There were days my parents took turns to be at home. Generally, my mother would take this job more often since my father was the chef and a bit of a control freak of his kitchen. I was a lot like him in various aspects of my life.
That night my mother had arrived early, and when I decided to step out of my room, where I was allegedly too busy working on a paper for school and certainly not moping around, Van Gogh meowed at me. I ignored him as I had been doing lately, but he followed me to the kitchen hoping to be fed a treat. He was too cute to deny him something.
As I entered the kitchen I saw a small container with a note attached to it.
“Your father sent it.”
I looked behind me to find my mother standing there in her working clothes. She was the manager of our small bistro, but her outfit suggested she worked in a big corporation which I guessed she would have been doing if she had not met and married my father back when she was twenty two. She was studying to become some sort of big-shot economist, and instead she met this boy who served her coffee at two in the morning when she was studying for finals. A boy who liked to cook and was the low-life son of a high-achiever psychologist and a strict pediatrician, and yet they had instilled in him a love for food.
It was tiramisu. My favorite, which he usually made for me when we were celebrating. Or when I was depressed.
The first thought that came to mind was Miss Davenport calling my mother about Mason and telling her everything that had happened. Otherwise, how?
“We might not be home as much as we would like to, but that doesn’t mean we don’t notice things.” She walked closer to me and her gaze softened. I took a step back because I was tired of getting those pitiful looks. I had been getting them all week. “Honey.”
“He cheated on me, okay?” I spat angrily. “He fucked things up because he couldn’t keep it in his pants.” I really did not know if something more had happened between Mason and this Tania girl, but as time went by I started to make up stories and possible outcomes of what had happened. I was stupid enough to believe one of those would be Mason pushing her away and coming to me one day to beg for forgiveness, but… well.
My mother didn’t say anything about cursing around her. My father would have been giving me the reproachful look, because he was old-school like that for some things. My mom believed in equality, to which my father would say that if equality meant that women were to be just like men, God wouldn’t have made women so much prettier and smarter and he would have married a guy since they would get along much better. It was all a joke, obviously.
She handed me a spoon and motioned for me to take a seat and eat my dessert. She sat across the table and looked at me while she petted Van Gogh, who had already jumped into her lap.
“How are you feeling?”
I shot her a look because I had been answering that type of questions hundreds of times already and I hated it. She chuckled.
“Right. Sorry. Awful start.”
I suddenly thought that maybe Jack had opened his mouth about Mason, because much like mom, he never knew the right thing to say.
Dad would have looked at me and tell me Mason was an idiot for not seeing what he was losing, that if he was that kind of boy, then I was better off without him. That it would hurt but I would find someone better. All those clichés belonged to him as a father. And then he would ask me if I wanted to play videogames with him or maybe cook some old recipe his mom had taught him.
My mom sighed and shook her head.
“I don’t know what you need me to say, hon.”
And that right there was the truth I needed. I had no idea what I needed to hear either. There was no chance that all breakups could be the same. There was no recipe for a broken heart and no instructions manual, because if that was available, my heart was defective because it did not come with one. And there was no receipt to return it.
Taking a spoonful of tiramisu, I shrugged.
“He doesn’t want to talk about it.” And I proceeded to give a summary of the worst time in my life, leaving out most of the details that could humiliate me even more, assuming parents disliked hearing about their children being ridiculed.
As I spoke, Mom made herself a cup of coffee. I knew she was listening by the way she frowned and made little questions about how, when and why. I had little answers for all of those, either because I did not want to tell her everything or because I did not know myself.
When I finished, she kept quiet for a moment, sipping her black coffee, no sugar or cream.
I kept slowly eating my tiramisu, hoping the treat would sweeten a bit my awful moment.
“Josie,” she whispered before taking a deep breath and straightening her back.
She was one of the two people who called me like that. Jack used to do it, but that was back when we shared everything and he enjoyed spending time with me. Apparently we were adorable when little.
The seriousness in my mom’s face sort of scared me. For a moment I was afraid she would tell me she knew Mason had been cheating on me all along because she had seen him with someone else. But then I thought it was impossible considering how fast the gossip traveled around school.
“I always thought there would be a time I would tell you about this, but I hoped you’d be much older.” She reached for one of my hands and held it in hers, smiling sympathetically at me. “You have heard more than enough times how your father and I met, how we fell in love.”
I nodded. It made no sense, but remembering that and her saying it, it felt like she was rubbing her perfect love story in my nose. Most of my friends’ parents were not that young, since they had worked in their careers before starting a family. And yet, my parents were rounding forty and sometimes joked about having another child, which of course was ridiculous.
“What you don’t know is that our story, as any other, was not perfect or easy. Perhaps it was a mistake to always present it to you like that, but it was romanticized over time.”
“Mom?”
“We met when I was twenty-one and in a short period of time, we fell in love. It was fast and frightening. I had never felt so strongly about any other boy before.”
If she started to tell me stories about her previous boyfriends, I was going to scram.
“I was scared and your father was so sure about us. He made plans for us and the future and I thought I had not even finished college. I was barely old enough to order a beer and most of my friends spent their weekends partying and having fun while your dad invited me to his apartment and cooked for me.”
“You didn’t like him?”
“No!” She smiled at me all sad and it was strange. She was not very sappy and I had not seen her like this many times before. “I adored him.”
“I don’t get where this is going.”
“You know your father. He’s a family man that enjoys cooking, a glass of wine and books. He does crosswords, for god’s sake!” She snorted a laugh. “He has always been like that. And back then he was too mature for his age. For mine.”
When I realized what she was about to tell me, I sat back and pull my hand away from her grasp.
“I thought I wasn’t ready for something so serious, and I asked him for time. I had met another boy-“
“Mom!” I yelled and stood up, shocked with her confession. “How could you say this? What about dad?”
“Let me finish, please.” She took a shuddering breath and looked at me directly in the eye as she continued. “This other boy was what I thought I wanted. Just fun. Simple. East. And I tried to convince myself that I was okay. But I wasn’t. And I thought it was too late because I had hurt your dad, I had ruined a beautiful thing. And then one day I swallowed my pride and asked your father to forgive me, because I was and always would be madly in love with him. His heart was big enough to do so, and he asked me to marry him only three months later.”
“So you are saying I should forgive Mason because Dad forgave you?”
“No, honey. I’m not saying that. What I mean is that when it’s true love, everything is possible.”
“But you cheated on someone you claimed you loved! How can that be right?”
“It’s not! And I know that. I will forever regret it, but I was young and inexperienced. I was afraid of how intense my feelings for him were.” She wiped away some stubborn tears that clung to her eyelashes and I decided to sit down again. “I thought it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.”
I could tell this was hard for her, and somehow I imagined she thought about this every day. The way she sounded was like she was grateful for having Dad in her life when she could have lost him out of sheer stupidity.
“And I don’t say Mason is your true love, but when that comes, it will be scary, imperfect and intense, but also wonderful.”
“But what if it doesn’t work out like you and Dad? What if I lose it over a little mistake?”
She took my hands in hers and then reached out to tuck my hair behind my ear and cup my face with one hand.
“There are no little mistakes in true love. You walk through them because little is insignificant when something so big and powerful is at stake.”