They found Mother wandering barefoot in the woods, and brought her home.
“Alzheimer’s, is it?” the young sergeant asked, helping her tenderly up the steps.
“We hope not,” I said. “This only started when my dad died.”
“Aaah,” said the sergeant, as if that explained everything. But it didn’t. Jason and I knew our parents hadn’t liked each other much, and had only stayed together out of habit.
After the police left, we made Mother a cup of tea. She sat upright on the sofa, her filthy feet neatly together on the white shagpile carpet. She smelt strongly of alcohol.
“Mum, how could you? We were worried sick!”
She looked back at us serenely. She didn’t seem like a person with Alzheimer’s, but she wasn’t her old housewifely self either.
“Where have you been for the last three days? We’ve been worried sick!”
“I went for a dirty weekend in Lisbon with someone else’s husband. It was glorious.”
That shut me up. I had done precisely this when I was twenty-two.
Jason stepped in, saying firmly: “Mum, this is serious.”
“Actually I snowboarded down a mountain without insurance, smashed into a tree and it cost my family thousands to get me home.”
It was Jason’s turn to shut up and go brick red: this had happened when he was nineteen.
“I also stripped naked at a rock festival and caught pneumonia.” Jason looked at me questioningly; he had never been told the whole story of my first time at Glastonbury.
“And before that I spent all night drinking, vomited up the walls and had my stomach pumped.” Jason’s eighteenth birthday party. Ouch.
We both glared down at Mother. She sipped her tea.
“OK,” I said. “We were shits. We admit it. Do you want an apology?”
“Certainly not!” said Mother.
“What’s it about, then?”
“Truthfully,” she said, “I’m not sure where I’ve been. There was a lot of alcohol involved, you see. But I know what I was trying to do. Make up for lost time.”
We gaped at her.
“You both thought I was angry when you did those things. But that was your father. I was just envious. Everything wild and stupid you did, was something I wished I’d done myself.’”
That was how Jason came to book us all a skiing trip in the Alps, and I took Mother clothes shopping, before the two of us hit the nightlife in Newcastle.
About The Author
Patience Mackarness lives and writes in Brittany, sometimes in a cottage and sometimes in an elderly VW camper van. Her work has been published online by Every Day Fiction and The Pygmy Giant. Her website is www.patiencemackarness.wordpress.com/
We release new stories multiple times every week, and the easiest to stay up to date with our new content is by subscribing to our content.
bandit. 
Leave a Reply