I'll Be Here

a narrow table beside the ceramic blue elephant that guards the front hall and stumble out of my high heels.  Have I mentioned how much they’ve been hurting my feet?
    “What in the world?”  My mom is bent over at the hip with her arms stretched above her at an impossible angle. 
    She straightens, settling her limbs back into all the proper places and shakes her short blonde hair out of her eyes. 
    My mother can be found doing yoga on a purple mat in the open space between the living room and the dining room at all kinds of odd hours.  Once, I woke up to use the bathroom at three in the morning and she was doing a feathered peacock pose against the wall.  She says that it relieves her stress when she’s tense.  I say that it’s weird.  
    Mom tucks her hair behind her ear and I catch this look on her face like she’s annoyed at my obnoxiously loud entrance.  But then she sees my expression and the way that I’m clutching my chest. 
    The world slips away. 
    She reaches me faster than I expect and she wraps me into her bony arms and her soft musical voice.  A part of me wants to move past her to the safety of my room where I can languish in my sudden aloneness alone , but she won’t allow it and for once I’m too tired to fight.
    Her hands push tangled, mermaid hair from my tearstained face and she is looking at me with that special expectant expression she gets sometimes.  Her voice and her touch carry me into the kitchen.  It smells like rosemary. 
    She guides me to the wooden chair with the scrolly arms and the springy seat that I claimed as mine long ago.  A minute later a glass of tangy white wine is pushed underneath my nose.  I look up and she raises her eyebrows at me. 
    “What?  You’re almost eighteen, you’ve just been dumped and you’re not driving anywhere tonight.”   
    I’m stung by the word dumped. 
    Dumped.
    Dumped.
    Is that what I’ve been?  It sounds so base.  So low. 
    You dump trash.  You dump yard waste and old ripped couches that smell like body odor and forgetfulness.  You dump cigarette butts and banana peels and hazardous waste.  But people? 
    I take a tentative sip of the wine.  It’s tangy and the slight burn it makes sliding down my throat feels good. 
    Moonlight filters in through the window above the sink and makes bizarre shadows of the appliances on the counter—like the microwave is about to eat the toaster and the coffeemaker and the soap dispenser are holding hands.
    We are seated at our kitchen table.  It’s a low-slung table that is really an old door that my mom found propped in the alley behind an antique store years ago.  I remember watching from the backseat of the crappy green car we had in those days as she haggled with a goateed man about the price of the thing.  Since that day, the table has been three colors: mustard, a crackly reddish-brown, and its current shade Calypso Breeze , which is really just a fancy way of saying blue.
    Mom watches me carefully.  Her eyes are wide-set and unusually large for her small face giving her a constantly surprised expression.  Right now her thin lips are pursed into an oval shape.  Her elbows rest on the table and as she leans forward she makes a hammock for her chin out of her palms. 
    I can guess what she is thinking.  She never liked Dustin.  She says he “stifled” me or some crap. 
    Here’s the thing about my mother: she’s a bit bohemian, hence the name Willow, and the yoga, and the dream-catchers hanging in our bedroom windows, the flowing crocheted tops that fill her closet, and the compost bins out front.  She fancies herself an artist.  The reality is that she manages a gym downtown. 
    Mom was born in Georgia to a conservative family of gun owners and during her tumultuous teen years she rebelled by becoming a peace-loving humanitarian who migrated to the beach with plans to sell jewelry and paint watercolors. 
    Dustin is (or was ) a little too “square” for her liking.  Most mothers would be thrilled with a sports-coat-wearing young man, but Julie Beagle is not most moms.  She tolerated Dustin just barely .  My mom admires people that push boundaries and inspire “movement,” whatever the hell that means.  Dustin’s favorite pastime is killing zombies in a post-apocalyptic video game. 
    Mom would prefer for me to hang out with people that stage sit-ins or strap themselves to tree trunks in the face of bulldozers rather than the crowd that hits the