Never Tell Our Business to Strangers by Jennifer Mascia

Author:Jennifer Mascia [Mascia, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-51907-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

THAT WINTER MY MOTHER and I took a trip to Florida to see Rita and Grandma Vivian. Arline joined us and refereed when my mother and Rita got into a huge fight over her drug use. Rita had a habit of leaving the house every few hours and my mother suspected she was smoking crack, and when she confronted her about it, Rita acted like a typical drug addict in denial.

Meanwhile, Grandma Vivian was still addicted to Bonanza, and I noticed she hadn’t lost her signature spunk. When I sparked a conversation with her about my mother’s teaching career, which ended at age forty-two when she married my father, Grandma griped, “She could have made more of her life. She could have been a principal.”

“Oy, Ma,” my mother snapped, and it was refreshing to see that my mother had issues with her mother, too. Grandma would die that October, on the day before my mother’s sixty-eighth birthday. She took it pretty well, but admitted, “Sometimes I still wish my mom was around to kiss my boo-boos, so to speak. I guess you never grow out of that.” I shuddered and hoped that wouldn’t be me.

The last two days of the trip I spent with Angie, just like I’d promised my father on his deathbed. I still hadn’t met two of her three children, and my failure to keep in touch made me feel awkward and slightly ashamed. A year before my father died my mother gave me Krissy’s and Joey’s wallet-sized school pictures with an admonishment: “You really should get to know your nieces and nephews, Jenny. You know how nice it is to have a good aunt.” She was talking about Rita, who had gifted me with diamond earrings and gold hoops and frequent visits. But it was hard to start a correspondence with my nieces and nephews when my father wasn’t communicating with their mother. After he died I finally had my entrée.

My mother drove me to Angie’s house in Royal Palm Beach, and we were late because we nearly got lost in the Everglades. When we finally turned onto her dusty road it was pitch-black outside, but Angie and Frank waited for us to start dinner. And there we sat around the dinner table, two sides of a shattered family: Nicole was sixteen and tall, somehow blessed with ample breasts but slender hips; Krissy was eleven, hyperactive and prone to fits of giggles, just as I’d been a decade earlier; and Joey was six, rambunctious and a human garbage disposal when it came to sour candy, just like me. “I’m not satisfied till my tongue is burning,” I told him.

“Me, too!” he chirped before turning his attention to his toy helicopter. As Angie and the kids cleared the table, tears sprang to my eyes; I couldn’t hold them back. “I can’t believe he missed all this,” I whispered in my mother’s ear.

“She okay?” Angie asked her. I could feel my mother nodding as she held me. Angie gently rubbed my back.

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