Before I Go (18 page)

Angela’s mother furrowed her brow and I knew she didn’t believe me. She glanced at her watch, and I was terrified she was going to say she’d wait. But she didn’t.

She nodded, as if she had made a decision about something, grabbed Angela’s hand, and gingerly stepped her way back to the front door. Then she turned around. “You tell your mother that I’ll be back,” she said, and narrowed her eyes at me. The thinly veiled threat hung in the air between us.

When she shut the door behind her, the heat of shame blossomed up my face and I looked around at the den, seeing it with Angela’s mom’s eyes—unable to see it again through my own.

I spent the entire afternoon scrubbing and vacuuming and washing dishes and dusting and bagging newspapers and laundering sheets. I even moved a chair into the hallway, and standing on my tiptoes on the seat of it, I was just barely able to screw the light fixture back into place.

When my mother got home that night, long after the moon had made its appearance, she entered the house through the door between the carport and the kitchen. I heard her keys clatter on the now-glistening countertop.

“Daisy-bear?”

“Yeah,” I called from my perch on the couch. I beamed, waiting for her to shower me with gratitude and praise for our new, sparkling house.

“Did you do your homework?” she called out.

“Yes,” I said. Maybe she hadn’t looked up yet. Maybe she was still flipping through the mail that she carried in with her each night.

She appeared in the doorway of the den and looked at me. The purple circles under her eyes were more pronounced in the evening. “Did you have a good day, sweetheart?”

I nodded. I knew I should tell her about Angela’s mother. Ask her what I should do if she came back. But Mom looked so tired. And I couldn’t bear to burden her with one thing more.

“I’m so glad,” she said, giving me a weak smile. Her eyes scanned the room, and I waited for them to brighten, for her to be overcome with the marked difference between now and when she left it that morning. “You picked up,” she said.

I nodded again. If I were a dog, my tail would have been thumping the floor in rapid-fire succession. “You’re a good daughter.” There they were—the words I’d been waiting for, the reward for my hard work—but the emotion behind them was flat. And I couldn’t understand why, instead of brightening, her face appeared even more defeated. She walked behind the couch, leaned down, and kissed the crown of my
head. “Go do your teeth. It’s bedtime.” She padded off down the hall and I stood up. But instead of following her, I walked the opposite direction into the kitchen. I got a hammer and a nail from the junk drawer, and with my tiny fingers, I gently tapped the nail into the wall beside the door. Then I picked up Mom’s keys from where they were splayed on the counter and hung them on the new metal peg.

“ALMOST DONE.” A voice jerks me out of my past.

I open my eyes and focus my gaze on the long tube protruding from my mouth. I know it’s jammed all the way down my throat and—even though I can’t feel it—I fight the urge to gag.

A hand rests on my shoulder. “It’s OK,” the nurse says. “Relax.” Her tone is warm, soothing, and I feel bad for thinking poorly of her before. She sounds nice.

I notice a slight pressure to the right above my abdomen and then nothing.

“There,” she says, patting me again. “All done.”

I try to raise my eyes to look at her, but my lids feel heavy and I have the absurd thought to prop them open with my fingers. I resist the impulse.

“Tired?” the nurse asks. “We gave you a light sedative. It should wear off shortly.”

As she threads the plastic tubing backward out of my throat, Dr. Jafari’s voice cuts in from beside me. “You did great. Tonya here will wheel you to the recovery room, go over a few postop details with your mom, and then you’ll be on your way home in no time.”

I want to say OK or thank you or something to acknowledge that she has spoken, but I can’t make my voice work in conjunction with the opening of my mouth, so I shut it and don’t say anything.

In the recovery room, Tonya rattles off instructions from a clipboard.
“You may notice some discomfort where we placed the stent over the next few days, but if your stomach gets hard or swollen or you start vomiting, call us immediately. Ditto if you have a fever, chills, or any severe pain.”

I nod like an obedient child but I’m not really listening to her. She has nice hair. Big soda-can-size curls that she obviously spent some time perfecting in a mirror before she left her house that morning. And she’s a nurse, which means she’s good at looking after people and disinfecting things. I wonder if Jack would find her attractive—her hips are wide and round.

Childbearing hips.

The phrase enters my mind, unbidden. I need to add to my list—a woman who wants children. And doesn’t mind ant farms.

Just as I’ve decided that yes, Jack would like her, Tonya hands over the postop checklist and the diamond-studded gold band on her left ring finger neutralizes my thoughts. Great. So far my contenders for Jack’s wife are a maybe-lesbian, a few smiling head shots of Jack’s colleagues whom I’ve never met, and a woman who’s already married.

On the way home, Mom reaches over and pats my leg. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” I say, inching away from her and closer to the door.

“But do you—”

“Mom! I said I’m fine.”

She nods and we ride in silence for a few minutes until she begins to fill the empty air with tales of Mixxy and the latest Giada recipe she re-created (“It was too tomatoey. And I don’t think I like capers.”) and the ending of the Mary Higgins Clark book she just read. Then she tells me that she’s recently joined the Atlanta Audubon Society and she’s going to attend her first bird-watching field trip this weekend. “I really only leave the house for work,” she says. “I need to get out more.”

I murmur a reply, but sit up a little straighter. That’s it.

If I’m going to find Jack a wife, I need to get out more. I need to widen my net. I’m not going to meet anyone by staring at strangers on campus or going to the same yoga class I’ve been going to for years or getting procedures done at the doctor’s office. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but then it occurs to me that I’ve never had to date before. Not really. I met Jack when I was twenty. A baby. And he was the first real adult relationship I’d had—unless I count Adam, my “friend with benefits” who lived in the dorm beside mine my freshman year. My roommate assured me that this was what everyone did in college. But after a few short weeks, when I realized I knew how Adam curled his lip and whinnied like a horse when he came, but had no idea what he ate for breakfast, I ended it.

