Spring Chicken

The morning light jittered on my knees as if it too were nervous about what my father would say. I expected his booming voice to carry bad news, bad news about Mom and yesterday’s doctor’s appointment. Even I knew that your lips are only supposed to turn blue when you’re cold. I expected Dad’s brisk, so-what attitude he seemed to share only with his family. I didn’t expect him to speak so softly. So… tentatively.

“Your mom’s gonna have to go on a diet,” I heard him say. We turned onto the road that would wind through the rich people’s neighborhood where I was daily deposited. “1200 calories. 1200 for the entire day,” he said as he thrust the car forward. I didn’t have more than a moment to process his dismissive, “You and I can go through that in a sitting,” remark before words, louder, more staccato, burst from his lips. “It’s because of her heart.”

I’d heard my father fling the phrase “heart for shit” during a fight they’d had about disciplining us kids, but thought it was probably a new insult Dad had conjured up for the week, right along-side “bitch-face.”

“Your Mom’s no spring chicken,” Dad said in his usual abrupt manner. “She was old when she had you.” Mom was a full decade younger when she’d had me, and yet, I knew that most kids my age didn’t cling to porcelain sinks to watch their parents apply Rogain to the roots of graying locks. But my mother wasn’t in a wheel chair. She didn’t have aging spots or deep creases in her skin. She was six or seven years older than Dad, but she wasn’t old.

Dad took my silence as his cue to drive his point home and prompted me to imagine what my life would be like if she died. The very thought made me depressed and panicky, and I, for once, considered it a blessing to have arrived at school. I can still hear the screeching of the window scraping the metal casing as it was forced down and his loud voice calling out to me after the car door snapped shut, “She’s old enough that she could kick it before you even get out of high school.”

I don’t remember what school was like, or if I hugged my mom particularly hard that night when she came through the back door in a flurry of commotion that I always associated with her. What I do remember was waking up in a fright in the middle of the night after dreaming of her death.

I softly crept down the hall, avoiding the noisy planks of wood far older than my mother would ever be, if what my father said was right. I eased open the door to my parent’s room, flooding light into the inky blackness, tensely waiting for the rise and fall of my mother’s chest. I clenched my teeth from the force of my silent plea, willing my mother to awaken so that I could confess to her my worry. The possibility that my father would wake up instead manifested itself as the aching chill that settled in just above my shoulder blades, pressure worse than any book bag crammed with school books could ever have been.

It was, of course, my father who stirred. His rumble in the darkness made me start, and the floorboards beneath my soles screeched in time to his words. Though he’d asked me what I was doing, and I knew the question would come, I only replied, “Nothing,” and scurried back into my room, praying that Dad wouldn’t lumber the few feet to the open door. I can still hear the wood bend under his weight, and see the shadow that was cast on the wall. My father’s frame filled the doorway, casting an even more intimidating shadow. He halted only a moment before coming in and settling himself at the end of the bed, repeating his question only after flicking the tip of his nose with his curled index finger.

“Why?” he asked, anger rising in his voice when I admitted I was checking on her. Even though it was too dark to see, I thought I could feel his face redden from the force of holding back his first response. He didn’t immediately speak, and that wasn’t like my father. When he got upset, he exploded. This, I knew, was something different. He jerked his hands back from his knees as if he wanted to wrap them around something, somebody. I saw my father do that in arguments when my mother made a point he couldn’t deny and baited him to disagree.

“If she dies, she dies.” He said it harshly, as if he wanted to beat the meaning into me, but knew it would do no good. “She’s old and there’s nothing you can do… there’s nothing we can do.”

I might as well have seen him sobbing for all the clarity I found there in the darkness. In that one moment, I understood his anger and frustration. My father was afraid—afraid she would die. He had tried to talk about it, tried to share with the wrong person. Suddenly, my strong, aggressive father was stripped away and, in his place, was left a man weak and flawed. When I crawled out from the covers and wrapped my arms around his broad shoulders, I could almost swear he shook.