Birthday Boy

"Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you..." my mom sang to me across one of White Spot's many run-down tables. Her voice, an alto warble as out of tune as the grand piano we sold to a violent russian woman six months earlier, was like a fucking cleaver in my stomach. With a thick inch of gray hair at the roots of her expensive chestnut dyed bob - a tuft of it now sticking uncharacteristically out of place - and prominent wrinkles in her signature black blazer, I could still tell that my mother had made an effort to be presentable.

I took a bite of the brownie that separated us as she hit the song's distinctively high note, lacking any sense of embarassment. In fact, her cheeks and the skin of her face, now presumably 50% Oil of Olay after years of application, were pale, deflated, and lifeless. She smiled and I felt my eyes water for the first time in years, not because she sounded like an ailing rooster, but because this, my birthday, was quite possibly the most horrible day of my life. The chill in my spine like those given by a thrilling ghost story eventually subsided --our family's tale of horror, however, had very quickly become reality.

"We don't sing Happy Birthday here." The fat waitress called down to me at yet another White Spot, one year since I had watched my mom drive off in her silver honda toward the psych ward. I didn't look at the woman's name-tag. I thought that if she hadn't the collar to hold them up, her chins would have swallowed it anyway.

"Thats okay, I want to sing," my mother replied, leaning over the table toward me with the expression of an excited child, and this time it was without the radioactive glow of anti-depressants. To my right, the fat waitress stood grinning stupidly, arms folded in a smug demeanor that begged my fist into her pudgy nose as if standing there was going to ease the baleful sound of burried memories. Behind her yet was an intricate bookcase full of cheap Peller Estates wine and behind that a curly brown bulb, zooming in and across the bottoms of glass framed booths beyond the narrow hallway. My mom had first thought it a dog, exclaiming loudly for all to hear in a similarly child-like manner. Unfortunately for the dwarf of a woman that ended up hearing the comment, it wasn't.

And so my twentieth birthday passed, just as the one before it, looking over the same black-blue arbright upon the same brownie. Hell, even the same brand of candle. As I drove home amid the harmonious slither and smash of CD-cases in door pockets and center consoles, followed by the frigid matter-of-fact voice telling me to slow to twenty kilometers in a fifty zone in that same silver honda, I got to thinking about how lucky I am. Actually, thats a lie, I was thinking about the best manner in which to destroy only the passenger side of a vehicle - but I'm thinking about it now. I survived.