She put her hand on my arm and said, “I’m your Mother, you can tell me anything, no matter how bad, no matter what you do, I’ll still love you.”
She needed to know, and I needed to tell someone, but I couldn’t tell her, so I went and got the laptop.
“I thought that was lost”, she said as she saw it.
“So did I, but I found it amongst Dad’s stuff’.” As I started the laptop, and then opened the files.
“Don’t worry about the movies now mum, you can watch them later if you wish, just read the stories, they’re in chronological sequence, and have more relevance.”
I lay on my bed and watched her for thirty minutes or so as she read two of the stories without expression, then she stopped and looked at me blankly. “I guess I knew all along, without really wanting to admit it. My bridesmaid Mary said that she thought that as he couldn’t have sex with his mother, he’d got a mummy clone in me. They’re not the words she used but you get the drift.”
She continued, “He’d started to see her on Friday nights when I worked late at the supermarket, she fed him and I got something to eat from work, and that helped me out. When my shifts changed, he continued going as she was missing his Dad so much, and from time to time he stayed overnight when he claimed that she was really bad.”
A long silence followed before she looked at me and said “I don’t want to talk now, I need time to process all of this, I’m going to bed. I’ll take the laptop as I’ll need to read the rest of it tomorrow. I hope you’re feeling better now. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I’m not sure if I felt better or not but I did dream about making love with my Grandmother again that night, I won and she still thought that I was her son, the lovemaking reached its usual frenetic intensity, and again I had to use the bathroom to clean up.
I had to leave early the next morning before Mum was up, and when I got home I said to her, “did you read any more of the stories?”
“Yes all of them, twice.”
“What about the movies?”
“The first one.”
“What did you think?”
“Interesting to say the least, what did you think of it?”
“Interesting to say the least.”
“How many times did you watch them Tim?”
I smiled, “several.”
She returned the smile “and still going?”
“Yes.”
Mum and I talked more about the hurt that she was feeling than the mess that I was in, she felt she should have said something to Dad, but really it was only a feeling in her gut rather than something concrete, so there was nothing for her to talk to him about.
We talked for a couple of nights more, and then it just seemed the best to let it go and move on.
Me? Well I still had to wear the bike pants every night.
The days turned to weeks, weeks to months, and the year sped by. Mum never talked much about Dad and Grandma, and I never brought it up in case it stirred the memories up for her.
It was still hard for her though, all the special days were hard, his birthday, her birthday, Christmas, wedding anniversary, everything was just so hard.
Then the first anniversary of his death crashed down onto us.