Ah So!

It's been something like five years since cancer took my mother, and equally as long since I've had the stomach to visit with my family. It wasn't just mom that died; the whole family institution crumbled, like a downed power line, whipping about and hissing, electrocuting anyone who got too close.

But two weeks ago I made the trip, me and my family, to surprise my Grandma Rose on her 80th birthday, a woman who had to endure the loss of her daughter, a roll of snake eyes in the craps of life, an ordeal worse than any this cruel planet has to offer.

I called her yesterday to wish her happiness on her real birthday, even though we had celebrated it together two weeks early. As usual, she was screening her calls. The mechanical machine monotone greeted:

"Hello... please... leave... a... message... Beep!"

"Hi Grandma, it's Scott, just calling to..." Click.

"Scotty! Hold on! Let me get the other phone! Hold on!" She is hard of hearing, has been all her life, so she has a special phone that is never the one she answers.

"Hello, Grandma."

"Hi sweetie, how are you?"

"Good. I'm just calling to wish you a happy birthday."

"Oh, my real birthday celebration was two weeks ago."

My wife and I mixed into the midst of her adoring friends and family as my aunt escorted her into the restaurant where Grandma expected to meet with my uncle for a quiet dinner. I was holding my twenty month old son in my left arm. Grandma saw my wife first and put both hands over her mouth and her eyes glossed over, and she reached out for her to come. Looking over my wife's shoulder, she finally saw me holding the baby.

"You have such a precious family, Scotty," she told me on the phone. "When I kissed little Emmett it was like Laura was there kissing him too. When I touched his little head it was like it was Laura's hand, and I just know she is here, watching over you."

I tried to keep my voice steady, "I hope so Grandma."

***

"Aunt Sandie, why did mom leave dad."

She looked at me with a stone poker face, but her eyes belied her casual countenance.

"I don't really remember back that far," was all she could muster.

"It's ok. I'm forty years old now; even you have to admit I'm not a baby anymore."

"Well, there might have been some abuse involved, I really don't know. Something happened on their wedding night, but I wasn't involved. But they went though with it anyway."

"Was mom pregnant then?"

"Of course not."

***

My step-mother never remarried since she left my father. She is a devout Catholic of the fire and brimstone variety, whose faith remains strong in a church that refuses to recognize a divorcee as a member. Perhaps she is punishing herself.

By happenstance, after the divorce she moved three thousand miles across the country, within ten miles of my biological mother, and neither had any idea. Whenever George Strait sings All My Exes Live in Texas, my father changes the station. Sometimes I have to believe that there is an angel looking after me, perhaps my great granny Deal, who reminds me that someone up there cares with little gifts like this. When I went to Houston to visit my mom, I got to see my brother and sister too, and for that I am eternally grateful.

"Mom," as I still call her, with a wisp of wryness, "what did you ever see in dad?"

"Have you seen any of his early pictures?" She laughed. "He was quite a macho man."

It's true, I remember seeing an old faded color photo of dad wearing blue jeans and a tucked in tee shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled into his sleeve, and a camel hairy butt hanging carelessly from his lips. He was tall and dark haired, and his face was cool and confident, like an actor from the day when men were men, like a young Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood. His face was forbidding and yet a promise of great things to come.

"When did things go wrong between you?" I asked.

"Right around the time he started fucking my best friend from high school."

"Noooo!"

"Yes! Remember, we used to visit them on weekends when we lived in New York?"

"Yes I do."

"He would drive up there while he said he was away hunting or on business trips."

And it all snapped together for me. The day my father told me that I couldn't go on the fishing trip for lying to my step-mother, how even then I thought he was lying, that he had ulterior motive. I thought it was me.

***

A long time ago, my real mom and I were driving to see the Houston Oilers play the Cincinnati Bengals, on a typical oppressively heat soaked day.

"I wasn't a planned pregnancy, was I mom?"

She looked at me for a moment before answering. "No."

"How did dad take it? I can only imagine that he didn't want it."

"Not at first honey, but once he realized there was nothing he had to say about it, he was very happy."

I smiled wanly. My momma, such a sweet liar.