Taylor McKay Hathorn

Alone and Loitering

My mother dies when I am seventy. All of my friends’ mothers are long dead: Brenda’s mother died when we were in college, on a lonely stretch of Highway 80 at the wheel of a drunk driver; Helen’s mother died after a long battle with breast cancer when we were forty-seven.

My mother outlasted them all, beating a round of thyroid cancer when she was in her sixties and a terrible bout of the flu when she was nearly eighty. And now, with no clear cause other than the cause of being nearly one hundred, the charge nurse at the nursing home in Ohio tells me that I should come. I drive in the middle of the night, wearing glasses instead of contacts. My husband is seventy-five, only five years older than I am, but when you are old, one more year seems like a hundred, and so his back is too bad to make the trip.

Michael kisses me at the door, tears in his eyes that I must do this alone. My friends with dead mothers speak endlessly of waning desire, of how they haven’t screwed their husbands in ten years, and yet. And yet.

It’s the middle of the night, and my mother is dying, and Michael makes me promise to call him every hour, and I drive toward Cincinnati.

The last time I drove through the night was eleven years ago when my last grandchild was born. Michael was driving then, touching the brakes and my knee as we cruised down the mostly-empty interstate. He had squeezed my knee when we had arrived at the hospital, had whispered, Let’s go, Grams, calling me by my grandma name, both of us not knowing then that this was the last child who’d ever call us Grams and Pop.

It’s five am when I arrive, shift change, but a nurse has compassion on me, an old lady who’s driven all night long and whose mother is dying on the second floor.

“She’s still conscious,” the nurse tells me on the stairwell, but my mother hasn’t been conscious in any of the ways that counted in nearly ten years. She doesn’t have dementia, the doctors say, she’s just old. I don’t know what that means, just being old. For my mother, it was a softening, a falling away of ability and meaningful conversation. When I told her that my oldest grandchild had graduated from high school, she said that’s good but didn’t ask any of the follow-up questions that would have led to things that I wanted to tell her, like the fact that she was going to cooking school in New York and that her chef’s knife would cost two hundred dollars, a year’s rent in my parents’ first home.

When I come into the room, my mother looks over at me. I am not the oldest child and should not have been the one they called. That was Hannah, but she died two years ago, riddled with brain cancer that stole her speech and her control of her organs and eventually her life. Mother couldn’t go to the funeral, so I sat where she would have, at the end of the pew, my three younger siblings and their spouses like so many stairsteps all the way to the stained glass window.

“Agnes,” my mother says, and it’s the first time she’s said my name in a long time. On the phone and at our last visits, I was always dear, an endearment she had never given me in any of the years that counted.

“How are you feeling?” I ask, all I know to say. The topics have waned over the years: her health and the weather and how Michael is doing and where my girls are living and what my grandchildren are studying. A few words about the remaining siblings that make it sound like I talk to Sue, Evan, and Peter more than I do.

“I miss Hagan,” she says in response. My mother’s second husband died thirty years ago, felled by the sort of heart attack they call the widow-maker, and so it had been.

“I know you hated him,” she says, not looking at me, and I feel my throat tighten. My mother met Hagan when I was thirteen. My parents had been divorced for less than a year, and while my father drank whiskey sours that made him angry and then mournful, my mother went on dates. It felt inappropriate to watch my mother put on lipstick and nylons while all my friends’ mothers made pork roasts and sewed their homecoming dresses.

“But I loved him,” she says, and her eyes are bright in a way that belies the fog that has slowly enveloped her over the last decade.

I did hate him. I hated the diamond ring he gave her when I was fourteen, hated the way he moved in when I was fifteen, hated that he bought me a stupid string of pearls when I was eighteen. I hated him even more when my own father died, bloated and yellow, a year later.

I moved away after college and called my mother collect when I thought Hagan would be at work. I married a man just like my father and not at all like Hagan, and I hated him even more for that, hated that he had become some silent, perfect comparison when I had never given him permission to be anything at all.

When my husband broke my collarbone and four ribs, I called my mother because I had no one left to call and Hagan answered the phone. He drove five hours, paid my hospital bill in full, and left a note with the phone number for a divorce attorney. He never came in my room, and I hated him for that, too, and I thought about how much I hated him every time I took a breath and felt the stabbing pain of what loving the wrong man could do to you.

I met Michael ten years later, the only other single parent chaperone at the sixth grade dance, and when his daughter broke a heel and cried, he put her feet in his lap and broke the other heel to match. “See, flats,” he said, and I was reminded irresistibly of Hagan, of the string of pearls, of the divorce lawyer who mysteriously never sent a bill. I was reminded of kindness, I knew suddenly, and I found that the hate had burned away, left only a raw, glistening emptiness in its place.

Michael asked me to dinner for six months before I said yes. Saying no to Michael was a crawling penance, a terrible devotion. I had spurned and shunned the only kindness that I had ever known; who was I to recognize it now when it came to me, all these years later, and wordlessly pointed out to me how full of hate I had always been?

“Stop punishing yourself,” Michael said to me on the night I finally gave in, even though he didn’t know what the crime was, only that he was the consequence. The next morning, I wanted to call my mother and tell her that I was sorry, but I was too old to say it, and so I just began buying Hagan a gift every Christmas, always something so bland it could be overlooked, like pine-scented cologne or a silk tie or cuff links. I sent him a card on his birthday sometimes, but not every year, even though I always remembered.

At his funeral, I sat beside my mother and she did not look at me even once, and I wondered if she somehow thought my years of hate had weakened the valves of his heart.

“I didn’t hate him, Mother,” I manage finally, forcing the words around all the years I couldn’t say them and the way I have become an old woman who never learns.

She does not reply, and I look up at her, the silence so deep that the room echoes with lack. The rising sun is reflected in the darkness of her eyes.

Taylor McKay Hathorn is a Mississippian by birth and a Jacksonian by choice, and you can read more of her work at www.taylormckayhathorn.com