How My Mother Left Us

My mother didn’t always play it safe. When she was my age, she skated on the Venice boardwalk, miles north toward Santa Monica and miles back on wooden wheels whose bearings would pick up sand and need disassembly and cleaning. She and her friends were so talented—weaving in and out of crowds, forming high-speed chains that jumped over milk crates and children’s wagons along the way—they got auditions for “Roller Derby” at the Olympic Auditorium downtown. She was invited to skate for the L.A. Thunderbirds, she always told us, and almost did. And Ralph Valladares, the reigning male skater for the team, she almost married. “Then you would be named Abril,” she told me.

As it turned out, she married much later, to a man she didn’t talk about much, and I was the third and last child she had, at 42. Every month since the divorce, she’d get a check for $90, $30 for each of us, and that was about how much my dad counted in the house. Many years later, my older brother passed on what Mom had told him, that he was not abusive or violent, just thoughtless: The family would be out of money, eking it out until the next check, barely enough money in the house for milk, but come payday Dad would run off to Tijuana to bet on the bulls. Not a clue, was how my brother put it. I don’t know if those were Mom’s words.

Maybe she knew she didn’t have much time left. And maybe I was too dramatic earlier, to say she left us. The truth is, on my fourteenth birthday, I went to wake up Mom before I left the house for my ritual morning walk to the palisades to watch surfers. She was usually up before me, listening to loud AM radio in the bathroom, half-dressed in bra and panties, putting on make-up. But that morning I entered Mom’s bedroom and found her dead on the floor. A circle of red the size of a quarter was on her pillow. She lay on the floor next to her bed, as if she had gotten up but then decided abruptly to lay back down. A little crust of blood had formed below one of her nostrils. She looked asleep.

It was her heart, of course. I don’t know what I did at the very moment I realized this, only that I shook her a little, knowing it would change nothing, would not wake her up. Then I called my oldest brother. Then I called 911.

In the week that followed I learned from my grandparents about other relatives with tricky hearts, meaning those who did not smoke cigarettes all their lives and then die reluctantly in their mid-90’s. The autopsy found Mom had a bad kidney, and when doctors opened up her chest they found signs of previously undetected heart attacks. To this day, I know my mother’s death left a hole in me the exact size of that red quarter. What scares me is how deep the hole might go.

I don’t think it’s overstating to say my mother was not a happy woman. She had many happy moments, I’m sure. Every time they were together, she traded loving insults with my grandfather, often over their shared love of scotch. Slathered in baby oil, she was happy baking herself in the sun on our back patio, lost in a Harold Robbins novel. But she had three kids and no husband, and she must have been lonesome. She was a divorced Catholic, and must have felt disapproval coming at her from many directions. “What’s next?” she would say to us sometimes, apropos of nothing. Now I think she must have asked herself that, and maybe didn’t have an answer.


I saw her skate once, at one of those pole barns next to the strip mall where parents drop their kids for three hours while they go to Herberger's or Home Depot. My friends and I were surprised to find her parking the car where we thought she was only going to be dropping us off. To pulling a bag like a bowling bag from the trunk. To lacing up the skates on the bench inside, then launching herself forward on the long boards of the floor, as if that wall at the other end was just a curtain, an inconvenience, as if on the other side was an ocean, and a pier two miles in the distance, the one with the Ferris wheel, and all the day left for roaming.