I told nobody, not even Callie, about my mother leaving.
The next Saturday, while my mother and I stood on the beach, by the lifeguard chair, she asked me again what I wanted to do and again I picked rollerblading. For a while we skated beside the blue ocean, its swells sparkling beneath the hot sun. We ate lunch at the Sidewalk Café, sitting on the boardwalk side so we could people-watch. My mother ordered a bean salad. I got the cheese burger.
“Aoife,” my mother said, after the waitress had set down the food. “I am sorry to have done this to ye but it was impossible for me to stay in that life anymore.”
I just looked at her.
She said that for a long time she had been thinking, little waves of thought lapping at the edges of her heart. Eventually those waves grew stronger, more insistent, impossible to ignore. Those little waves had changed her on the inside, changed her so that she couldn’t live the old life anymore, the old life as mother and wife. The dead life. She told me about Lord Krishna whispering, awakening her heart, opening her consciousness to the Love of God. Everything and everybody is awash in the Love of God, able to witness the Eternal Truth. She understood that now. She was learning to love the world and everything in it, she said, and she hoped that I would be there for her journey.
In a year, maybe more, she would have a new name.
I couldn’t eat my burger. I thought I was going to throw up. But still she went on talking about the breath of life.
When she had finished her salad, she said, “Let’s skate to Manhattan Beach, a good long skate,” and I followed her out of the café and onto the boardwalk, thinking, I don’t want to skate to Manhattan Beach, I don’t want to skate at all, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be with you, and before I knew it, instead of skating after my mother down the boardwalk, I was skating up a side street, toward Venice Boulevard and the homeward bus. What are you doing, what, I asked my legs, but they just kept skating, skating all the way to Venice Boulevard. After a couple of miles my thighs began to ache and I stopped and looked over my shoulder for the orange bus.
The bus came, but the driver, a lady with reddish dreads, took one look at my skates and said, “You ain’t.” I sat on the sidewalk and began unlacing. “I can’t wait,” she said, and the door hissed shut. By that time one skate was off and I stood, weighing it in my hand, and then, with everything I had, threw it as if I were passing the ball the length of the court to the tips of Callie’s fingers for her to deflect into the net, two points. The skate slammed into the bus window and a frightened look jumped onto an old lady’s face. A starburst began to spread in the center of the glass. The bus screeched to a halt. Meaning I had to run, and I did, down a side street, as fast as I could with one skate on. In a back alley, I took off the other and threw it in a trash bin and walked the rest of the way home in my stocking feet, figuring that now I was a criminal.
When we got home, my father was angry. She had already called. “Your mam is going to have to pay $168 for those skates.”
“I don’t care.”
“She doesn’t have $168.”
“She stopped going to Mass,” I said, but my father said nothing. “I don’t want to go there anymore.”
He shook his head but didn’t press and he took me to Dinah’s Fried Chicken. I had the regular chicken dinner and he had the jumbo, both of us ordering banana cream pie for dessert.
My only regret was for the purple-and-gold Converse I’d left behind.
Our next game in the tournament was the Sweet Sixteen. We were in a different landscape now, competing against bigger schools with a deeper bench, richer schools with remunerated coaches and a presumption of winning. Coach Jenkins asked us if we would let ourselves get intimidated. “They count on that,” he said. “Intimidating you. Our strength is here,” he said, and touched his head. “And here.” He tapped his heart.
Our opponent was Saint Paul the Apostle, a team from a seaside parish. That morning, my father and I took the plumbing truck to the game, finding Callie and her dad in the parking lot, transfixed by an ebony Maserati.