Heavy Heart

Daria Eloise Holmes was many things, but on that Saturday afternoon in April, she was most of all exhausted. She had slaved away over the freshest baked goods in town, only to sell them all morning to the never-ending stream of people that trickled through the door. It was her fourth year at Yellow Spoon, the only real bakery in her small, Connecticut town, and that had been her busiest day yet. Finally, the rush of people had calmed, most of the pastries gone and the shop set to close in a few hours. She was ready to go home and lie in her bed, cuddle up with her books, and study the rest of her day away.

“Hey Carla, it’s two-thirty,” she called into the back of the shop, unwinding her dark hair from her tight topknot. “Can I go home now?”

The middle-aged woman she called her employer teetered out from her office, pulling a folded piece of paper from the pocket of her heavily floured apron. “Of course, honey,” Carla cooed, her full face tinged red with the fatigue of the busy day. She was three months pregnant, a crescent of a full belly just starting to show, and the day had been even harder on her than it was on Daria.

“Before you go, here’s your paycheck,” she hummed, handing her the thick envelope-like paper. Daria knew inside would be her payroll stub, listing her earnings to date, along with what she’d made in the last two weeks of what felt like non-stop work. Her heart skipped a little at the thought of how much it contained. She had calculated it in her mind a thousand times during her shifts, taking out the allotted amounts for Social Security, Medicare, and taxes.

“Thanks,” Daria replied with sincerity, heading to the back to hang up her apron and grab her purse in exchange. “I’ll keep you updated on everything. I think this should be it.”

Carla nodded, crossing her arms just above her slightly protruding stomach. “I hope so,” she added before wrapping Daria up in a tight embrace.

Daria hugged back, the scent of Carla’s curl-holding shampoo wafting to her senses just ever so slightly, calming her. Her boss was one of her only friends in Middletown, most of her high school friends having moved away for college. She’d gotten a scholarship to the best school in her town, Wesleyan University – partially circumstantially and partially because Daria was unusually bright. However, she and her mother couldn’t afford to pay the absolutely outrageous room and board at the pricey private school, so she was forced to live at home.

It was hard to make new friends, especially when she only encountered them in passing on campus or in classes. Daria hadn’t expected it to be so difficult, but dorm life was a part of the college experience that she was missing out on, leaving her lonely and isolated from the rest of her classmates. It also occurred to her that her friends from high school had been with her through the darkest times – a thorny thicket that Daria had fought through bravely. They understood why she was the way she was. The people she sat with in classes did not. They simply saw her as the quiet girl with the sad eyes and all the answers to the professors’ questions.

As she left the bakery and waved goodbye to Carla through the window, she sped up just slightly to reach her car faster than normal. Once inside, having slammed the door behind her, she held the paycheck in her hands. Her fingers trembled as she tore the perforated edges from the body of the letter, opening the flap that revealed the dollar amount. The breath caught in her lungs as her eyes scanned the paper, the tally going in her mind. That paycheck, plus all the others, plus her student loan…

She finally had enough.

The excitement got the best of her, her normally controlled and concise actions boiling over in a stifled scream in her hands and the welling of tears around her eyes. All of her had work that entire year – the full time job on top of full time schooling at one of the top universities in the United States – had finally paid off. She was finally going to get out of there.

Her applications was finished ages ago, her acceptance came through at the end of March, and the only thing they had been waiting on was the final installment of her tuition payment, which was a little over $4,000 dollars. She’d been stretched thin, lost most of what was left of her spark, but she knew that in the end, it would be worth it. She was going to leave Middletown. She was going to go to England.
“Oh my god,” were the best words she could find to express her excitement.

But as she pulled out of the parking lot, her excitement slowly faded to panic. She had yet to tell her mother of her plans. The only people who knew were Carla and the attendants at the study abroad office, along with her course adviser and obviously herself. Daria didn’t know how she would form the words to tell her mother what she was going to do. She spent hours mulling over the subject while she sorted through her notes on ancient philosophers. How would she tell her mother that her sadness was taking over Daria’s life to the point where she couldn’t put up with it anymore, to the point where she was going to leave the continent because of it?

