The argument started in the morning and lasted until lunchtime, not an unusual occurrence while growing up at 110 Flamingo Street. Us four boys and The Sister were debating which one of us had gotten Mom the best gift over the years. Mother’s Day was Sunday, just two days away, and none of us had bought Mom anything yet.
Big Brother James said the best gift to Mom had come from him. His gift was an ashtray he made in kindergarten. It was the same year Mom gave up smoking for good. We all said she quit because James’s ashtray was so ugly. Just like him.
After she stopped smoking, Mom kept the ashtray on her makeup table. It held the items she thought to be most valuable: her engagement and wedding rings (when she took them off at night), a charm bracelet with silhouettes of each of our heads in profile carved in silver, and an empty picture locket. We asked her why it was empty, and she always replied the same way. With a smile, she’d say, “It will be filled when the time is right.”
The Sister said she gave mom the best present. Mom was always cold inside our house. It may have been because Dad was cheap and didn’t want to run the heat, but The Sister thought it was because she didn’t have a throw blanket. So she made her one. Mom used that blanket every day for two weeks, but then we never saw it again. Us boys said it was because Mom didn’t like it. The real reasons were that we spilled too much food and juice on it during those two weeks. After one time in the washer and dryer, the hand-stitched blanket came apart. Even Mom couldn’t repair it. She made the blanket into a pillow and used it every night.
Twin Brother Mark and I argued the best gift was a special breakfast from us. When we were 7, we had made Mom breakfast in bed for her Mother’s Day gift. Mark scrambled the eggs; I baked biscuits and fried bacon. We both cut and squeezed oranges to make fresh orange juice. We delivered the food to Mom’s bedroom on a TV tray. After one bite, she deemed it being the most surprising breakfast she had ever eaten. We bounced out of the room knowing she had a great start to her special day.
As soon as we left, Mom tossed all of the breakfast we had made into the trash. You see, Mark had salted everything on the TV tray, even the orange juice. Not knowing he had, I did too. It was years later that Mom told us she had kept a small amount of salt in a crystal container on her dresser from that day forward. It was to remind her of how sweet her twins had been.
Older Brother Richard said he gave Mom best gift. He had made a plate out of clay with an imprint of his hand in the middle. Mom liked it so much that she hung it on the wall at the end of the hallway. He said such an important place was proof that the plate the best gift of all. It stayed there for only three months and then disappeared; we never saw it again.
We argued that was proof it wasn’t the all-time best gift. Of course, Mom’s displeasure with the gift wasn’t why it disappeared. Pre-plate-disappearance, in stocking-clad feet, I had slid down the hallway and smashed into the plate. When it hit the ground, it shattered into many, tiny pieces. I dumped the remains into the trashcan.
Unbeknownst to us, Mom retrieved all the pieces, glued them back together, and rehung the plate safely in her closet. It stayed there, hidden in plain sight, until the day Richard died. We moved away from Flamingo Street soon thereafter, and we truly never saw the plate again. If asked, Mom would’ve said she could no longer bear to look at it. Like Richard’s plate, Mom’s heart was broken that day. Unlike the plate, her heart could not be mended.
By lunchtime we were hungry and tired of arguing. We couldn’t decide who had given Mom the best gift of all time. But we had agreed on one thing. We would let Mom be the final judge. The “winner” would choose the present given Mom that year.
We found Mom in the kitchen fixing us peanut butter, bananas, and mayonnaise sandwiches for lunch. It was a lunch everyone could agree on. We asked her who had given her the best Mother’s Day present over the years.
She stopped making lunch, turned around and said without hesitation, “Each one of you is the best Mother’s Day present I ever received.” Then she hugged and kissed each one of us. As we left the kitchen, we had an idea. That was the year Mom received the perfect gift – a small picture of us.
Mom’s gold locket was never empty again. Inside was a baby picture of one of us that she switched out each week.
[Rick Ryckeley has been writing stories since 2001. To read more of Rick’s stories, visit his blog: storiesbyrick.wordpress.com.]
