Page 118 of Hero for the Holidays

And she hated her mother again. For never showing her. For never being there for her.

“I just want to be different,” she said.

“You will be.”

He meant than her mother when her father left. He didn’t understand. She also wanted to be different than herself.

Because she just didn’t feel adequate. She didn’t feel worthy. She couldn’t get to the bottom of why. And it made her want to scream. “Do people just feel like this? When they’re raising another person. When that person is their responsibility, they just feel like this all the time?”

“Only if they’re good parents. I’m pretty sure parents never thought this much about what we were feeling.”

And that was the sliver of hope she needed. In this small moment of hopelessness. Of weakness. This permission to be uncertain. And to see it as a strength. To see it as love. She put her hand on his face. “Thank you. That was what I needed to hear.”

He took her hand and moved her fingers to his lips. She was frozen with the desire for more. And she had the feeling, the sense, that maybe this was the door she was holding firmly closed. But she was too damned afraid to open it.

“Landry,” she said softly. “I need this.”

She meant this family. This living situation. This life. It was a plea. A desperate one. To not push her further than she could go, because she was afraid of what she might do.

“I understand.”

He dropped her hand. “You gonna be okay?”

“It’s so silly. I’ve really never been better. In so many ways. But this is challenging. And it’s...”

“Growing us up?”

“Yeah. I pretty much thought I was done. But there’s a lot of stuff we never really turned over.”

“We didn’t have to. Now we do.”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“Let Lila and I do the dishes. Why don’t you go... Well, you can sit out here. You could go visit your sister.”

“Thanks. I think... Yeah. I’ll sit out here for a bit.”

She sat there, on the front steps. And finally, she picked up her phone and called her mother.

“Hi, Mom,” she said.

“Finally,” her mom said. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you. Alaina told me that I needed to give you some space.”

“She was right. I needed space. Thank you for respecting that.”

“You can say what you need to say,” said her mom. “There’s nothing you can say to me that I haven’t said to myself already. I failed you, Fia. Pretty profoundly. And I’m aware of that. Finding out that you were pregnant back then... Well, it’s given me a lot to think about. That’s what I do here. I think.”

Fia chewed her thumbnail. “I was given to believe that what you did was take new lovers of an evening.”

That was a bit mean. But oh well.

“Sometimes that too. You know you can think and have lovers.”

It was so strange, to talk to her mom like this. Her mom who had joined a commune life, and who had clearly let go of needing to be attached one person and pour all of her feelings into that person.

Her mom, who had traded in the intense marriage that she’d had with their father for casual polyamory and breezy pansexuality.

“It’s important to be able to tell people that you wronged them. I wronged you. You girls needed something from me that I couldn’t give you. Not at the time. I had to go away and I had to get away from your father, and that was when I realized that I could feel different things. Prioritize things differently. That I could be a whole different person.”

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