s respect? Or did I possess some faulty O’Rourke gene that rendered its women incapable of mothering? Was it latent, just waiting to switch on and prove all my attempts to better myself were nothing but a farce?

The cheap clock in the living room chirped eight o’clock with the tinny warble of an electronic chickadee, reminding me the rest of the apartment waited.

I scrubbed and mopped and tossed liquor bottles until the smell of alcohol and bleach burnt the tender skin in my nostrils. By eleven o’clock that night, I had the place righted. It took me two trips to haul the three heavy trash bags of detritus I’d collected to the trash can. The loud slam of the cart lid startled a feral cat that had wandered up to take a sniff.

After a check on Ma, still snoring noisily under a Tweety comforter I’d never seen before, I gathered up the dirty clothes and headed for my car.

Tomorrow, Ma would wake with a fierce hangover and be mad as hell that I’d poured all her booze down the drain. She’d never believe she’d drunk the last of it herself. I was always the bad guy with her. She was always the recalcitrant child who pouted and sulked and screamed to get her way.

We’d tried detox and A.A. and even hypnosis, plus a goodly portion of prayer. But like that old saw about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb, nothing would help until Ma herself wanted to change.

I drove on up the interstate, the soft syrupy sounds of late-night country music no help for my mood. Despite my best efforts, tears slipped down my face. Between the fight with Joe and my latest skirmish in the never-ending battle to keep Ma safe from herself, I was one sad puppy.

The clock on the dash read eleven-forty-five when I got home. I humped the overflowing basket of Ma’s dirty clothes up the porch steps and into the dark house. Cocoa lay sprawled out on the living-room sofa. She cracked open one eye and thumped her tail in a sleepy greeting.

“Hey, girl. I’ve missed you, too. You go on back to sleep, but get off that couch before Joe wakes up in the morning, you hear?”

The light above the stove gave me a dim view of the kitchen. Two glasses sat on the counters, a plate by the sink. The memory of Ma’s catastrophe of an apartment made me drop the basket of clothes and put the handful of offending items in the dishwasher.

Joe’s long frame took up three-quarters of the bed. I didn’t bother turning on the light, just guided myself by the one he’d left on in the bathroom. Peeling off my wretched clothes, I dropped them to the floor. I considered briefly the idea of simply tossing them and not bothering to salvage the white T-shirt I’d worn. My ingrained frugality won out, though.

In the shower, I switched on the hottest water I could stand and let the cleansing stream of water pour over me. The grime from the awful day sluiced into the drain at my feet. I propped against the ceramic tiles, tears mingling with the hot water.