She is on a payphone at a grocery store and it sounds like she is one million miles away.

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But she is much closer than that, really, much closer than that. Almost too close. Moving up the coast she’s been through some forested places, over some mountainous states, she is getting nearer and for a minute I consider leaving, or better yet, moving. I eye a dormant suitcase. It opens its huge sleepy mouth and begs I throw cottons and polyesters inside. Don’t bother to wash them it says, I will hold them tight for you and dirt matters not to me.

She is my mother. If you can believe such a thing. That I have a mother. Who uses payphones outside a grocery store in a funny state called Virginia. She says through static and rusty buggy wheels, that she is going in for Chinese takeout, inside this grocery store, though the last time she ate there she told me it felt like a chicken carcass hatched worms inside her belly. Her mood is up, it is a good mood, better than most moods, so I do not tell her, do not remind her of this food fact.

If she tries to stay too long I will tell her the place is not fit for occupation. If she says I haven’t let her in since I left home I will say that I am eating popcorn, and what was that last part? If she asks why it is I am spending the holidays alone I will mumble something about money and beer and she will laugh because she will think I am being silly. Then she will say, no, seriously, why?

She has been on a Greyhound for thirty-six hours. She says last night she slept better than she’s slept in months. Across two seats, she tells me.

I say: well, that’s a miracle, and I go back to eating my soup.

Oh yes, a miracle, she whispers.

I can’t believe I’ve let her come. It was some weak afternoon I was having when she called to say it was November, and wow, what a good time it would be for her to make the trip.

Oh shit.

No, it’s not a good time, and if you asked me and if I could speak truthful sentences to you, I would say, no, it is not November, and no, it is not a good time for you to come see me.

Do you have a fold out couch? She asks me this from the grocery store. If not I can just sleep on the floor. Is it a wood floor? No matter, whatever will be fine.

She does not really mean this. Of course she does not really mean this. She will be sleeping in my bed and I will have the couch. And that could be fine if her asking were worded just a little differently.

When I finally moved out I was nineteen and had stayed a year longer than I wanted to. The final straw was her getting a piano. And taking lessons from one of my friends who she ended up fucking on a second had couch in our basement. That damn song she played. That damn song over and over and over. The same keys, the same screw-ups, the same clunked notes, the same the same the same. The fucking my friend. There was that too.

When I held his penis out of spite some months later I looked at him while he was sucking my neck and said: ha! You’ve had this thing inside my mother, and he lost it there in my palm, shrunk away from me, out of my room into his car and then away. She slashed his tires and so I had to move out. Had to.

And now, here she is, at this grocery store I know so well because I worked there for two years carrying bags of food to trunks of cars, so here she is at this same place calling me before her dinner, a dinner I know will make her weak stomach sick, she is calling to say she is only hours away and here I am with the suitcase in the corner and the door bolted firm now, here I am and there she is and what? What?

I’m going to eat now. See you soon, sweetie.

Fucking sweetie she calls me. Fucking soon.

I do some dishes and pee and smoke a nervous cigarette on the fire escape then spot an oldish man across the street who I think I may know. But I cannot place him: old teachers, grandfathers, fathers, bus drivers, ticket takers, mechanics, bail bondsmen, criminals; his features swim about but do not attach themselves to a face I can identify. When he slinks behind a dumpster and lowers his pants I decide that I must have been mistaken, I do not in fact know this man, this man shitting on the sidewalk, I do not know him at all. And I go inside and I pout in a terrycloth bathrobe.

I will not let her change in my head. It is easier this way. Rather than letting her back in, opening a door I thought was locked for good, I’ll keep her away, she will not play-nice her way back in, no how, I won’t have it. Fuck that.

I pout harder, hard as I can. I will pout myself madder still.