I need to get out. But it’s more than that. I need to know where to go. And whom to look for. And what to do.

I need to learn how to date.

And I know, as much as I hate to admit it, that there’s only one person who can help me.

I need Kayleigh.

eleven

T
URNS OUT MIXXY’S cut is infected. Jack says he needs to run her up to his clinic to bandage her paw (“She has to stop licking it if it’s going to heal,” I overheard him instruct Mom in the living room) and pick up a round of antibiotics.

“You’ll be OK?” he asks, sitting beside me on our bed. He rubs the back of my hand with his thumb.

I shrug him off. I’m only lying in bed because Mom won’t let me get up, not even to do a load of laundry. I tell Jack this, adding a smirky: “Doctor’s orders.” I sigh. “I’m so glad she’s leaving in the morning.”

It’s a sentiment I would have never voiced in elementary school, when I swallowed envy as other moms sewed costumes for school plays and made pineapple upside-down cakes for bake sales and were chaperones for field trips to pick-your-own berry farms and art museums. I nearly shook like a timid puppy with my own desire to have her reassuring hand smooth my hair or to put my head in her lap on the rickety seat-belt-less bus that we traveled in to our destinations. But I never told her that. There wasn’t enough room in our tiny house to hold all of our sadness, so I did everything I could to alleviate hers and basked in the attention I received for my efforts. “I don’t know
where she came from,” I overheard Mom whisper to Aunt Joey on one of their ritual Sunday-night long-distance phone calls, her voice cracking. “She’s just so . . . responsible.”

By high school, we had evolved into something resembling roommates more than mother and daughter. While my peers were fighting for later curfews and driving privileges, I was essentially running a house—ironing Mom’s pleated pants, trying new recipes for dinner from her Weight Watchers cookbook, admiring the parallel vacuum lines that I etched into the carpet every second Saturday that I spent deep-cleaning, and reminding her every three thousand miles to get her oil changed.

“You worry too much, Daisy-bear,” she’d say to me, but the unorthodox role reversal worked for us—until she met George. He was a car mechanic with a handlebar mustache, skinny arms, and a round belly. And the first time I saw him make Mom smile was like seeing the sun after living underground for ten years. George moved in with us when I was in the tenth grade and encouraged Mom to go back to school for her two-year degree—which is exactly how long their relationship lasted. “Not everyone’s meant to be together forever,” she said when I asked her why he was leaving. I was worried she’d revert back to her old self, but she never did. He had changed her. Or she had changed herself. And that changed us.

It was like some dormant momness had been jolted awake inside her, and like a peacock, she felt the overwhelming urge to display it all at once. On the Richter scale of parenting, she was suddenly a ten, insisting on driving me up to UGA for my first semester of school and decorating my dorm room with Target pillows and lamps and picture frames, then calling every day to make sure I was studying and not partying too hard or sleeping with inappropriate boys. I didn’t resent it as much as I just didn’t know how to respond to it. It was like we had been doing the fox-trot our entire life and Mom suddenly switched to
the tango. I didn’t know the steps. So I ignored most of her phone calls and her advice, while continuing to navigate my life the only way I’d ever known how—alone.

And then I got cancer. And I had no choice but to finally let her be the mother she had so desperately been trying to be, because for once I couldn’t completely take care of myself and I didn’t think it was fair to depend entirely on Jack and Kayleigh. So I let her come drive me to a few appointments and slather my dry skin with lotion, but I drew the line at spoon-feeding me broth and holding my hair when I threw up.

And now, here we are again—with her trying to squeeze in as much mothering as I’ll allow, leaving me to believe it’s no coincidence that only one letter changes the word to “smothering.”

“She is leaving?” Relief floods Jack’s face. “She was just saying something about staying the weekend.”

I sigh again. “I already told her that wasn’t necessary.”

“I can see how she would think it might be,” Jacks snaps. “She probably thinks I’m the worst husband ever. You should have let me take you today.” Since I didn’t let him come down to Emory for my trial workup, he had been single-minded in his determination to accompany me to the stent procedure. But I was just as determined not to let him miss any more clinic and jeopardize his chances of graduating on time.

I shake my head. “School comes—”

“—first,” he finishes. “Yeah.”

He stares at me and I feel like a glass slide in his lab, beneath his microscope lens. The sensation that I could break at any second under his gaze is constant and exhausting. At least he’s given up trying to be romantic. After my rebuff of his uncharacteristic dinner invite, Jack’s been working his usual hours—maybe even more than usual, and I wonder if it’s because he wants a break from playing the concerned husband as much as I want a break from being the pitiable,
dying wife. I’m relieved when Mom pops her head into view, declaring that I have a visitor.

Kayleigh steps into the room, her neon-pink shirt as loud as her voice. “What the hell? I have to get announced around here? It’s like getting an audience with the queen.” She curtsies at the foot of my bed.

“Hey, Kayleigh,” Jack says, acknowledging her presence without really looking at her. When I first started dating Jack, I had a naive wish that he’d love Kayleigh as much as I did and the three of us would seamlessly become best friends, taking cross-country road trips and finishing each other’s sentences like some kind of NBC sitcom. But it didn’t exactly work out like that. “Does he ever, like, actually speak?” Kayleigh asked after first meeting him. I tried to explain about his social anxiety and that he warmed up after you got to know him. “She’s a little, uh . . . in your face,” was Jack’s assessment, destroying the last vestiges of my perfect-friend-triangle fantasy.

Since then, they’ve learned to tolerate each other, even though Jack still sometimes questions our friendship after spending extended amounts of time with her. “You guys are just so . . . different.” I’ve given up trying to explain that what we have in common is our whole lives.