Mother goes to the Acme across the street once a week at 9:43 on Tuesday night, because that’s when the fewest cars are in the parking lot. She counts the cars from the living room window obsessively and keeps a chart. Tuesdays at 9:43 has been the best time to go shopping for some time now, unless it’s changed since the last time we spoke on the phone. She always diligently reports the number of cars in the Acme parking lot, whether I ask or not, and I never do. She has a record going back several decades. It’s a shame there isn’t a market for this sort of data. She’d be the Bill Gates of food-store parking statistics.
“If you really love me,” I say, making a preemptive strike to her Achilles heel, “you’ll go to breakfast with me right down the street at the Crystal Lake Diner. We’ll have waffles maybe. You could use a walk. We need to get you outside more. You look sort of pasty.”
“A walk! In the daylight! They’ll see me! They have small planes now with cameras. Drones, they’re called! I saw this on TV. The drones can shoot you dead too! Anywhere in the world!”
“The government is not watching you, Mom. They could care less about you, believe me. The US government only cares about rich people! Last time I checked you’ve never lived in Faddonfield.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Mom taps the soft flesh of her right palm against her forehead. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t vote for Obama. And not because he’s black either. But they have records! And now that we have a black president—it’s hard to trust anything these days.”
“You haven’t voted for anyone in three decades, white or black.”
“They’ll shoot me for being unpatriotic then!”
“Listen, Mom.” I lift her chin with my index finger until our eyes meet. “I promise it’ll be okay if you eat breakfast with me at the diner. I promise.”
“We could eat here!”
“We can leave the house and be okay. I swear. Do this for me, and I won’t throw anything away for at least a week. You can rest easy for seven entire days. And a week is long. I might lose interest in cleaning the house by the end of it. I won’t touch a thing. You’ll have my word.”
“This is my house! My father gave it to me!”
“Mom. Focus. Breakfast. At. The. Diner,” I say, karate-chopping the periods into the air between us, thinking about how Ken and I have paid her taxes and debt for the last seven years just so she won’t lose this wonderful little shithole. We’ve actually prepaid everything for the next few years too—taxes, cable, water, electricity, everything. Less than Ken spends on his monthly cigar and scotch supply.
“I don’t know,” she says, but she’s nodding in a way that lets me know we have a deal.
After she’s wrapped everything but her eyes up in a pink scarf, covering enough of her face to appease the strictest and most sexist Taliban members, we walk down the street holding hands, just like we did when I was a little girl, only now it’s my mother who waits at corners looking in my eyes for permission to cross and flinching whenever cars roar past and begging me not to let go of her.
She’s shaking the whole time.
Leaf-in-a-hurricane shaking.
“Can I just wait outside?” she asks when we arrive at the Crystal Lake Diner. “I can stay right here until you are finished eating, yes? I’ll be good.”
“No,” I say, and drag her inside by the arm.
It looks like every diner in South Jersey—booths, a bar with permanently fixed-to-the-floor stools, old people nursing cups of coffee, overweight people enjoying heaping portions of greasy heart-attack-inducing delights, kids in high chairs at the ends of tabletops, solo men reading old-fashioned newspapers.
In other words, this is home.
We don’t have to wait, but we’re seated in the back room.
“I don’t like this. I don’t like this. I don’t like this one bit,” Mom says several dozen times. Her scarf is still covering her forehead and chin, making her look like a cross between a fat ninja and a wounded earless Easter bunny, but she’s uncovered her nose and mouth. To be more precise, she looks like a homeless person, like someone to pick up off the streets and lock up for her own protection. “This isn’t enjoyable for me,” she says. “Not in the least!”
“You’re doing this because you love me, and mothers and daughters who love each other go out to breakfast from time to time. In South Jersey, they go to the diner. That’s normal. Obama actually passed a law stating that mothers have to eat breakfast out at a restaurant with their daughters two times a month or else they will be fined a lot of money and people will come and straighten their houses for them. Congress is thinking about using the drones to enforce the law and—”
“Stop teasing! I hate this! How much is the fine? I’ll pay it. Just no drones!”
“Mom, I swear to God, if you complain one more time, I’ll clean out the house today.”
“No! No! No! No! No! No!” she shrieks loud enough to make people turn and look.
I’ve pushed her too far already.
Yes, I remember you, old friend, Mr. Guilt.
“Shhhh, Mom. Relax. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t—”
“Coffee?” a woman says.
“Please. For both of us,” I say, because my mother is looking at her lap and pretending to be invisible, which she does often in situations like this. I study our waitress’s face and red dye job and then say, “Hey, aren’t you Danielle Bass?”