The Candle that Wouldn't go out

I was halfway through shellin’ peas when the phone rang again. I already knew it was him.
A mother knows the difference between an ordinary ring and a ring that comes loaded with trouble. I let it ring twice more anyway. Not because I wasn’t gonna answer. Lord knows I always answer. But because sometimes I need a second to brace myself before I hear that voice slippin’ around drunk on the other end of the line.

The peas sat in a chipped yellow bowl in my lap, Wheel of Fortune playin’ on the television though I wasn’t watchin’ a bit of it. Outside the kitchen window, the sun was settin’ behind the pine trees, throwin’ that orange summer light across the yard that always makes everything look softer than it really is.

By the fourth ring, I picked up. “What now?” I asked.

Silence first. Then breathin’. Then: “Mama.”

Just that one word and my whole body tensed. “You been drinkin’?”

A laugh. “You always ask me that.”

“Well, have you?”

More silence. I closed my eyes.

There are women my age travelin’ with friends right now. Women postin’ pictures from beaches in Florida holdin’ little drinks with umbrellas in ’em. Women my age got pickleball clubs and church trips and grandchildren sleepin’ over on weekends.

Me? I sit in this kitchen waitin’ on disaster.

“I don’t think I can do this no more,” he said quietly.

There it was. The line.

Not always the same words, but always the same meaning. I’m done. Nobody’d miss me anyway. Maybe everybody’d be better off.

Every version meant: Drop your life and come save mine.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and stared out the window at the old swing set rustin’ crooked near the edge of the yard. Lord, those children used to spend hours out there, all three of ’em barefoot and hollerin’, runnin’ through sprinklers while I stood at the stove fryin’ chicken with the windows open.

Back then I thought if I loved ’em hard enough, I could keep bad things from happenin’ to ’em. That’s the lie motherhood tells you.

“You at the apartment?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“You got your truck?”

“I shouldn’t be drivin’.”

“No shit.”

I heard him sniff hard on the other end.

Then softer: “I just don’t wanna be here no more, Mama.”

And every damn time he says it, somethin’ inside me drops straight through the floor. Because what are you supposed to do with that? People always got advice till it’s their child.

My daughters sure do.

“You’re enabling him,” the oldest says. “You gotta set boundaries,” the younger one tells me like she read it off a Facebook graphic.

Meanwhile neither one of ’em hardly speaks to me unless they need somethin’. One moved three states away and acts like I personally ruined her childhood because I worked too much. The other one keeps my grandbabies so scheduled up in sports and dance and God knows what else I gotta make an appointment just to hug ’em.

But my son? My son still needs me. Even if it’s killing me.

I looked down at my hands sittin’ in my lap: swollen knuckles, little cuts from years of work. Hands that raised babies alone while their daddy run around actin’ single.

Nobody came savin’ me. Not once.

“You eat anything today?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Course not.”

I pushed myself up slow from the kitchen chair, my knees complainin’ the whole way.

“Mama…”

“What.”

“I’m sorry.”

And Lord help me, that almost hurt worse than the threats. Because for one second I could hear the little boy underneath him, the towheaded child who used to crawl into bed beside me during thunderstorms smellin’ like shampoo and grass and summer sweat.

People think motherhood ends gradual. It don’t.

Sometimes it just stretches itself thinner and thinner till there ain’t enough left of you to recognize.

I reached for my purse hangin’ off the back of the chair. Outside, the last little bit of sunlight disappeared behind the trees.

“I’m comin’,” I said.