North & West

Four

It might've been coincidence that brought our mothers together.

Or maybe it was something like witchcraft and a whole lot more irony than was of the norm.

My mother came home that day, gushing on about a woman that she'd met at her yoga class. Just the thought of my mother doing yoga with a bunch of other middle aged women made me uncomfortable. She'd come home and told me that the woman's name was Melissa Monroe, and I'd just about stomped away from her when she told me that she was inviting her for dinner.

So when the dark haired woman walked into our house just after five in the afternoon, a bright smile on her face and a cloth basket of bread rolls in her hand, I decided that she couldn't be too bad. Maybe this time, my mother wouldn't bring up the topic of my future. Or me at all, preferably.

She always seemed to enjoy bringing me up in conversation each time she had dinner with another human being. I understood that she cared, but just about each time she opened her mouth, I longed to grab all twenty of the cigarettes from one of the packs hidden in my room and light each one, letting their smoke drift up around me and swallow me whole.

Fifteen minutes after – yes, I was watching the clock and counting the minutes as they passed by – Krissy walked in, and the relation clicked inside of my head and I just about had an epiphany. This was West's family, his mother and his sister, sitting at my long kitchen table with plates of my mother's spaghetti in front of them.

But West was absent from the family, and that made me wonder where he was. I'd just learned his last name, and I almost wanted to leave the table to find him and ask all the questions that I could think of. His mother seemed nice enough, although there was an air about her that made me wonder what had happened to her.

At one point in the conversation, my mother mentioned my father and his business trips, and I could have sworn that her eyes turned sad for a second, and then the light seemed to bounce off of them and then the look was gone before I could process it.

It only took fifteen more minutes for my mother to piss me off enough to leave the kitchen table and inevitably leave the house altogether.

“My daughter's been struggling with a bit of a problem lately, but she's been getting better. I'm so proud of her and her efforts.” She said, reaching a hand over to me.

Before I could rationalize why I was mad or why her sentence had set me off, I shoved my chair back and walked from the table, grabbing a clear lighter from the basket beside the candles where my mother kept it for emergencies.

“North! Where are you going?” She called after me, but I continued to walk away from her, ignoring each question she shot my way, her words increasing in volume and her tone becoming angrier with each syllable that left her mouth.

I grabbed my pack of cigarettes from my room and then I left the house, slamming the door behind me. I would've felt bad for leaving like that, leaving West's family – of all people, really – with my mother and her irritating words, but I couldn't find it in me to care enough about that.

I knew my anger was irrational, but I couldn't help it. My anger was bubbling in my stomach and working its way up my throat, causing me to wonder if I'd let out a scream that would explain all of my feelings if I just opened my mouth.

I pulled out one of the cigarettes from my pack, lighting the tip and pressing it between my lips. For something so ready to kill and take another life, it sure left me feeling more calm than anything else did. Not even the booze I often consumed could make me feel quite like the nicotine in the little white cigarette. Nothing I could think of had ever compared to the way the smoke wrapped around my face after escaping my mouth, the smoky tendrils seeming to linger just long enough to drag the anger and stress from my body.