Chapter Eight – Little Big Man
My mother doesn't smile anymore.
Not the way she used to anyway. She had the most beautiful smile I had ever seen that reached all the way from her eyes to her soul. And you knew, you just knew, every time she smiled at you, you were everything.
Her smile was powerful beyond belief. Bruises always paled faster, wounds healed quicker, tears dried sooner when she smiled. I felt like nothing was ever as bad as it seemed the second that she smiled.
My father made her smile for the briefest time.
Allowed the smiles beauty and power to seep into his restless heart.
She understood him with that smile in a way no one ever had before. She asked no questions, demanded no answers, just understood it all.
Somehow he couldn't help himself. He was captivated. Drawn in as if under some kind of spell only she could cast.
He married her because he knew then and there that he needed that smile forever. He needed that smile to belong to him.
But his attention span was short. His need for adventure and freedom greater than any power the smile of one woman could hold over him.
He left a note, because that was the only way to do it. If he looked at her, he knew he would never leave.
The day he left he took a part of my mother's smile with him tucked away somewhere safe in the pocket of his leather jacket. No matter where he went, or who he met he'd always have the smile she had given to him.
Jack knew my mother's smile too.
Held onto it as if it were a lifeline that could reel him in from the misery he had descended into. He clung to it, like my father, recognizing its power to temporarily at least mend a heart misunderstood for far too long.
There were times when she would look at him, and just smile. And he thought in those moments, just maybe if that woman kept smiling at him that way everything in his life would be ok.
It was ok for Jack. But not for my mother.
Another piece of her smile faded the day Jack ended whatever it was they had. She'd lost it to him forever, to keep in a dark corner of his memory with his empty promises.
That smile was never really meant to be Jack's or my father's or mine for that matter. It doesn't belong to either of them although they both took parts when they left her behind.
These days it seems that smile, the one that could light up the moon and the stars is just not there anymore. There's still a trace of it. But it's just a mere shadow of what it used to be. An innuendo of a smile that once was.
I wonder if I selfishly stole the best part of my mother when I left her behind just like my father and Jack. If by sheer need her smile was the part of her I took with me and in doing so robbed the world of something so beautiful.
I didn't mean for that to happen. I just wanted something so familiar to comfort me, make me feel like I really had come home. I needed that smile of hers that I thought belonged only to me because without that smile this would not have ever been home.
What's left for her is a smile that comforts victims, or their families or a stressed out co-worker. But it's foreign and she knows it too. She's looked in the mirror and wondered exactly when it vanished. Who was responsible for its disappearance?
I think it's time I gave my mother back her smile. She needs it more than I do now. She needs to feel alive again, even if I'm not. She'll smile at me everyday. I know she will because she has my picture on her nightstand and million more in her head.
And I just know there's a certain blue-eyed co-worker who hangs out each day just waiting for her to throw a glance his way and smile at him.
I thank God he's patient.
Because one day Samantha Spade will smile.
And he'll be certain that smile belongs to him.