The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo

Author:Courtney Miller Santo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Mother and Child

Nobody ever spoke directly about the fight. For the rest of April, everyone made an effort with Deborah. The house was icy with politeness. She told herself that Erin was the only one who mattered. In a normal world, Bets and Anna would have already passed on, their funerals would have been well attended and their memories frozen by banality. Never speak ill of the dead. If that were only true, then this schism with her mother wouldn’t matter. Lots of women hated their mothers. She just didn’t want Erin to be one of them.

She tried to give advice. When Erin winced in discomfort, she said, “Make sure you’re sleeping on your side. It’ll help with the back pain during the day.”

Watching her daughter write out her birthing plan, Deborah shared with Erin her own birth story. Explaining that the women in their family had an easy time of it. “It goes quick for us, and none of the kids have gotten stuck. With you, they barely had time to give me the pain meds. It was just a few quick pushes, and there you were, a long, skinny baby, head not even a little deformed from the birth canal, and a little rosebud mouth.”

Silence.

“You mewed. It was sort of a joke with the nurses because your cry was so small and seemed to say ‘I hate to inconvenience anyone, but I’m hungry.’ ”

Erin looked at her through the bangs she was growing out. “I’m not doing meds. It’s bad for the baby.”

As they closed in on the baby’s due date, everyone began to tread a little lighter in the house. Ears listened for any sound that Erin was in labor. Deborah watched her daughter sleep in the afternoons on the worn couch in the living room. Sometimes, when she woke up, she seemed to forget the unhappiness between everyone and her face was full of joy.

“You know,” Deborah said one late afternoon in May when she came in from working at the Pit Stop, “I did all this planning and worrying about being pregnant and giving birth, but it never occurred to me to visualize what my life would be like when you were actually here. Maybe it is because I was so young.”

“It’s not just you,” Bets said. “Every woman I know makes that mistake with her first.”

“And then we vow to never do it again,” Anna said, the corners of her eyes crinkling.

Callie came through the front door, leaning heavily on her good leg. “Helluva day,” she said. They listened as she stomped through to the kitchen and ran the faucet. Deborah guessed she needed water to wash down the handful of pills she’d just swallowed.

Whatever playfulness had been in the room evaporated, and each of the women turned back to what had been occupying their interest. Deborah watched her daughter watch the singing competition and listened to her mother’s giggly voice as she spoke to that doctor in Pennsylvania.

The next visit with Ms. Holt did not go well.

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