Her Mother’s Secrets
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Copyright © 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
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Her Mother’s Secrets
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Violet had one year of pretty in her life — 1976 — and at the time she had been too concerned about her weight to notice. She remembered, vividly, obsessing about her fat thighs. She was so obsessed, in fact, that she never wore shorts or miniskirts, even though she weighed 115 pounds, and had, at that point, thighs six inches in diameter.
She discovered her year of pretty twenty-one years later when she was going through old photographs in her mother's house, preparing it for sale. Her mother had died of pneumonia two days before, and left Violet the task of dealing with everything, the estate, the house, and the daily phone calls from her mother’s friends, asking for a memorial service. Her mother had expressly asked for a conventional funeral, and Violet had had to explain that wish again and again.
The pictures were a revelation. She sat on the middle of her mother's floor, boxes strewn around the orange shag carpet, her grandmother's rocking chair a hand's reach from her side. The television was off, unusual for that time of day in that house, and she had changed the radio station from her mother's soft jazz station to the town's only oldies station. The music somehow added to the memories, made them jar against the images in front of her.
She remembered that time so well, feeling gangly and dumpy and flawed. She remembered using Noxzema at night and Stridex in the morning, remembered hours in front of the beveled mirror in the bathroom playing with her hair, remembered shunning makeup because she was too terrified she'd put it on wrong.
The photographs said she hadn't needed makeup. The girl that looked back at her was not the one she remembered. This girl was slender, with dark brown hair in a stylish cut, clear gray eyes and a skin that appeared flawless.
Not like she remembered.
None of it was as she remembered.
None of it at all.
***
The pretty had left her in 1977. Her boyfriend, Skeeter Jackson, had been holding a gun. It went off. The bullet hit Violet on the right side of her face, missing the brain — fortunately — but destroying the eye, and shattering the bones in her cheek. Reconstructive surgery had helped — she didn't have to wear a patch or anything — but it didn't hide the unnatural smoothness of her skin, or the immobility of the glass eye.
She had grown used to her face, but most people were startled by it. By, her husband once said, its appearance of normality far away, and its strangeness up close.
He had liked the strangeness, even at first. It was one of the things she loved about him. That, and his unusual calm. His great warmth. His strength and his protectiveness.
Her mother used to say, It's amazing what gifts tragedy brings us.
"What a pile of crap," Violet muttered, just as if her mother were still alive and listening. "What an absolute pile of crap."
***
She didn't want to show Tom the pictures, but she did within minutes of his arrival at the house. He was a big man, broad-shouldered with an athlete's build that belied his bookish nature. He carried brochures and papers from the auction houses and cleaning services in town, and set them, surreptitiously, on the kitchen table. Then he had tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, looked at her face for a moment, and pulled her close.
She wasn't going to show him, she resolved then. She didn't want him to know what he had missed.
But he wanted to know what disturbed her so, thinking it was her mother, assuming it was her mother, and Violet had said — no, yes, no. Ah hell, and pulled the pictures from the box.
They were different sizes — the school photo was large, and the rest were snapshots from various cameras, made at a time when that determined the size of the print. He gave each photo due consideration, studying it as if it were a window into another world. Then, when he finished, he gave each photo to her.
Her first prom, when she stood beside Skeeter, her robin’s egg blue dress revealing a trim delicate form that matched her delicate features. A laughing girl, sitting in a tree, the delicacy buried in bell bottom jeans, sweatshirt jacket, and wide crinkly smile. The same girl, same tree, different jeans, different mood, brow furrowed as she concentrated on a book.
With each photo, her hand shook. Tom’s familiar face, with its sun-wrinkles and age-softened skin, seemed unfamiliar as he looked through the pile. Then he stopped at her graduation photo, taken only weeks before the shooting.
Her auburn hair was in a pageboy without bangs, the ends turned under her ears. She wore no make up — she didn’t need any, not with her naturally rosy cheeks, her pink bow-shaped mouth, and her perfect skin. The green dress with its soft collar made her wide eyes look green as well.
Beautiful. She had been beautiful, not pretty. Tom would finally get to see what he had lost.
He wrapped an arm around her as if he had heard the thought. Then he set the photo down, and pulled her close, kissing the top of her head. He put a finger beneath her chin, lifted her face to his and pressed his lips against the smooth skin near the glass eye, the place where she had no feeling at all.
Yet she felt that kiss through every inch of her body, all the way to her soul.
***
The funeral home was two blocks from her mother’s house. Violet walked to the visitation, enjoying the warm summer twilight, the faint hint of roses in the air. Her mother had liked winter, and had said just before she died that she was sorry to miss another one. But Violet liked summer, with its heat and its flowers and its greenery. They had differed on so many things, but Violet knew that she would miss those differences for the rest of her life.
She had spent most of the afternoon, finishing preparations for the visitation: viewing the body, making certain that her mother looked as normal as possible — whatever that meant — setting up the guest book, and making sure the flowers were arranged properly. The funeral home had been built in the 1960s and still reflected its origins. None of the decorations looked proper against the blue wall paper and the blond wood.
Not that her mother would have cared. Her mother always understood the importance of making do. She had been a single mother long before such a thing was fashionable, working two jobs and trying to raise a daughter in a somewhat normal environment. Violet had hated it all, her mother’s haste, the slap-dash meals, the hard-fought home. More often than not, her mother dropped her at school while still wearing her robe and curlers. Violet always asked to be let out a block away so that no one saw.
Someday you’re going to regret always thinking about how things look, Violet Marie, her mother had said a week before the shooting. Two months after, she had apologized, as if the injuries were her fault.
Even though Violet was early, there were still half a dozen cars in the funeral home parking lot. Her mother had been well known and well liked in this small Wisconsin town near the Minnesota border. She had been the first woman CPA, the first woman to head an accounting firm, the first woman president of the Chamber of Commerce. The last illness had happened not because her mother was elderly, but because she hadn’t been paying attention to her health. She had been too busy on a new project — helping the church buy a building big enough to house the town’s first homeless shelter.
At least Tom was at the funeral home. He had brought his suit coat with him, so that he wouldn’t have to go to the house and change. He had thought people would arrive early, and they had.
He had been a saint through all of this, something she wouldn’t have expected. He had once told her that he hated funerals, hated the ritualized grief. Then his father had died, and he had learned why the rituals existed. Tom thought of things she wouldn’t have considered, because he had experienced a parent’s death already.