Tryst Six Venom by Penelope Douglas

A painting has been ripped off the wall and lays on the marble floor facedown,
a vase with roses shattered next to it amidst a puddle of the water that
was inside.
I head up the stairs, seeing their wedding pictures broken on the floor of
the hallway, as well as the destruction I wreaked before I ran out. I find my
mother in her closet, gowns, shoes, and blouses strewn everywhere as she
leans back against the dresser in the center of the room, holding a large bottle
of Evian between her bent legs.
She meets my eyes, and I’m stricken for a moment.
She looks like me.
Uncertain. Deflated. Too many feelings and no way to put them into
words.
Young.
She wears a pair of cream-colored silk boxers with a white cashmere
sweater, her hair a mess and black around her eyes from crying.
Not the usual masterpiece she’s been the past few years.
She holds up the nearly empty Evian bottle, and I notice another, drained
and laying among the clothes. “I thought champagne would be the answer,
but…”
“‘Carbs are never the answer,’” I recite our motto.
I walk over and slide down to sit beside her, my back against the dresser.
“I’m still deciding,” she sighs. “So stand by.” And then she downs the
rest of the bottle.
I stare at her, wondering if she ever had any idea this day was possible.
When she bought her wedding dress, or when they bought this house, did she
know there was no guarantee? That someday she’d end a pregnancy, because
she couldn’t stand to raise another child and love something so hard and
possibly lose it? That her husband would give up, his heartbreak making him
hurt us when hers just made her hurt herself?
She gazes off. “I don’t know how she did it, Clay,” she tells me. “For
years, I’ve been trying to crack your grandmother’s secret.”
I listen.
“I mean, I would wake up the day after Thanksgiving when I was little,”
she continues, “and the house would be completely decorated for Christmas
already. I would go to sleep on New Year’s Day and wake up with it all gone
again.” She smiles to herself. “It was like magic, how she got things done, as
if she had a wand and never needed to sleep.”