On Thursday, August 21st, an unknown number called. I answered because I thought it was from work—I was finishing my quarterly tax returns and waiting for a call from the office.
It was Mom. But her voice was different than usual—low, rapid, as if someone could hear her.
“Lucynka, I’m calling from Janina, the neighbor. I’ve run out of blood pressure medication. Amlodipine and the other one, the white one. Wojtek was supposed to get a prescription, but he didn’t.”
“Mom, have Wojtek go to the pharmacy. Or have him call your doctor in Łódź; they’ll issue an e-prescription, you can get it anywhere.”
Silence. Then Mom said quietly:
“There’s no way to ask Wojtek. Because he’s angry.”
“What do you mean, angry?” What are you angry about?
“Lucynka, just bring me those medications. I still have some for my blood pressure, enough for two days. But bring them.”
I didn’t ask any more questions because I knew that tone. Mom used to say that when she didn’t want to explain. When she preferred to swallow the problem rather than name it.
I went to her apartment on Retkinia Street to get some spare bottles. In the drawer of her bedside table were two blisters of amlodipine and a pack of perindopril. Next to the prescriptions, carefully folded, with the dates written in marker. Mom was organized – she always had a two-month supply. If the medication ran out after three weeks, it meant she only brought enough for two.
Or maybe someone told her it was enough for two.
I left Łódź on Friday at six. I drove through Piotrków, then along side roads through villages whose names I remembered from childhood – because Wojtek had bought a house in the area where our parents had once had friends. This wasn’t his family’s village. It was a house Wojtek had bought eight years ago with the money from the sale of his father’s plot of land.
We never spoke directly about that plot of land. My father had left it to Wojtek, even though my husband and I had contributed to its upkeep for years. When my father died, Wojtek sold the plot of land within three months and bought a house in the countryside. He didn’t ask my mother if she wanted to live there. He didn’t ask me if I had any objections.
I arrived before nine. The house stood at the end of a gravel road, behind a wooden fence that Wojtek had painted green. From a distance, it looked nice – a house with a garden, hollyhocks by the window, an apple tree.
My mother stood at the gate.
With a bag.
Not the small one she uses to carry documents to the clinic. A large, navy blue one on wheels – the same one she’d gone with at the beginning of August. She stood erect, in a summer blouse and skirt, her face painted as if she were going to church. She was waiting.
“Mom, what…”
“Let’s go, Lucynka.”
“But I came to bring the medicine.”
“You’ll bring it. But I’m going with you.”
I saw that the bag was packed carefully—not hastily. The zipper was closed, the braided strap wrapped around the handle to prevent it from tangling. Mom had packed earlier. Maybe last night. Maybe even before she called me.
Before I could say anything, Wojtek came out of the house. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt, holding a mug of coffee. He didn’t look angry. He looked tired.
“Oh, you’ve arrived,” he said. No surprise, no joy. A statement of fact.
“I’ve arrived with medication for Mom.”
“What medication? I told you I’d take care of it.”
Mom remained silent. She stood next to her bag and looked away, at the field beyond the fence, as if the conversation didn’t concern her.
“Wojtek, Mom called to say she’d run out of amlodipine.”
“Well, she’s out. But I was supposed to go to town on Monday. What’s the problem? She could have lasted four days.”
Four days without blood pressure medication. For a seventy-eight-year-old woman. Four days.
I didn’t say it aloud. I knew Wojtek would say I was exaggerating. That Mom was being dramatic. That he worked hard here, and he still had to keep track of his pills.
We went into the kitchen. Inside, the house looked like a lonely man’s house—clean, but sloppy. A pot on the stove, a dishtowel on the back of a chair, a radio playing quietly in the background. There was a newspaper and an ashtray on the table.
“Does Mom smoke?” I asked quietly.
“No, it’s mine,” Wojtek shrugged.
Mom hated cigarette smoke. For years, she’d been asking my father, then Wojtek, to smoke outside. And here was the ashtray on the kitchen table.
The three of us sat down. Mom remained silent. Wojtek was drinking coffee. I searched for words.
