…mother.
My mom. Sixty-eight years old, in her gardening clogs, carrying two cans of paint and a bag from the hardware store.
I sat in my car two streets away and stared. My mother walked around the side of my house, to the back door. Just like the text said. Like always.
My brain went to places I’m not proud of. Then it went blank. I sat there for twenty minutes. Then I drove home, parked in the driveway right behind her red car, and walked in through the back door.
I followed the sound of voices to the garage.
My husband, Tom, and my mother were standing in the middle of my late father’s old woodworking shop. Except it wasn’t his woodworking shop anymore. The walls were painted a soft white. There was a big window where there used to be a wall. A skylight. Shelves. A long wooden table. And an easel. My father’s easel, the one he’d built for me when I was twelve, sanded and refinished, standing in the middle of the room.
My mother screamed when she saw me. Tom dropped a paintbrush.
“You weren’t supposed to be home until five!” my mother said.
I couldn’t speak.
I used to paint. All through high school and college. I was good. Then I had three kids in five years, and a job, and a mortgage, and somewhere along the way I put my brushes in a box in the attic and never took them out. Every once in a while I’d say, “Someday.” Tom had heard me say it for seventeen years.
My father died two years ago. His workshop had been sitting empty in our garage ever since, full of sawdust and old tools. I couldn’t bring myself to clean it out.
“Your dad always said you’d go back to painting someday,” my mom said, wiping her eyes. “Tom came to me in March and asked if I’d help him turn it into a studio for you. For your anniversary. Your father would have wanted it.”
For seven months, every weekday, while I was at work, my mother had been coming over at 8:30. Tom worked from home those mornings. He’d text her when I left. He’d leave the back door unlocked. She’d painted every wall. He’d built the shelves. They’d kept the whole thing secret from me, the kids, everyone.
“The text,” I said finally. “This morning. You sent it to me.”
Tom looked at his phone and went pale. “Oh no,” he said. “I sent it to you instead of your mom. You two are right next to each other in my contacts.” He looked at me. “Wait. What did you think?”
I didn’t answer. He saw it on my face anyway. He put his arms around me and said, “Seventeen years, and you thought I’d do that?”
“For about twenty minutes,” I admitted. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” my mother said. “It was a very suspicious text, Tom.”
We all started laughing, standing in my dad’s old workshop, and then I started crying, and then my mom was crying too.
I’ve painted in that studio every Saturday since. My first painting was the view out the new window, the maple tree my dad planted when I was a baby. It hangs in our kitchen now.
Tom put my mom’s name in his phone as “MOM (NOT WIFE).” Just to be safe.
