“Oh, you poor thing, come here,” Jeanie said, coming over and putting her arms around me. It was an awkward sideways hug, and she wasn’t having it. She pulled my chair closer and put her arms fully around me, then drew back to look at my face and wipe away the tears with her thumbs. But there were too many. She held me close again, and I let myself fall into her arms, found a spot that fit perfectly, me inside my mother’s embrace, my damp face in the crook of her neck.
“I’m sorry,” I said, through a clogged nose and into her hair, which I was making wet.
“It’s okay,” she said, and held me tighter to prove that she didn’t mind that a stranger was crying all over her, getting snot on her top.
After a while she pulled away, keeping a reassuring grip on my shoulders. “Is this about your mother?” she said.
I nodded.
“Shall we stop talking about this?” she asked, almost a whisper.
“No,” I said, my voice rough at the edges. “I want to know what the second important thing with parents is.”
My mother returned to her seat and held my hand across the table.
“After love, the second thing that matters is just being with them. Time. Simple. Love, then time.”
“Some people can’t do that, don’t get the chance for time with their parents,” I said, sniffing wetly.
“I know,” she said, “I didn’t. And I don’t know for sure that my parents loved me. I assume they did, but not really knowing hurts me.”
“Time and love,” I said.
“Yes, but not in that order. Love first, then time. There’s no point in spending time together if the love isn’t there. If you only have one of those things, love is the king. And that’s it, that’s all it really comes down to, the rest is all consequences of love and time, like protection and security and all that stuff. It’s all important, but it’s offshoots.”
“You said there were three things.”
She batted the imaginary fly again. “Oh, that,” she said. “Well, the third thing is getting to know your parents as people.”
“You said that was a waste of time.”
“I know, but the compulsion to do it is so strong, you really can’t ignore it.”
“That’s a conundrum,” I said, and we both laughed.
“You can only know your parents as parents, you can’t know them as anything else. There’s like a barrier to knowing your parents beyond that role.”
“What about if you know they’re your parent, but they don’t know it?”
She frowned and puffed her cheeks out, seeming to think about it, then exhaled. “In what world?”
“Just hypothetically,” I said. “Let’s say you meet your mum and you know she’s your mum, but she doesn’t know you’re her daughter. Can you get to know her as a person then?”
“Nope,” Jeanie said, in a heartbeat.
“Because…?”
“Because, the daughter still knows she’s the daughter. She can only experience the mother as a mother, not as anything else. The mother thing is too strong, it’s an impenetrable wall of unknowability. You can know some stuff, but you can’t know her beyond knowing her as a parent, and that’s a different kind of knowing. A sort of not-knowing. Get it?”
“Uh… yeah, I think I do.”
“Heavy,” she said, putting a lot of emphasis on both syllables and sounding like a doped-up hippie.
“Yeah, but that’s okay,” I said, “I can do heavy.”
Jeanie took both my hands in hers and squeezed them. “You all right?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, and I was, at that moment I really think I was.
“Hey, neither of us has siblings, you want to adopt?”
“Huh?” I said.
“Adopt each other?” she said. “You wanna be my sister from a different mister?”
“Well, yes, but… we’ve only just met,” I said.
“I already know things about you that it can take years to know. And I can tell you’ve got a good heart. Plus you threw yourself in front of a car for my daughter.”
My face felt hot and my heart skipped. I thought of Cassie and Clem and how they were like sisters to me, how important a bond that was, and how maybe—for my mother—that was the kind of ally she needed. It didn’t really matter what Cassie and Clem thought, yet I was certain they would like my mother if they saw us together now, and would agree with me that she was in need of a sister.
“Sisters,” I said, and Jeanie released my hands momentarily, spat on her palm, and then gripped my hand, giving it one hard shake.
Upstairs I heard little Faye again. “She seems like a nice kid,” I said, keen to find out what my mother would say about me as a child. I was fascinated and I was after compliments, I don’t deny it.
Jeanie sighed and rested her chin on her hands, looking wistfully into the middle distance. “I couldn’t ask for a better daughter. I feel like it’s her and me against the rest of the world sometimes. And I feel like we’re winning! I love her so much, I want to consume her. I want to be her, so I can feel what it’s like to be loved this much,” and she held her fists to her heart.
I stared at my mother, held my breath as she said these words, felt a tear slip over the edge and down my cheek. Jeanie put her hand over mine.
“You’ve had a hell of a shock today, what with the car, and you fell over earlier as well, didn’t you say? Then there’s me dragging up your past.” She clapped her hands once, changing the tempo of the conversation. “Well, if we’re going to be sisters, we need to get up-to-date, because we actually can get to know each other. Let’s do Twenty Questions, okay?”
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and nodded. Jeanie pulled a clean, folded tissue from up her sleeve and handed it to me; it was warm.
I asked first. Jeanie’s favorite food was sticky toffee pudding; favorite color: blue; favorite thing to do: go to the seaside to play the penny slots and paddle and get fish and chips; favorite novel: Rebecca; if she had a lot of money she would take Faye to Spain for a holiday and buy a good TV; she sometimes felt lonely; she missed having a man around; worst job in the house: vacuuming; favorite things to do with Faye: bake, play cards, and hula-hoop. Her favorite subject at school was art; she was scared of spiders and heights; she got a chest infection every year; she had no family except Faye; she liked gin but not vodka; she knew the poem “The Owl and the Pussycat” all the way through by heart; she could cure hiccups; she’d stolen a pair of shoes once, leaving her old ones in the shop; if she could spend one day with her mother again, she’d spend it talking and holding hands; she hoped for her daughter that one day she would be happily married and be blessed with children; and the hardest thing she’d ever done was walk away from the love of her life.
“Hang on, what?” I said.
“No more questions for now.” She wagged her finger. “It’s my turn. You’ve asked me twenty. You’ll have to wait if you want to know more.” Jeanie lowered her voice. “And I can’t talk about it in front of Faye, she doesn’t know about him.”