WANTED: Love of my Life

05. Unholy altruism

The rest of the school day went by far too quickly. No, I am not, I repeat, not crazy. It's just that at home, two things were waiting for me that tended to weigh heavily on my stomach: my elder sister and my mother's dinner. It wouldn't be so bad if at least I could devour the former and sit next to the latter instead of the other way around. But I doubted that would have gone over very well with my parents.

I had hardly closed the apartment door behind me, when I heard my mother's voice.

“Honey! You're home.”

Honey? I do not know why she calls me that, honestly, I don't. I doubt it is for my sweet-tempered nature. I turned around and saw my mom standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a horrible flowered apron around her waist, and holding my packed lunch at me accusingly.

“You left your lunch behind, honey.”

I tried to infuse my voice with as much sincere regret as I could muster. “Oh, I'm so sorry, mom. It won't happen again, I promise.” God, I'm such a liar.

Mollified, she gestured to bathroom. “Go clean yourself up. Dinner's almost ready. Your daddy and your big sister should be here any minute now.”

Desperately, I tried to think of an escape route. I could lock myself in the bathroom and pretend to be sick... But then, they'd just get something from the pharmacy which would taste even worse than my mother's attempts at cooking. I could always go into the bathroom and jump out of the window – or drown myself in the bathtub. But I decided that in spite of my mother's dinner looming before me, I wasn't quite that desperate. After all, I had the trip of a lifetime to look forward to: I was going to the local homeless shelter tomorrow. Yippee! I couldn't end my life just yet.

So I just went into the bathroom and did the things one usually does in bathrooms.

When I came out again, smells were wafting through the air which were considerably less appealing than those of Bert's hot dogs. I knew it was inevitable, so I slunk into the dining room and slumped down on my usual chair in the corner. My mother was furiously leafing through a cookbook to find out how long the lasagne she had in the oven was actually supposed to stay in the oven. You couldn't help but admire her efforts – even if they were completely stupid.

I probably would have understood her better if she actually liked cooking. But she didn't. In fact she hated it – she just thought it was part of her duties as a good, christian housewife. I just couldn't bring myself to tell her that she totally sucked.

“Where is it, where is it... ah, yes. Thirty minutes.” My mom took a look at her wristwatch. “Oh dear. Well, I suppose ten minutes more or less won't make that much of a difference.” She hurriedly opened the oven door and backed away, coughing.

“Air vent?” I suggested.

She nodded and fumbled for the switch. The vent turned on and soon we were rid of most of the smoke. A faint burned odor remained, however.

“Perhaps ten minutes make a bit of a difference,” my mother admitted. She pulled the lasagne out of the oven and regarded it critically. “Well, I can always cut off the burned parts.”

“You do that, mom. I'll just go and...”

“No. You stay right here. It's dinner time.”

“Yes, mom.” And if my day wasn't bad enough, at that moment, I heard the apartment door open and close and an ever-cheery voice call: “Mom, I'm home!”

Great. Just great.

Catherine strode into the room in a way that suggested she had invisible pom-poms permanently attached to her hands.