Page 3 of Here & There

Mom swats at a bug that’s flying in front of her face. “Bryony, really. Was coming all the way over here really necessary?”

“Brunch reservations in the city would have been a lot simpler,” Dad says, almost angrily.

They look like they’re doing me a huge favor by being here.

My shoulders threaten to sink.

Richard’s still on his phone.

It’s okay. I haven’t explained yet, and they haven’t seen the inside.

I fortify my voice with a brightness that came easy a moment ago. “Well, Mom, there’s a reason we’re here.”

“I certainly hope so,” Dad mutters.

While there was a time I was close to Mom, I’ve never been close to my dad. He was hardly home when I was a kid. Not even when…well, not even when we needed him the most. After what happened with Jessica, Mom kind of…folded in on herself, almost like it wasn’t possible for her to love me like she used to.

But I know she’s in there. Somewhere.

I focus on Mom, clearing my throat.

Here goes nothing.

“Mom, when I was little, you used to tell me and…”

I swallow as Mom blanches. Shit, I messed it up already. I clear my throat again. I don’t get nervous making presentations at corporate events. But my own parents? I lose it.

“Well, uh, when I was little, you once told us about the very first birthday of yours you remember. It was on a farm somewhere around here.” I gesture to the pastiche of sea and mountains behind them where Mom grew up.

My heart pounds.

Mom’s eyes widen.

“It was your sixth birthday, remember? You told us you saw a llama for the first time and you thought it was a camel.” It was one of the very few times I remember my mom laughing about something from her childhood.

Mom’s expression has turned unreadable.

My mother is famously secretive about her past, but when she used to talk about it, before Jessica, I remember vague mentions of the towns on this stretch of rugged coast north of Vancouver, places like Swan River and Redbeard Cove.

And the camels. Always the camels and that birthday.

“Well,” I say, nerves making my voice shake. “Last Christmas, when you were getting ready to downsize and you gave me that box of your mom’s things, you brought up your mom again. And that birthday.”

Mom’s lips purse, but nothing else.

Okay, so she’d been a bottle deep into her Pinot Grigio when she brought out that box. But I saw her face. For the first time in years, it was soft. So I’ve gone out on a limb here by bringing up her childhood. A big limb, since she never, ever talks about it. Ever.

“Well, I thought for your sixtieth, I’d try to recreate that for you. Get it? Sixth? Sixtieth?”

No reaction.

“Okay,” I say to myself. Too late to turn back now.

I turn around and push open the doors to the hall.

Inside, the room is decorated to the nines. Streamers and balloons. Bob Dylan, which she once said her mom liked. An assortment of items from Mom’s favorite restaurant in the city, and her favorite Sauvignon Blanc, which I’ve had on ice in the cooler.

“Ta-da!” I say.

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