Brenda was ready to keep pouncing on her, but she stopped, shook her head, and left the room. Mama looked at me and sighed.
"I know she wants me to hate him. April. I know I should, but I can't get myself to hate him. I'm angry and hurt, but it's just not in me to hate."
"Me, neither. Mama," I revealed.
"Maybe we should be more like Brenda. She's so strong. She'll never be hurt, and if she is, no one will ever know it."
"Is that good. Mama?"
Mama shook her head. "Right now," she said. "it seems wonderful to me. Go on. April. Do your homework, talk to your friends on the phone, do anything but hang around and moon around this house with me," she said.
"I want to be with you. Mama."
"I know. honey. But I don't want you to be sad. Please," she begged.
Reluctantly, I left her.
Our lives soon took on a strange ethereal quality. It felt as if we were floating through our days, and the things we did, we did mechanically, almost entirely without any thought. It got so we fled to our separate corners, afraid that if we did spend too much time with one another, we would crack and crumble into dust. I dreamed of that happening to Brenda and me and Mama simply vacuuming us up before turning the vacuum cleaner on herself. The empty house echoed with the sound of ghosts sobbing.
Mama never went outside for the mail. Usually, because of the later hours Brenda kept at school. I was the one to bring it in, and of course, my fingers trembled when I opened the door to the mailbox and slowly gathered the envelopes together. My heart thumped in anticipation of seeing Daddy's
handwriting. I fantasized about a letter from him, one in which he begged for forgiveness and asked to return.
It never came. Weeks turned into months, and then, one day, there was a crack in the walls that had fallen with the weight of steel around us, and a piece of correspondence slipped through. Mama almost didn't see it. When I brought in the mail. I would leave it on the counter in the kitchen. Sometimes it just piled up for days, and sometimes she took it off immediately.
Lately, she had taken to bringing the mail into Daddy's office and sitting at his desk. Brenda looked at me, and I looked at her, but neither of us said anything about it. Was it a good thing or a bad thing? We both wondered. At first, she had treated
everything that belonged to Daddy as sacred things. They couldn't be boxed or packaged or given away. Nothing could be changed. She had gone into his office only to clean it the same way she used to before he had left.
Was she in there now because it helped her remain close to him? Or was it because she had finally accepted he was gone, and as Robert Frost told us in his famous poem, nothing gold could stay? Was she finally conceding and facing reality, or, as Brenda so coldly put it, had she finally gone to the cemetery? A part of me wanted her to do that for her sake, so she could go on and do something with the rest of her life, but another part of me hoped it wasn't true. I couldn't help it: I wasn't Brenda. I had to cling to some hope.
One night. Mama was sitting in the office, mindlessly tearing open envelopes and filling files with documentation, when both Brenda and I heard her scream. 'Oh. my God!"
We both came to our doorways at the same time and looked at each other. Then we charged down the hallway to the office. Mama was behind the desk, her hands over her eyes, her elbows on the desk. She looked like someone who was told to keep her eyes closed until the surprise was ready to be shown. Daddy's computer and monitor were turned on beside her. Although she knew how to use it well and often shopped over the Internet, as far as we knew, she had not done that since he had left us.
"Mama?" Brenda asked.
Slowly, she lowered her hands and looked at us. For a moment, she looked like a stranger. Her face was so contorted and changed, wearing an expression I had never seen. It looked like a composite of emotions: shock, sadness, but relief of some sort as well.
"What is it. Mama?" I asked, stepping into the office. Brenda followed.
She sat back and held up a letter. "What is that?" Brenda asked.
Mama took a deep breath first and then spoke. "As you know, all of our business correspondence, every bill of any importance, legal documents, and so on, goes through the money manager your father had appointed before he left us. I get a monthly report. but I haven't paid all that much attention to it. The summary is all that matters to me. We've always been in the positive column: our income always exceeds our expenses, and there are trusts set up for both of you."
"Are we in financial trouble?" Brenda pounced. "Is that it? Was all that Daddy had done just window dressing?"
"No, honey, far from it."
"Then what is it?"
Mama looked at the paper and sat forward, "This comes from a health insurance company. Apparently, some time ago, your father contracted with an insurance company different from the one we've always had, the one that covered our family. This one was for him only, and that was why I never saw anything on it or about it before this.'
"Why would he do that?" I asked.
"He was trying to hide something from us," Mama replied. "What was he trying to hide?" I asked.
"I'm not sure exactly, but whatever it is, it's a very, very serious thing. This." she said, holding the letter up again. "is a letter approving the insurance coverage for his stay at a facility."