Pineapple Moon

Krystal Powers

 

One night when I was seventeen, my mother drank too many pineapple martinis and wound up in the ocean outside of our beach rental on Cape Cod.

“I was saying hello to the moon,” she said, coming into the cramped living area dripping wet. The wind whipped as she closed the glass slider.

My stepfather and Uncle Paul took a break from watching the game to laugh at her shenanigans.

“Your mother had too much to drink,” my dad said. He had been saying things like that to me a lot that summer, as if I were finally old enough to hear it.

“I love those pineapple martinis,” she laughed.

“They’re like boobs. One is too few, and three is too many,” my uncle said.

I smiled at my uncle’s joke and watched my mother fumble around the living room, looking for something. She found my uncle’s Parliament Lights, took one, and pressed it between her fingers.

“These are your Uncle Paul’s, not mine,” she said to me with a slur. “It’s a disgusting habit.” She sparked the lighter and stared into the flame. That sad ache I had seen in her all vacation melted away with her long inhale.

“Jan, can you not smoke?” my father asked in half-protest.

“Dad, who cares?” I said.

Uncle Paul got a kick out of that.

I stopped watching the Red Sox and looked out at my mother on the deck in her pink one-piece, a towel wrapped around her fanny like a skirt. Strings of smoke filtered up around her.

When she came in she scrubbed a starchy white towel through her shock of auburn hair.

“Sweetie, you should go to sleep,” she said. Squiggly red veins swam around her pale blue irises.

“Not tired,” I said with a shrug.

“Well, good night then,” she said, and folded the towel for some reason. She kissed my forehead. Her hair smelled of minty cigarette and coconut shampoo.

“Night, Jan,” said my father. “Try not to trip on your way to the bathroom.”

My mother laughed in that nervous way she had. Then she clenched her jaw and wiped away a tear. I didn’t think it was a laugh tear. I looked for a reaction from my father: none. My uncle: adoring smile, sip of beer, cheer at TV.

▱

The next morning I stared at her while she made breakfast for me and my two little cousins, Dan and Daryl.

“Why were you crying last night?” I asked.

My mom flinched slightly—imperceptible even to a cousin—and flipped the bacon.

Dan, five at the time, knocked over his orange juice and looked up with a guilty pout.

“Sorry,” he piped.

I sprang for the paper towels and caught the orange puddle before it reached the edge of the table.

“What do you mean?” my mother asked. Her eyes looked more concerned than angry.

“You were, though.”

“I had too much to drink, Amanda.”

“You never usually drink.”

“Well, vacation,” she said. “Adults can do that on vacation. Try to enjoy your last day here, honey.”

▱

On the way home the next morning I rode with my mom. My dad had driven home early for work.

“Mom, are you and Dad getting a divorce?” I asked. I called my stepfather Dad. He’d raised me since I was in kindergarten, and I had never known my real father.

She laughed. “Why would you say that, Amanda? Your father and I love each other.”

“I don’t know,” I answered, looking out the window at the scrubby pines and pink rugosa roses trying to grow on the side of Route 6A. I pinched my thigh the way I always did when I felt something in the air I couldn’t name: a lie, a secret, a judgment.

“You know honey, you’ll understand one day, when you have your own children. Sometimes it’s hard. That’s all.”

Anxiety swirled in my chest. I didn’t understand why it was so hard, or why she had seemed so distant since school got out. “It’s hard because of me?” I said, pinching harder.

As I listened for her answer, a bubble of tension started to form between us. This bubble both separated us and joined us—we could press against it or, if we tried, pop into it together.

“Also, men don’t understand,” she said, rolling down the driver’s-side window. She removed her sunglasses and ran her fingers through her red hair.

“Mom, are you sure you and Dad aren’t getting a divorce?”

“Yes! Christ, Amanda, you don’t have to worry about that.”

“Okay.”

My mother sighed and for a long time said nothing.

“Your father and I were going to have another baby. But we didn’t. I lost it,” she said finally.

“Oh,” I said blankly. “Sorry.” I pressed against that imaginary bubble and popped into it, wanting her, but she remained in the driver’s seat. “Did the baby die?” I asked.

“It never really took root,” my mother said, then pursed her lips together so tightly that I saw wrinkles bloom around her shimmery eye shadow. “I had a miscarriage.”

“Another one might take root, though,” I said, only half understanding what the word miscarriage meant. “Another baby.”

That’s when she put on her blinker and exited the highway at the Sagamore Bridge. She pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot. All I remember is that her face looked white, not its usual rosy—but once she started looking in her mirror and primping, the color came back.

“Do you want some chicken nuggets?” she asked.

She smiled and relief flooded through me.

“Sure,” I said.

We walked across the parking lot, and I remember thinking that summer always looked best on the way home from vacation. The sky held pink streaks, and the moon’s outline, almost like a shadow, was pale like a circle of tissue paper.

 

Krystal Powers in an English teacher at Newton North High School in Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in Black Fox Literary, Hippocampus Magazine, Spry Literary Journal, and Bustle.