That was two years ago, when I was a freshman. We were all sorry when the Salazars split up, Dad most of all. Bennie Salazar moved to Manhattan, and now we only see him when he picks up or drops off their son, Christopher, who’s a year older than Molly. Bennie Salazar waves to us from the window of his sports car. “What a loss,” Dad always says.
After Mom and I finish cleaning up, I stay downstairs with Dad, studying for my AP finals, while Mom goes upstairs to help Brian and Molly with the many things they need help with. Brian’s cup underwear is uncomfortable and he has a baseball game tomorrow, so Mom drives to the Modell’s four towns over that’s open late to pick up new cup underwear one size bigger, and afterward she helps Brian with his math （Mom is freakishly good at math）。 Later I hear Molly crying to Mom about her friend sagas, which are never-ending. I stopped bringing my problems to Mom a few years ago, as she predicted I would. “I can only help you until high school, Hannah, maybe not even, and after that you’ll be on your own,” she used to say over my objections and denials. But she was right: By high school, I saw Mom differently. Now it’s Dad I turn to.
When I was little, I had a fear of dying in my sleep. Mom never said, “That’s silly. You’re going to live forever, sweetheart, and so am I, and so is our whole family and everyone we love.” Instead, she got out her stethoscope, hospital-grade thermometer, and blood pressure cuff and took my vital signs.
“Normal,” she said. “You won’t die tonight.”
According to Mom, you have to be careful or the forces of doom will line up against you. Things are more connected than they seem. The world is cruel and irrational, the strong thrive at the expense of the weak, and happy endings are purely a matter of framing. She emphasized this last point at the end of every fairy tale she read to us:
“We’ll see if the prince still loves her when she’s middle-aged and has stretch marks, or whether he trades her in for a newer model.”
“Yes, the prince inherits his rightful kingdom—until an enemy prince invades it and slaughters them all.”
“？‘Happily ever after’ so long as the hundreds of serfs toiling in the fields and scores of servants that make a castle habitable keep slogging away.”
“In the real world, there’s only one ending, and it isn’t happy,” Mom has been telling us for as long as I can remember. And when these dire pronouncements made us cry, she would gather us into her arms and murmur, “My beloved children, things are interwoven in ways we don’t understand. There are conspiracies. There are plots. I am your mother. You come from my womb. And I will kill anyone I have to kill to protect you.”
Nowadays I find it painful to have a mom who’s widely perceived as unhinged—a mom my friends laugh at. But when I was young and she was all I knew, I lived inside a force field that shielded me from every danger without concealing it. She made me strong.
Sometimes I think that Mom is like a character from a fairy tale: engrossing until I outgrew that kind of story. Now I want to read other things.
* * *
The next night, while Brian and Molly are at the dinner table, Mom says, “He doesn’t like me.”
“No one likes you,” Dad says with that little half-smile that’s Dad’s version of a grin. “Except us.”
“We love you,” Molly says.
In the world of moms, ours is solitary. She’s not invited to moms’ meetings or moms’ parties, not included in moms’ book clubs or wine tastings or sample sales or theater trips or spa weekends or even moms’ round-robins, although she was once a competitive junior tennis player.
“He’s a convicted felon,” she says.
“Let’s not go there,” Dad says. “He’s a normal person who went off the rails. You of all people should understand that.”