I'd only slept five hours when I awoke on Sunday. Staring at my ceiling and tried to force myself to go back to sleep, but no matter how I breathed and tried, I couldn't drift off into sleep. After what felt like ages spent trying, I sighed and resigned myself to wakefulness. Rolling out of bed, I put on some slippers and checked the time. Six o'clock. Too early to be up, but I couldn't get back to sleep.
'Figures,' I thought. 'My one day off a week and I can't sleep.' I walked into the kitchen having decided if I was going to be conscious I needed to get some caffeine in me. I started up my coffee maker and waited for it to finish brewing. I wasn't much of a coffee fan, but I'd learned to love it after too many late nights and early starts. I just had to fill it with so much creamer and sugar that I couldn't taste the coffee itself.
As much as I hated waking up early, I did like these early hours. They were so still and peaceful. Once my mother awoke, things got chaotic. I loved my mother to pieces, but it was work taking care of her. Work, that I was ashamed to admit, I resented. I was a young girl. I didn't want all the responsibility that came with having a mentally incompetent mother and no father. I wanted to go out and have friends and significant others and make bad choices and regret things. That wasn’t an option for me, though. I couldn’t go have fun, I couldn’t do stupid things, I couldn’t be impulsive. And while most people praised my responsibility and said they wished they could be one tenth as mature as I was, all I really wanted was to be a nineteen year old girl.
It was less than an hour later when I heard the shuffling noise of slippers on the hardwood floors. I turned to see my mother standing in the entryway.
"Mornin' momma," I greeted.
"Hi," she said, sounding dead tired. "I'm hungry."
'And so it begins,' I thought. I sighed and put my cup down, hopping off the stool I had been seated on.
"What do you want to eat?" I asked.
She looked thoughtful for a moment. "Oatmeal."
"Easy enough.” I put on some water to boil and grabbed a couple instant oatmeal packets. Cinnamon apple for me and plain for my mother. I grimaced at the thought of plain oatmeal. It sounded horrid to eat, but plain oatmeal and dry toast was one of mom's favorite meals.
I went to go make her some toast to with it, but noticed we were out of bread. "We'll need to go shopping today," I said.
"Really?" mother's face lit up and I felt a pang of guilt at how excited she looked as I realized how little she'd left the house.
"Yeah," I said. "And maybe we can get some new clothes or hair cuts or something. Make an outing out of it. If you feel up to it."
"Oh, I feel very up to it!"
I grinned as I stirred the oatmeal packets into the water. It always made me happy to see mom this animated.
"Go ahead and take your medicine, then," I said from where I was standing.
"Sammy—"
"I'm not arguing this today, mom. If you don't take them you can't come."
"Fine," she said. I could hear the pout in her voice. I hated making her do something that made her so miserable.
"Sorry," I told her, trying to sound both sympathetic and firm at the same time. "But, you do need them. I know they make you miserable, but they're for your own good."
She didn't reply. My mother and I had this argument daily. I always won, of course. I wasn't going to let her hurt herself.
I grabbed the bowl of oatmeal and took it over to the kitchen table once it was done and sat down across from her with my own bowl in hand.
"So, " I said as I started picking at my food. "I was thinking we could head down to main street and stop by at the grocery store that's there—"
I saw her grimace when I said that. "Yeah, I know it's pretty gross there, but it's cheaper than the nicer places." Main street was right in the middle of the human sector. It was a pretty dangerous place to be and the stores there were sketchy at best. But, as I had told mother, it was cheap. And that's honestly all I could afford to care about. As appreciative as I was to have a job at all, waitressing didn't pay well. I'd have preferred something like a secretary or receptionist or salesman even, but with no experience and all my time spent taking care of my mom, I knew something like that wasn't a possibility.
As a child I'd dreamed of someday going to space. I remember learning about spacecrafts and people stepping foot on the moon, and I wanted to be one of those people so badly it hurt. In school I'd draw pictures of myself in protective space suits floating amongst the stars, but I quickly learned I could never be one of those people. I couldn't go to space or be a doctor or anything I'd dreamt of. I was a waitress. And after awhile I just forget about the dreams of someday being something more and accepted my lot in life. A broke waitress playing nurse to my mother.
I poked at my food, my appetite suddenly gone. Usually I hated wasting food, but right then I didn't care all that much. The thought of scooping another bite of the mush into my mouth sounded like hell. So, I got up and rinsed my bowl out, looking back at mother who was still happily eating. I grinned, pleased to see her eating so ravenously. With all the medications she was on daily, it was rare that she felt up to eating much at all.
It was enough to shake off all the thoughts of negativity and deferred dreams and make me remember just why I put up with all of this. I loved my mother more than anything and so when she was happy and healthy, I felt happiness that rivaled anything that I could feel on my own.
"I'm going to get dressed and ready to go. I'll just be in my room if you need anything, okay?"
Mother nodded, acknowledging that I had spoke but she had a distant look in her eyes, like she was elsewhere. I always wondered where she went during times like that. Somewhere happy I hope.
I threw on a pair of distressed jeans (distressed through being old and worn, not in a fashionable way) and my favorite purple t-shirt, before stepping into some tennis shoes and making my way to the bathroom. I avoided looking in the mirror, not wanting to see what a mess I was. My knew face was all broke out from stress, my hair was a mess that poked up in every direction, and I had massive bags under my eyes. I grabbed my brush and quickly ran it through my pixie-cut hair, grimacing at it's refusal to sit how I wanted it to before taking my make up and hiding my blemishes and throwing on a bit of mascara lip gloss. I examined myself in the mirror for a moment longer, before deciding I was done. I wasn't going anywhere fancy. No reason to get all done up.
'Now to get mother ready, I thought as I walked across the hall to pick out my mom's clothes.
Once I finally had mother dressed and ready to go, I no longer felt like going or doing anything besides falling into bed and passing out. But, we needed food and mother hadn't been out of the house in far too long. So, I grabbed my coat and my car keys and headed out of the door, holding my mom's hand all the while. I didn't like driving, but when I was with mother I drove. She couldn't walk all that far without getting tired and she was the main reason I even owned a car. Though, it was pretty shitty as far as cars go.
I unlocked the doors to my beat up, old beetle and helped my mom in, making sure turn childlock on (something I had starting doing after she opened the door in the middle of the highway) and buckled her in.
"It's choking me," she complained about the seatbelt which was certainly not choking her, but gently sitting across her chest.
"No, it's not," I told her, hopping into the driver's seat. I pressed down on the clutch and brake with my feet before turning the key in the ignition, sighing as it sputtered. 'Come on, come on,' I prayed, hoping it would turn over. With my car, I never knew. I counted myself lucky when it worked. And then, lo and behold, it purred to life.
"Thank you baby," I said, rubbing my hands over the dash. As much as I didn't like driving, I did love my baby.
My friends always made fun of her and said she was a piece of shit, too small, and I needed to upgrade to an automatic. I didn't want an automatic, though. I liked my stick-shift.
I took off down the street, driving very slowly to avoid pedestrians. There were an annoying amount of them in the human sector that just didn't understand how to not walk right in the middle of the street.
"For Christ' sake!" I yelled at one, though, I knew he couldn't hear me through the windshield and doors. "There's a sidewalk two feet to your left! Get out of the the damn road!"
"Calm down, sweetie," mother said. "And don't curse."
"I'll curse if I damn well please," I murmured, but made sure my voice was too muffled for mother to understand. Even though I had a tendency to curse like a sailor, I didn't want to disrespect my mother.
(Even if I was the one paying the bills in our household.)533Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCoett66ixW
