Mother’s Best Friend


No one ever said our family outranked their family
that we were the officers and they the noncoms
that if our two families sat down at a poker table 
we would likely draw the inside straight and 
they would fold once again

but that’s what I understood as a child 
about my family and their family— 
the family of my mother’s best friend.
Maybe it was their six kids and 
carousing, hard drinking, wife beating husband 
stacked up against our two nuclear kids and 
cranky but essentially kind father 
who didn’t drink, worked two jobs
and (nobody’s perfect) 
bitched and moaned like a too-tired child
all the way to church every Sunday morning.

We stretched to reach the middle of middle 
class but at least we owned and didn’t rent. 
We didn’t have a basement and the closets were small 
but at least the asphalt in front of our house 
was years away from the open tributaries
flowing toward the crumbling curbs
our nearly new Ford leaned against
when we graced my mother’s 
best friend’s family with a visit.

And, of course, there was grandma,
our matriarchal Buddha,
God’s own made lady
perched in a front row pew
doling out prayers like parcels
of pity on her single party line 
direct to the Almighty.

She was ours.

Property is private.

They owned the problems.

We owned the solutions.

That’s what I believed
about my family and their family— 
the family of my mother’s best friend— 
a half century ago.

Today
I sit at the feet of my mother’s best friend:
90 going on 70,
husband long dead,
children folding her
like an origami flower
into the fabric of their lives
 
she owns the answers
to the questions I did not know 
how to ask then
and refuse to burden her with now.

She laughs, 
the correct answer to all questions unasked.

I miss your mom, she says,
she was my best friend.