Page 78 of Santa Has a Six-Pack
“I’m sorry, Matt. That sounds so hard.”
“It’s no walk in the park, I’ll tell ya that.” I chuckle and walk my tea across the room. I set it on my bedside table, then get settled on my bed, my back against the headboard.
“For what it’s worth, your mom seems really sweet,” Penny says. “I liked her.”
“Um…”
I should have just said, “Yup, she is,” or “Yeah, my mom’s a great lady, and she always has been.”
But those things wouldn’t be true.
“Did I say something wrong?” she says softly.
“No, not wrong. My mom is generally very sweet. Now.”
Penny stays quiet on her side of the phone, like she’s giving me the space to say more if I want to.
“I know it’s probably surprising given how lovely she was tonight, but growing up, my mother was—” I struggle to find the words to describe how she used to be. I settle on, “She was really hard.”
“Hard?” Penny asks softly.
“Tough,” I correct myself. “On me. I mean, some of that wasn’t entirely her fault. I was a handful. Especially after my father died.”
“You? A handful? I don’t believe it.” She jokes.
“Believe it, baby.”
Shit. I called her baby. I gotta watch that.
I keep talking, hoping she doesn’t register that slip of the tongue. “The hardest part wasn’t her toughness, though. It was her lies that I couldn’t take.” I pause. “She lied. A lot.”
“What do you mean?”
I sigh.
How do I explain something I don’t fully understand myself?
“What would she lie about?” Penny asks when I don’t answer right away.
“Everything. Nothing,” I say. “Sometimes it was little things like what she did that day. She’d make up these fantastical stories. For no reason at all, it seemed. But… there were big things too.”
“Like what?” she gently presses.
“Like how much money we had in the bank when we were talking to financial aid officers. Where she was when she left me home alone for days at a time.” Pause. “How my father died.”
“Oh my god,” she breathes.
“Yeah. Slowly but surely, I realized she wasn’t telling me the truth about things growing up. So it became hard to know what was up and what was down, you know?”
“I can imagine. I’m sorry, Matt.”
“It’s okay. Between my occasional therapy sessions and my daily ‘Seven Minutes in Heaven,’ I find ways to work through it all.”
“Right. You mentioned your ‘Seven Minutes in Heaven’ thing the first time I came to the gym. What, um, what did you mean by that?” she asks skeptically.
“Not at all what you’re thinking.” I chuckle. “The loft is filled with brand-new pillows that got left behind by the previous tenants. I go up there every day and lie on the pillows to clear my head, meditate… that sort of thing. It feels like my own little fluffy cloud-pillow heaven. Gene and I have talked about renovating the space to create another revenue stream for the gym, but I dunno. I don’t think I’m ready to let it go.” I clear my throat. “Anyway, no reason for you to feel sorry for me. I turned out okay.”
“You sure did,” she says. “And I don’t feel sorry for you. Despite all you went through, I was just thinking it’s amazing what an openhearted person you are. You could have easily turned into someone who doesn’t trust anyone. But from everything I’ve seen of you… you didn’t.”
