“Interior,” oil on canvas, by Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1914.
I’m ten minutes late to the interview to be my mother’s daughter. I’m confident, as her actual daughter, her only child, that I’ll have a leg up, but when I walk in the lobby of the memory care facility I see four other women waiting. If they are here for the job, three of them have no chance—Too Old, Too Blonde, Too Connecticut—but one makes me question all of my life decisions. She’s slim, athletic, exactly what my mother has always wanted in a daughter. I am not slim, not athletic, so unlike my mother, she used to joke that my father had slept with the mailman.
Tom, my mother’s nurse, who I pay to be with her when I cannot, comes down the hallway. He holds a clipboard. “Next,” he says, looking around the room. He seems amused. When he called me yesterday to tell me about the interviews I told him no fucking way.
“Remember,” he said, which I found ironic. “No fighting her delusions.”
“It’s fucking ridiculous.”
“Oh Sweetie,” he says, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Don’t worry. I think you’ve got a real shot at this.”
*
The interview is short. My mother sits with pen in hand, a notebook open on the desk in front of the window. She is in the only chair in the room, so I sit on the bed, which feels unprofessional. She is wearing a sweater I have never seen.
She asks me questions: How often will you visit? What will you bring? Are you married? How many kids do you have? Do you own any nice clothes?
I answer them: Almost every day, magazines and muffins, not anymore, you know the answer to that, are you fucking kidding me?
Tom puts his hand on my shoulder and I sit back down, breathe, smile.
She tells me I can go now.
Tom walks me out.
“What’s next?” I ask. I can’t wait to drive out of this parking lot. My pants are too tight. My feet hurt. Fifteen years of therapy have been erased in less than an hour.
“She’ll be in touch,” he says.
*
Tom calls to tell me I made it to the final round, which happens to be on the only day of the week I don’t normally visit my mother. I spend an embarrassing amount of time deciding what to wear. Nothing screams “I’m Actually Your Goddamn Daughter,” so I choose my comfortable jeans and a blouse with tiny blue flowers. Tom tells me I am supposed to bring a presentation, so upload three photos into a slide show. I stop on my way to get muffins.
In the facility lobby I am surprised to see only one other candidate, the slim, athletic one. She looks a little less catalog-ready today, anxious, tired. She has a briefcase by the leg of her chair and is working on her laptop, finalizing her presentation, no doubt. There’s a part of me, not as tiny as I would like to admit, that’s rooting for her.
My mother seems distant in the interview, confused. She asks me why I am there and I go all in, tell her I’m prepared to be her daughter, that I am honored to have made it this far in the process, that I think I’m a natural. She’s in bed this time, sitting up, but reclined slightly. I pull my chair up next to her, open my computer, and show her my presentation.
She smiles at the first photo, one of us on the steps of my childhood home. I’m maybe three years old and it’s clear I’ve been crying. Mom is next to me, wearing a green sundress and a floppy hat. She’s laughing and looking at the camera. She touches the screen and her eyes fill with tears, and I think that maybe I’ve been wrong about everything, maybe she does love me. But when I look closely I see that she is touching her own face in the photo. I click to the next one, us at my high school graduation. She shakes her head. She doesn’t even look at the third.
She tells me they are poisoning her food here. She grabs my wrist, her nails digging into my skin, and tells me George, my father who has been dead a decade, is fucking the nurse. She tells me I’ll never get married if I stay this fat. She tells me her handsome son visits her every day and that I have to leave now because she doesn’t want me there when he arrives, which would be fine, only she doesn’t have a son, handsome or otherwise.
Tom is sitting outside the door. He stands when I come out and raises his eyebrows at me. He seems to want it to have gone well. He rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck. I hadn’t noticed before, but he looks exhausted and I wonder why he chooses to spend his days with other peoples’ parents. Maybe it’s easier when there aren’t so many layers, when words are just words.
“How did it go?” he asks, walking me to the door.
“I’m hopeful,” I say to him, because I’ve got to believe there’s a chance.
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Variant Literature, Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work at https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).
