Hush by Kate Maxwell

Author:Kate Maxwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2022-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

Thirty-four

Mum shuffled through arrivals, pulling a suitcase with a red-and-green strap buckled around it, carrying the cracked grey handbag she had had since I was at school.

‘She looks so old,’ I whispered. It had happened, the shift people talked about, when you became responsible for your parents. I wasn’t ready for it. It was all right when you were old too, when you were fifty, as Jess was, but it didn’t seem fair when you hadn’t hit forty.

We waved and shouted, ‘Mum! Over here!’ and I wondered but did not ask, When was the last time you saw her, Jess? When was the last time you saw your mother? They wrote to each other, Jess told me, they spoke on the phone, but she never went back to England; it must have been years.

‘Are you going to introduce her to Sam?’ Jess asked, and I shook my head.

‘Definitely not,’ I said, ‘it’s far too new.’

Soon, we were speeding over Brooklyn Bridge and Mum had wound down her window and she was running her fingers through her white crop. She’d had it cut six months earlier: ‘So much easier like this, I didn’t even have to pack a hairdryer.’ At that moment, her mouth open in wonder, she looked like a child. ‘Oh, girls, I don’t know whether to talk or to look out of the window or both. This is so thrilling!’

The best times of the week were the quiet times, when we were all together in the apartment, when, apart from the view, we could have been anywhere. I regretted all the dinner reservations I’d made; it was stupid of me when Mum was exhausted by four o’clock, when she wasn’t impressed by the provenance of the chicken or the maritime décor. When she was constantly shocked by the menu prices – ‘Twenty-five dollars for a cheese-and-ham pancake?’

Then there was the noise. I’d researched the restaurants’ acoustics, but now I realised that they were not the problem, it was the people, who did not possess what Mum called ‘indoor voices’. When I listened to them as she asked, ‘What’s branzino? What’s brisket?’ I realised that they were not talking about the mid-terms or the new museum on the Westside; they were all shouting, bellowing, barking, all of them, about themselves. Was that what I did? Was that what I did with my friends?

Three days in, I cancelled the remaining reservations and took her to breakfast at the diner at the end of my street. I had never been there before – why would I have? There was no chalkboard menu, the patrons were not in athleisurewear. Mum ordered silver dollar pancakes with bacon and maple syrup and I had corned beef hash and bottomless coffee (‘Why don’t they do bottomless tea?’). As she slouched comfortably in her orange chair, she said the diner reminded her of the movies, and when she snatched the bill from my hand and delved in her bag for her dollars, I didn’t stop her.

That

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