She went and got the groceries like she did every Saturday, the panic still attacking her incessantly like a wave beating the sandy shore. Her mother wasn’t stable to do much anymore, working a little bit from home to pay the bills but otherwise unable to function. She was so crippled by sadness that everyday tasks like going to the grocery store and preparing dinner were too much for her, so the responsibilities fell to Daria. All the responsibilities always fell to Daria.

That was part of what scared her most about leaving, the only thing that could maybe get her to stay. Her mother would be completely lost without her. But as her mind flipped and flopped, Daria tried to convince herself that it was her mother’s choice to live that way. Daria was young. She deserved to live a life that could make her happy. Getting out of the country for a while was just what she needed, a gasp of air in from the life she’d been drowning in for the last ten – almost eleven – years. She deserved a chance.

“Hey, I’m home!” she called into the cavernous depths of her house when she arrived, struggling to bring in the bags but not expecting any help. It was no surprise to see the house the way she left it, looking like no one lived there anymore.

She received no response and again, wasn’t much surprised. Her mother was probably in bed, too tired from being alive to continue the day much past four in the afternoon. But when she carried the bags into the kitchen, she saw that wasn’t the case. Georgia Holmes was seated at counter, staring at a blue and white cake, unlit candles standing at attention like little candy colored soldiers. Daria’s heart dropped. She hoped that what she assumed about the situation wasn’t true.

“Mom,” she greeted cautiously. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t you remember?” her mother asked, more of a statement than a question. “It’s your father's birthday.”

Daria’s suspicions were confirmed. She’d forgotten her father’s birthday for the first time in the decade since his passing. Every year, her mother insisted on buying a cake for him in some sort of morbid ceremonial testament to his memory. It was her way of honoring him, the only way she seemed to know how, other than putting her life on hold completely.

“Of course I didn’t forget,” she lied, taking a seat next to her mother on the barstools. She reached for the pale hands that lay listlessly in the lap across from hers, all skin and bones. Georgia Holmes had once been a beautiful woman, with long auburn hair and the same sparkling green eyes as her daughter. Now, her hair was chopped short for maintenance’s sake and all the life had gone from her gaze.

“Can we sing now?” Georgia asked, her voice wavering like her unsteady heartbeat. Ever since Daria’s father passed, Georgia had difficulties with her health, and sometimes spent time in the hospital for a heart murmur.

“I’ll light the candles,” Daria said in reply.

The flames cast a pale, flickering light on her mother’s already insipid face. Daria could see the glow reflected in the droplets of tears that dripped from the corners of her eyes. It broke her heart to see her mother that way, but the feeling didn’t outweigh her shame in forgetting the date. She loved her father so terribly; it wasn’t fair of her to let herself get caught up in her distraction of business.

“Happy birthday to you,” they sang in unison to the absent man in question, Daria’s voice a little stronger than Georgia’s. “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Alan, happy birthday to you.”

Neither of them moved to blow out the candles, instead letting them slowly melt as though some wind would come and extinguish them. Alan Holmes had been a good man; he was dedicated to his family and to his job as a sales representative for a large electronics company. He had a laugh like an earthquake and hair as dark as an ink spill. He always wrote with a specific brand of ballpoint pen, crossing the letter “z” whenever he came to one, like they did in Germany. If Daria had a best friend in her childhood, it was her father – the man who challenged her already exceptionally bright mind with puzzles and difficult texts, who told her stories at night when he was home and brought her back trinkets from his travels.

They pair sat in silence until the candles had melted completely down onto the cake, marring the surface with pimpled wax. Slowly, Daria was building the courage to tell her about her exciting news, to finally unmask her great secret that she had been working towards for so long.

“Mom,” she finally breathed. “I’m going to England. In the fall. To study at University of Birmingham.”

Her mother said nothing. Her eyes were nailed to the cake, to a man she missed so terribly, to a life she could never get back, no matter how hard Daria tried to fix it.

“I need to get out of here,” Daria explained, waiting for her mother to look at her but she never did. “I can’t do this anymore. I need to stop being so sad. You choose to live this way, and now, I’m choosing not to. I deserve more than this, and we both know it.”

They sat around the cake and no one touched it, not once, until her mother stood up and left without a word. It killed her to hurt her mother more, to leave her alone, but she hoped that maybe it would push her to make a positive change as well. Daria threw the cake away when her mother went to bed, listening to her violent sobs through the walls.

She would leave in September, and finally be free.