56. Lena

She was aerodynamically curvacious in the way that even as she approached 80 she still called herself sexy.
She was
The coral lipstick she often left on my face.
White Diamonds perfume and a loud, elongated "DAAHHHHLINN!"
She once stole my dad's pot stash when he was a teenager and replaced it with oregano.
She once attempted to sell watches out of a mink coat at the beach he was hanging out at.

She was his mother by DNA but not in the way he needed her to be.

I'm talking with my dad over coffee shortly after my own mother, his ex wife, passed away. He's tossing out his grievances like pieces of paper into a fire. I'm listening, watching the color flush to his face, his hand waving up in the air like mine does when we really get into the story.

He says, "I'm sorry I couldn't give you the mother you deserved; the mother you needed."

I take a deep breath, half focusing the steam snaking it's way out of the cup into the open air of our house that three generations of our family were raised in.

I say, "You know dad, looking back, I did alright without it."

He catches the blacks of my eyes with his and says, "Yeah I did alright without a real mother too."

"Maybe we didn't need them like that after all?"

"That's nonsense!" He exclaims, his voice cracking a bit. "Don't you know how much easier our lives would have been if they were more focused on being parents, and less focused on themselves?"

"Yeah," I say back, taking a long thoughtful deep breath, "But they wouldn't have been nearly has colorful, would they?"

He grabs his tea, the cup shrinking between his hands, takes a sip, looks at me out of the corner of one eye, and with a half smile on his face he says in the same way his mother, Lena would have, "

"You're damn right about that, Kid."