A Mother's Day Confession

If I could talk to my mother one more time I'd tell her I love her, of course.

Then I'd confess to a crime that's more than a half-century old: I was the one who ruined the finish on her beloved 1950 Chevy.

I never had the courage to admit my guilt when she was alive.

Like most households in the 1960s, we were a one-car family. Trouble was, unlike most families, my mother worked.

Dad took the station wagon to his job each morning, leaving us stranded in a small, rural town that didn't even have mail delivery.

That also left my mother hoofing it to her job as the drive-in window teller at Farmers National Bank – on the far side of town.

Even though she was only visible from the waist up, my mother always wore stockings and 3-inch pumps. It was the '60s, after all. People actually dressed up for their jobs.

Yet that mile-long, high-heeled hike left her feet swollen and tender at night.

For years, she begged my dad to buy her a car – what can I say, even working women asked permission back then – and he finally found one for her: an ancient black sedan that looked like it rolled out of a gangster movie.

It didn't have power steering or an automatic transmission, but my mother didn't care. She hopped in that black behemoth every morning, stomped on the clutch and drove herself to work. A wide, I-have-my-own-car smile on her face.

One hot summer day she took me on a shopping trip in her Chevy. We rolled down the windows and aimed the vents at our sweaty bodies.

As usual, I was chewing Bazooka bubble gum. When it lost its flavor I spit it out the window. I don't do that any longer. No need for indignant comments.

What I didn't realize was that the gum made it only as far as the rear door. There it stuck, a fat pink blob on a jet-black body.

I didn't notice it when I hopped out of the car in the sunny parking lot. And it was hours before we returned.

We both spotted the masticated mess at the same moment.

"Son of a sea cook!" my mom shrieked, using her favorite expletive. "Look what some slob did. He spit bubble gum on my car.

"What kind of a person would do such a thing?"

A boy, clearly.

I worried for a moment that she'd recognize my teeth marks, but she didn't.

Instead, she reached into her purse, extracted a tissue and tried to pick the gooey blob off the sizzling body.

Naturally, the tissue stuck.

Horrified, I was just about to confess – honest, I was – when my mother did something totally unexpected.

She started to cry. Right there in the Sears parking lot, with her bags strewn on the pavement.

There was no way this 10-year-old was going to accept responsibility for a mother's tears. So I enthusiastically joined in the condemnation of the culprit to cover my tracks.

"We should call the police," I suggested, "this is serious."

"It's too late," she sniffled. "Whoever did this is long gone."

"You could go to jail for something like this, couldn't you?" I ventured.

"I hope so," she replied.

I shivered.

We drove home in silence. Later, my parents worked to remove the goop using ice cubes and a putty knife. My dad waxed the car, but a dull spot, where the gum had been stuck, remained as long as we owned that Chevy.

A constant reminder of my cowardice and bad manners.

"I'd love to get my hands on the person who did that," my mother said from time to time, scowling at the blemish on her beloved car.

My mother could climb trees, ice skate and walk miles in high heels. There was no way I was letting Superwoman get her hands on me with the worst kind of a confession: A belated one.

I could have told my mom about the gum years later, of course. By then she'd given her heart to a Chrysler New Yorker convertible and that old Chevy – her first car – was just a memory.

Who knows, she might have laughed.

But – weasel that I am – I never took the chance.

A version of this column appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on May 13, 2017.