“Mom, do you want to go home?” I asked directly.
“I do.”
“But she was supposed to be here until the end of August.” Wojtek set down a mug. “That’s what we agreed. I cook her food here, we sit in the garden in the evenings…”
“Wojtuś, you stay at the neighbor’s in the evenings,” Mom said calmly, without reproach. “I’m sitting alone.”
“Because Zdzisiek is inviting me, I won’t refuse.”
“You can’t refuse Zdzieś, but you can’t get me a prescription.”
That was the first sentence in which I heard anger from my mother. Quiet, controlled, honed over years. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t accuse. She stated a fact.
Wojtek blushed. Not with anger—with shame. I could see it clearly. He bit his lip, as if he wanted to say something but didn’t know what.
“I’ve been here all year alone,” he finally said. “Alone. No one comes, no one calls. I thought Mom would come, it would be more normal. And Mom just sits there waiting for you to call.”
I understood then something I didn’t want to understand. Wojtek didn’t take Mom to the country to let Mom rest. He took her so he wouldn’t be alone.
But he couldn’t ask for it. He couldn’t say, ‘It’s hard for me here, I’m lonely, I need someone.’ Instead, he organized a ‘vacation for Mom.’ And when Mom turned out to be a guest, not a companion, he was irritated. At her, at myself, at everything.
Mom rose from the table.
“Lucynka, will you help me carry my bag to the car?”
“Mom, you don’t have to…”
“I have to. I’m not resting here. I’m making sure Wojtek doesn’t think I’m ungrateful.”
I looked at her—a seventy-eight-year-old woman who had pretended to be fine for three weeks so as not to offend her son. Who had packed her bag the day before and waited by the gate because she knew she couldn’t call a taxi to the countryside on her own.
I carried the bag to the car. Mom sat in the front seat and fastened her seatbelt. Only then did she sigh—a long, deep sigh, as if she’d been holding her breath for three weeks.
Wojtek stood on the doorstep. He didn’t approach, didn’t wave. He held a cup of coffee and looked at us. He looked like someone who wanted to apologize but didn’t know why.
“Call him next week,” Mom said as we pulled onto the main road. “He’s not angry. He’s alone.”
We drove through the fields, and Mom told me how Wojtek spent the first week going for walks with her, showing her the garden, explaining what he’d planted where. How in the second week he started going out in the evenings, coming home late, sleep-deprived and irritable in the mornings. How in the third week he barely spoke to her.
“He couldn’t tell me he wanted me to stay longer, but in a different way.” Mom looked out the window at the passing villages. “And I couldn’t tell him I wanted to go home.”
Three weeks of silence. Two close people, sitting under the same roof, unable to say a single honest word to each other.
I drove Mom to Retkinia. I watered the flowers on the balcony—they survived, albeit barely. Mom took her medicine, checked her blood pressure, sat in her armchair, and turned on the TV.
“Lucynka, would you take me? For a week?” she asked, not looking at me.
My throat tightened.
“Mom, of course. Whenever you want.”
“In September. When he calms down a bit.”
I didn’t know if she was talking about the weather or Wojtek.
I called Wojtek on Monday. He answered on the fifth ring. He said, “Hi.” I said, “Hi.” We were silent for a moment, like Mom and Wojtek had been for the past three weeks. Then Wojtek cleared his throat and asked:
“Did Mom get here okay?”
“She did.”
“That’s good.”
Silence again. But this time—shorter. As if something inside her had snapped.
“Lucyna, I didn’t know she was so… I thought she was happy here. I meant well.”
I wanted to say—you should have asked. But I didn’t. Because I hadn’t asked for three weeks either.
“Wojtek, maybe you could come to Łódź on Saturday? To see Mom. Just for dinner, of course.”
He was silent for so long that I thought he’d hung up.
“Would Mom like to?”
“I’ll ask.”
I asked that same evening. Mom listened, looking at her flowers on the balcony, which had already sprouted new buds.
“Let him come,” she said. “I’ll make some broth. Just don’t let him smoke in the kitchen.”
It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t forgetting. It was something much more difficult—an invitation to try again.
