In Blood
Sivvy was an unusual child.
She could never please her mother; she stood too tall, walked with a straight, stiff spine. She reminded her mother of the spinsterly, gangly teachers she had put up with back on the farm.
Nothing she ever did could please the spitting cobra her mother could be.
***
Sivvy was a painfully bright girl. When she learned that her name was short for Sylvie and wondered what the point of having a nickname that eliminated one letter, her mother boxed her ear.
Life was a caravan of smoky clubs and bottles of gin. Sivvy was sickly, frustrating her mother to no end. She locked the girl in a closet while she made furtive love (if it could be called that) to sleazy patrons. They never got her anywhere.
Sivvy grew taller and brighter. She blossomed into a radiant flower, growing out of the dirt of the Depression.
***
Sivvy became a line worker in a factory. That necessitated ditching her mother during a Detroit gig. It was clear that she'd never marry, but she worked hard. Two children came into her life, and she raised them in her little yellow house by the rotary.
One day, while shopping for food, she heard a woman screaming her name. Pointing, yelling, her dress in tatters, she swore that this was her Sivvy, her baby, her child.
Sivvy did not turn her head.
***
Sivvy polished a silver frame before laying it with the others of its kind. Her children smiled back at her.
Her doorbell rang, and she signed for a package.
Inside lay a brassy urn with her mother's ashes.
There were things she would never forgive Roxie Hart for. Never telling her who her father was. Pushing her aside for her career was another.
But chief among them would be the most everlasting; she had the nerve to die before Sivvy could forgive her.