I Hit My Mother, Then Her Old Friends Came to My Door

The last normal thing I said to my mother was that Sloan and I should get dinner out.

I said it after I hit her.

She’d asked me not to smoke in the kitchen. I told her she was making a fuss. Then I slapped her hard enough to turn her head. I know what that sounds like. I’m not writing this to make it sound smaller.

I’m writing because I spent the next day trying to explain it away, and I want to say what I did before I find another excuse.

My mother, Loretta, was seventy-three. She’d been staying in the guest room at our house for six months. I was forty-nine. Sloan and I had been married eleven years, and most days I thought we were doing fine.

My mother had lived alone in a small apartment in Columbus. After she sold it, I offered her a room while she figured out where she wanted to go. I told her there was no rush. That was the part I liked repeating later.

The less comfortable part was that I expected her to be grateful in a way that suited me.

She gave us $800 a month for food and bills. I knew that was more than her share, but I let myself think of it as help with the house. I didn’t count the money carefully. I counted every time she asked me to move a box or fix a latch.

That’s not fair. I know.

My mother had worked three jobs when I was young. She took in people from church, neighbors, anyone who needed a meal or a few nights on a couch. When I was a kid, I thought that was just what a person did.

Once I got older, I started to see it differently. I saw people asking things of her. I saw her handing out what she didn’t have. I told myself I wouldn’t live that way.

Then I got a big house and a guest room, and I expected her to live by my rules without making me feel like the boy she’d spent years rescuing.

The kitchen had been a problem for weeks. Sloan smoked there, usually by the back door. My mother’s lungs were bad from years working around factory dust. She’d asked Sloan to go outside before, and Sloan did it sometimes.

I’d heard the request enough times that I was embarrassed by it. I acted like it was the tone that bothered me. It wasn’t. It was that my mother could still ask me to do something and I still felt sixteen.

That afternoon, Sloan had a cigarette lit while she was putting groceries away. I came in from work and found my mother standing by the counter, one hand on the back of a chair.

She asked Sloan if she could smoke outside. Her voice was tired, not loud. I should have let Sloan answer.

Instead, I told my mother she was making a fuss again. She looked at me and said her lungs couldn’t handle it. I remember the little blue bowl on the counter because I’d rinsed it that morning. I remember thinking I did a lot around the house, as if that mattered.

Then I hit her.

There was no fight before it. No shove. No threat. My hand moved, and her head turned.

Sloan didn’t say anything right away. The cigarette stayed between her fingers. My mother touched her cheek and stared at me like I’d done something she couldn’t fit into the rest of her life.

I said, “Maybe now you’ll stop talking.”

I could have said I was sorry right then. I didn’t. I asked Sloan if she wanted to go out for dinner.

I can hear how ugly that is. I heard it too, but I kept moving. I washed my hands. Sloan changed her shirt. We left the house about fifteen minutes later.

In the car, Sloan asked if my mother was going to be all right. I told her she was fine. Sloan said she didn’t think that was what she meant. I turned up the radio.

We went to a place we liked near the mall. I ordered a burger and barely ate it. Sloan talked about a work thing, and I nodded at the right spots. I told myself that if my mother didn’t bring it up, then it hadn’t become a whole thing.

That was how I got through most hard conversations. I waited for other people to decide they weren’t worth having.

I don’t know what my mother did while we were gone. Later, I learned she made three phone calls. At the time, all I knew was that her name didn’t show on my phone. I checked once in the parking lot and felt almost annoyed she hadn’t called.

When we got home, she was in the guest room with the door closed. I didn’t knock. Sloan did, but I heard no answer, and she didn’t try again.

The next morning, my mother was already in the kitchen when I came downstairs. There was a bruise on her cheek. It wasn’t huge, but I saw it right away.

I saw it and kept looking at my phone.

Sloan ate yogurt from a glass bowl. My mother poured coffee and sat at the table. Nobody brought up the night before. It was the kind of quiet I used to call peace.

At nine, the doorbell rang.

I asked my mother if she was expecting someone. She said yes.

That should have made me nervous. I wasn’t nervous yet. I was irritated. I thought she was making a point by bringing someone over without telling me.

When I opened the door, a man I didn’t know stood on the step with a folder tucked under his arm. Behind him were a woman about my age and a younger man in a work shirt.

The man at the front asked if Loretta was home. I said she was, then asked who he was.

He said his name was Ray and that he’d known my mother for years. He was a lawyer now. I recognized his name only after he said it twice. My mother had taken him in when he was a young man with nowhere safe to stay.

I started to close the door. Ray put his hand on the frame, not pushing, just holding it open.

He said, “We’re here for Loretta.”

My mother came up behind me. She didn’t ask me to move. She went around me and stepped onto the porch.

The woman was Patrice, a journalist whose mother my mother had cared for while Patrice finished school. The younger man was Neil, who’d eaten at my mother’s table all through college. He worked in financial investigations now.

I didn’t know any of that until later. I only knew they had come for her, and she had called them before I had time to talk her out of it.

I said they couldn’t just walk into our house. Ray said they weren’t there to walk into anything. They were there to help her pack and find a safe place to stay.

Sloan came to the doorway. She looked at my mother’s cheek, then at me. For once, she didn’t fill the silence.

My mother had her phone in one hand. She told Ray she was ready.

That was when I finally understood she wasn’t asking my permission. I reached for her arm. She took one step back.

Ray said, “Don’t touch her.”

I let my hand drop.

My mother went inside to collect her purse and a small bag. She’d already packed it. That detail bothered me more than I can explain. She’d made a plan while I was out eating dinner.

I wanted to ask her why she hadn’t talked to me first. I wanted to tell her it was one slap, one bad moment, like there was a number of times it became acceptable.

Instead, I said she was making this bigger than it needed to be.

She looked at me for a few seconds. Then she said she’d asked me not to smoke in the kitchen, and I’d hit her. There wasn’t much else to add.

She was right, which made me angrier.

Ray drove her to a friend’s apartment. Patrice went with them. Neil stayed long enough to take pictures of the bruise and the guest room, after my mother said it was all right. I wanted to tell him he had no right. I didn’t, because I knew he’d say he was documenting what happened for her, not for me.

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