A Mother's Homecoming by Tanya Michaels

Pam in the same situation.
    â€œBut then something will happen,” Faith continued, “that he gets weird about. You know, girl stuff, so he makes me talk to Grandma Gwendolyn or Aunt Leigh. I love them, but Aunt Leigh only has sons, and Grandma Gwendolyn …”
    Been there.
No one had to explain to Pam how difficult Gwendolyn Shepard could be. Pam should steer the conversation in a different direction before she ended up saying something she regretted about the girl’s grandmother. “Your dad tells me you have a great singing voice. Do you plan to pursue that?”
    â€œPursue? Like how?”
    â€œVoice lessons or high school choral group or maybe singing professionally one day.”
    â€œI don’t know. It would be such a cool job to star in one of those musicals that tours all over the place, so I could travel to lots of cities. But I think what I want to do is get a job at NASA in Alabama. Dad took me to the Marshall Space Flight Center, and it rocked.”
    Pam leaned back in her booth. If she’d been harboring any delusions that Faith was a Mini Me, they’d just been blown out of the water. Pam had barely passed her math and science courses in high school; even if she had, she never would have thought a career using those skills was exciting.
This kid sounds more together at twelve than I was throughout my twenties.
“I’m impressed. You must be really good in school.”
    â€œI am!” Inexplicably the girl sounded exasperated. “Which is what I keep telling Dad. I’m an A student, so he and Grandma Gwendolyn should ease up. They don’t need to be on my case all the time like I’m some kind of delinquent.”
    Pam bit her lip. Gwendolyn’s son had knocked up his teenage girlfriend. Had Nick and Pam’s past behavior caused her to err on the side of prison warden when it came to her granddaughter? And while Pam knew in her bones that Nick adored Faith and would do anything for her, it wasn’t difficult to imagine him being overprotective. Didn’t he understand that kids who felt suffocated by rules and regulations were often the ones who rebelled? Pam couldn’t stand to think of the bright, beautiful girl across the table doing something stupid that would mar her future just because she felt the need to defy her elders.
    A chiming sound came from Faith’s phone. Sheglanced at the screen and sighed. “Dad just texted. He’s on his way. Must be thirty minutes on the dot. He’s kind of a stickler.”
    Half an hour had passed already. Pam wasn’t sure how she felt about that. On the one hand, their conversation hadn’t been nearly as excruciating as she’d anticipated. On the other, she’d had the underlying sensation of walking on eggshells this entire time, afraid that the next thing she said might be the wrong one, and she was looking forward to being able to breathe normally again.
    â€œThank you for the milk shake,” Faith said, her formal manner making her suddenly seem more childlike. A little girl hosting a tea party for imagined royalty. “And for answering my questions. I only have one more. Don’t you think everyone should have a mother?” She kept her tone carefully neutral, as if she were asking in the abstract rather than about herself.
    Ignoring the pang in her midsection—under wildly different circumstances, could she have been a real mother to this girl?—Pam chose her words carefully. “In a perfect world, sure. But in reality, maybe it’s better sometimes not to have a mom than to have one who’s terrible.” Images of Mae flashed through Pam’s mind. It was occasionally difficult to remember what the woman had looked like smiling, but it was second nature to envision her raging drunkenly about how Pam had ruined her life.
    Faith straightened, her face alert and anxious. “Were you a terrible mom?”
    I was going to