Read Missing Mom for Free Online Page B

cook.”
    Mom had promised more ice cream for the table, to accompany the remains of the peach melba and the kringle, and it was my task to poke through the crowded freezer in search of another pint. I tried not to be distracted by the numerous snapshots held by tiny magnets to the refrigerator, mostly family pictures. There were layers of these going back to when Clare and I were teenagers. My smiling parents in summer clothes, looking startlingly young and happy. Clare and Rob on their wedding day, also young and happy. Clare with infant Foster in her arms, looking like an athlete who has won a prize. Blond Lilja at age eight, squinting at the camera with a beautiful shy smile. And there was almost-eighteen-year-old Nicole in high school graduation cap and gown, over-exposed white in a dazzle of sunshine: “Nikki” not yet spiky-haired, darkish blond and smiling wistfully at the camera (held by Dad) in the grassy backyard at 43 Deer Creek Drive.
    Strange, to see an old photo of yourself. All that was so crucial at that time (senior prom, boyfriend, sex) melted away now like last year’s snow.
    I’d located the ice cream, raspberry ripple. The carton was covered in a fine frost-film, icy-cold against my fingers.
    “…and Lilja, she scarcely touched her food. Oh Clare, I worry about her…”
    “Please don’t.”
    “But her wrists are so thin, little sparrow bones…”
    Between Lilja and her adoring grandma there’d been a special bond, it had seemed. But not recently.
    Lilja was a sensitive topic Clare refused to discuss with Mom, in fact with anyone. I avoided this subject as I’d have avoided a live wire. (I’d have taken my niece’s side, anyway. Rebelling against her so-efficient mother must have been delicious.) Mom knew better, but couldn’t help herself. Clare bustled about the kitchen in a way to make you think she was shoving Mom and me aside though she hadn’t so much as touched us. She grabbed the steaming teakettle off the stove, tossed two fresh bags of Almond Sunset herbal tea into the ceramic teapot, poured boiling water carelessly into the pot and slammed back into the dining room.
    Mom said, hurt, “Well, I do worry. You read about anorexia, it’s on TV all the time. It isn’t just Lilja is thin, she’s so edgy and, I don’t know, not-there when you try to talk to her. This little sweater I want to knit for her, in a light cotton yarn, she hasn’t picked out the style yet and her birthday is only two months away…” Mom’s voice trailed off wistfully.
    I could imagine Lilja’s polite interest in Grandma’s latest knitting project. I didn’t want to think how vulnerable Mom was to hurt.
    “Well, Mom. Lilja will be fourteen. She isn’t a little girl any longer.”
    “Oh, I know! Girls that age. I see them at the mall, and at the pool, they seem so self-sufficient, somehow. I smile at them and their eyes go right through me. When you were that age, Nikki…”
    “Was I more immature, Mom, than I am now?”
    Mom laughed, perplexed. Knowing this was a joke even if it wasn’t wholly logical.
    I loved to make Mom laugh. These last four years it seemed the best I could do for her.
    All this while Mom had been fussing with the coffee percolator which was made of glass that had become too stained for use with guests, coffee made in it had to be carefully poured into a gleaming silver pot to be carried into the dining room. And the ice cream, which I’d simply have passed around in its carton, naturally had to be scooped into a “nice” bowl to be presented with a silver serving spoon.
    Nice . That was the measure of Mom’s life.
    As if she’d been tracking my thoughts Mom said suddenly, in an anxious undertone, “And you, Nikki? How are you ?”
    “Terrific, Mom. As you can see.”
    I brushed at my spiky hair tufts with both hands.
    Mom was peering at me, smiling uncertainly. Her greeny-amber eyes appeared moist as if, in fact, she was trying very hard to see who stood before