Make It Hot

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“Hey, Sammie. It’s your mother.” Veronica Dash’s soft voice wafted through the phone lines, and Samantha tried to discern what kind of mood she was in.

Was it her sober and depressed mother on the line, her two-glasses-of-gin shy of passing out and depressed mother or her angry, bitter, lashing-out and drunk mother?

“Hi, Mom. How’s it going?”

“When are you coming home? Why can’t you get a job here in Chicago? What kind of daughter leaves her mother all alone?” The slight slur in her voice canceled out still sober.

Samantha started walking with the cordless phone, kicking off her shoes and making herself comfortable on the huge plush brown sofa-sectional that took up the majority of the small living room/dining room. There was no telling how long she would be on the phone with her mother this evening.

She could hear the sound of clanging glass and knew Veronica must have been fixing herself another drink.

“Mom, I have a job here that I love, and I like it here. You could always move out here. A change of scenery might be good for you.” She had made the offer many times before, and she knew her mother would turn it down.

Samantha loved Chicago and would always consider herself a Chi-town girl. But when she left home to attend graduate school and earn her MS in Occupational Therapy at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, she ended up staying on for the DPT—Doctor of Physical Therapy—program. By the time she finished her studies, she’d come to love the North Jersey area, and she had come to love the newfound peace in her life and not having to watch her mother drink herself to death.

Finally, she had a legitimate reason to leave the continuous sadness looming in her childhood home. As much as it shamed her to admit it, she was sort of glad her mother didn’t want to move to New Jersey.

“I’m all alone, and I don’t want to leave my home. It’s all I have left of him. It’s the only thing I have left. If you were any kind of a daughter, you wouldn’t have left me. How could you leave here? We’re a family here.”

“You have me. The house is just a place, Mom. You have me, also. Daddy was murdered but you still have me…” Samantha wished she could call back the words as soon as they left her mouth.

“I don’t have you. You’re not here. You’re no help. You’re selfish. You’re trying to punish me because you think it will make me stop drinking. Just like when you stopped visiting. Cutting me off…Selfish!”

Samantha closed her eyes. She didn’t say anything because her mother was right. She had tried to use the threat of not visiting as a ploy to get her mother to go to rehab in the past. It hadn’t worked.

“They murdered him. They took him away from me. Why? Why did he stop at that corner store to pick up cough medicine for you? It’s your fault. It’s your fault my husband is dead.” Veronica’s angry words caused Samantha to go still.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t heard the words before. It was more that she was shocked that they still had the ability to wound.

Samantha spoke so she could barely hear her own words. “It wasn’t my fault. It was the criminal’s fault, the one who was robbing the store when Daddy walked in.”

In the past, Samantha might have been spiteful enough to add that she wasn’t the one who called her husband and asked him to pick up a bottle of Robitussin while he was on duty. But the grown-up woman knew it was no more her fault than it was her mother’s.