Mary's Answer Final Draft

Mary’s Answer

Mary wakes up every morning around five am, she keeps the same routine she has had now for the past ten years, since she and her husband separated. Mary stayed distant from any meaningful relationship in her life, loneliness was a regular emotion.
She lives underneath her mother’s house in a basement that she calls an apartment. She constructed the space at her own speed, it took seven weeks to install a kitchen counter and sink. The apartment is moldy and damp and filled with a thin fog of cheap cigarette smoke, from the carton cigarettes her ex-husband drops off for her weekly. The ceilings are low, barely six and half feet high and made of thin, stained material.
As a child, Mary learned to not expect too much, in fear that she be let down. After she cooks, there are drops of condensation that fall from the metal beams above her head. She never complains of the apartment’s imperfections, yet she dreams that someday after her mother passes, to build a cabin in a remote area down south, with the money she will inherit.
She keeps to herself, never many visitors. She rarely leaves, only to get groceries for the month. Her mother, Irene, is her exact opposite. She is seldom at home, eighty five and a social butterfly. She gets her hair fixed in rollers every Friday at the same beauty shop she has gone to since 1950. Mary hears her mother leave every morning, never later than seven o’clock. The big white metal door slams and the Christmas bells they never removed off the door knob from last Christmas, jingle like Santa’s in the room himself. Mary never wonders where her mother plans to spend her day, and only continues on with her dull existence.
She is detached from Irene, a nonexistent bond that fastens a mother and daughter that most hold dear. Her mother always warned her that she wouldn’t amount to much, not so much directly in words, rather indirectly with subtle comments. Mary no longer desires a relationship with Irene, but was pained by the natural relationship her mother once had with her younger brother. Paul has since deceased due to a drug overdose, which wasn’t a shock to Mary the morning the police knocked on the front door.
Mary would picture her mother kissing her before bed and snubbing the brother just once. She would picture smirking over at her brother and enjoying the moment, as she felt important and him not so much. She believes her mother is at fault for his death. Irene never punished him, even after finding bags of marijuana in her closet when he was selling dope to the neighborhood. Mary would rat her brother in but only be scolded.
Frequent thoughts of her mother’s abandonment were fresh in her mind that day. Fantasies of someday toppling her mother over by describing her neglected childhood were often visited. She wanted Irene to feel pain, the kind of pain that burned from the inside out.
Mary is overweight but not round, her shape resembles one of a man’s. She once had blonde short hair, but the roots are now light silver and the length is past her shoulders. It is usually knotty and looks like it hasn’t been conditioned for decades.
Shortly after Mary wakes, she scuffles over her feet, which are covered by dirty, weathered slippers, into the kitchen to brew a cup a coffee where she enjoys her first of twenty cigarettes for the day. Her computer screen usually has a game idling, the same game that caused her husband to feel abandoned in their marriage, which lasted twenty five years.
As Mary takes her first sip of coffee, she sits at the computer to open the mail her mother had brought down, from yesterday. She shuffles through the envelopes noticing an unusual pale blue colored envelope, with a cursive hand written return address. The return address was labeled Oak Grove Kentucky. She opens the letter with dull curiosity, to find a black and white picture of a newborn baby wrapped in a receiving blanket. The baby is held by a young girl that appeared to be the mother of the child. She stares into the picture, marveling at the expression the mother has in her eyes while holding the child, but still does not recognize who they are.
Something seemed different between the two in the picture, when she compared their natural relation with the one her and Irene never experienced. She flips the picture over and reads the same hand writing that appears on the envelope that first caught her attention.
She reads” My sweet angel girl 1954”. She glances down to the right hand corner she read out loud “a phone number 802-433-2091”.
Perplexed and overwhelmed with fear, Mary reaches her right hand into her robe and pulled out a black flip phone and eagerly dials the number she read. She put the phone to her right ear and counts the number of rings in her head. At the other end she hears an unfamiliar voice say
“Hello”, the person at the other end waits for Mary‘s response.
“Hello!” Mary repeats, “this is Mary O’Neil, may I ask who this is” She hears a silent cry at the other end. She watches as the smoke from her cigarette curls into the air.
Then from the unfamiliar voice she hears with a weak desperate tone say, “Mary…Mary, I’m just goanna come right out and tell you who I am, you don’t remember me but I am your birth mother”.
Mary quickly slaps both ends of the flip phone together and hangs up. Her respirations now irregular and fast, she is flooded with blissful emotion for the first time in her life. Like a damn that has been barricading a section of her soul she never knew how to permeate. Any chance other than being the daughter of the cold woman that lives above her, made her overjoyed. Mary wasn’t sure what she would do next, she wondered if there was nothing else she need. Everything seemed to make sense, she no longer felt guilty for hating Irene rather she was ready to confront her true perceptions for the first time.