Home Is Burning (18 page)

They didn't have any yogurt.

I went outside to call Abby, hoping her sweet, angelic voice would soothe me. She was due to visit in a week or so, so I figured we could start planning her stay. I wanted to get out of the house for a little bit, as I was spending virtually all my time there. Right before my dad was diagnosed, he had purchased a condo in the resort town of Park City. So I figured we could go up there, drink wine, sit by the fire, and lounge around like a couple of in-love assholes. It would be a nice break. Abby answered after a couple of rings.

“Hey babe, what's up?” I said.

“Not much. Heading up to the lab.” Part of her Ph.D. required that she work up at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab on some laser, or particle accelerator, or some crazy shit I'll never understand.

“Great, I'm up at chemo with my mom. She's acting like an asshole, so I figured I'd talk to you about your visit, because that'll make me happy,” I explained.

She was quiet on her end, then finally said, “Listen, I decided I'm not going to be coming next weekend. I have Jody's birthday party to go to.” Jody was one of her new classmates.

“What? Fuck Jody,” I said.

“Well, it's important that I'm there for her.”

“It's important you're here for me. I'm going insane out here. My life is turning into shit. I need you. I miss you,” I pleaded.

“Listen, I'm almost at work. I'll call you later.” She abruptly hung up. I was shocked. I didn't see that coming. Abby seemed to be acting more and more distant about all of this. I guess she had her own life up and running, but still, I just wanted to see her. To crack jokes with her. To kiss her. To listen to her patented jaw clicks as she slept. To wake up next to her instead of a pissing cat.

*   *   *

After attempting to put a couple of puzzle pieces together while I burned through a bag of pretzels in the waiting room, I finally came back and sat next to my mom. I pulled out the notepad to jot down some thoughts. Some of this shit was just too weird to not write down. I wrote, “Boy, Mom can sure be a loudmouthed bitch,” and underlined it twice. I was still pretty angry and embarrassed about the shit stuff. It was one thing for her to wear the antlers, but to turn me into a prop?

I looked up at the loudmouthed bitch. She was asleep, already snoring lightly, her now brittle body working with the chemo chemicals to fight off the cancer. She looked so fragile, so vulnerable, as if it could all end at any second—which would leave me without a mom to tease me about eating shit.

Sometimes I forgot that she went through all of this—all the chemo, all the surgeries, all the ass-pounding diarrhea—just so her kids could still have a mom. That was always her goal. “Cancer isn't going to win. You kids need a mom,” she'd always say. “Plus, I don't want your dad out there fucking some other woman who you guys like more than me,” she'd add.

I think it was so important to her to be there for us because her own biological mother had left her at an orphanage in Blackfoot, Idaho, to be put up for adoption. Apparently, my mom's mom already had five children and just couldn't handle any more. I guess life can get overwhelming anywhere, even in Blackfoot. The nuns at the orphanage started calling her Debi and raised her for the first few months of her confusing, parentless life.

Eventually, some angels came along in the form of my grandparents, Rosie and Joe Mendiola (pronounced Men-dee-ol-a)—a couple of bighearted Basques from Twin Falls. Grandpa Joe ran a gas station, a Texaco, on the edge of town, and Grandma Rosie worked a variety of different jobs to help with the bills. They were simple blue-collar Catholic people who loved drinking beers and smoking cigarettes with their extensive Basque family, who all lived in Twin Falls or in neighboring towns. My grandma Rosie's ovaries were broken, so they couldn't have kids. They'd spent a few years crying about it before deciding that they should just adopt. After an expansive search, they finally came across the orphanage in Blackfoot. They and my mom were a perfect match: they wanted a child and she needed parents. They wanted to name her Francesca and call her “Frankie” for short, but since the nuns were already calling her Debi, they decided to stick with that name.

My grandparents later tried to adopt another kid, but couldn't. It was always just them and Little Debi, Little Debi Mendiola.

My mom didn't love being an only child, but she fought off the loneliness by making her best friend, Julie, and her next-door neighbor, Brook, her surrogate siblings. When she wasn't hanging with them, she'd read books and write. Being an only child at least helps build your imagination.

Because she was abandoned by her biological mother and an only child, she always felt like an underdog. Consequently, my mom developed a real me-versus-the-world attitude. “Little Debi versus the world,” I'd always say to her when she was in a fight with someone. She thought everyone and everything was out to get her. She turned into a very feisty and opinionated person who never fully trusted anyone. When she was diagnosed with cancer in 1992, she used that “Little Debi versus the world” attitude to fight it, pledging that cancer would never beat her or prevent her from being our loving and supportive mother.

When she was first diagnosed, I was such a sympathetic son. Anytime she got home from chemo, I'd go into our yard and pluck a rose off a thorny bush, not knowing how to show that I loved and supported her, that I had her back during this new fight.

I'm a very superstitious person. During all Jazz games I would rub an old rabbit's foot and wear a pair of purple Jazz wristbands. I wouldn't let anyone else so much as touch them. One year when my mom was starting chemo back up, I gave her the rabbit's foot and wristbands to hold as good luck charms.

“You need these more than I do,” I told her.

She started to cry, knowing that I was giving her some of my most treasured possessions.

“It's brought the Jazz lots of luck,” I said.

She pulled me in for a hug and pressed her wet-from-crying face against mine. “This means so much to me. I'll bring it to every chemo, Danny Boy.”

“Just, please keep on fighting, Mama Bear,” I said, also crying now.

“I will. I promise,” she said, her body shaking from the sobs.

I'd sit by her bedside, always telling her to keep on fighting, to push through so I could keep having a mom.

And she did.

Being a mom is hard work. Being a mom with cancer is even harder work—the hardest work. All of her limited energy went into being our mom, and she was wonderful. My dad did a lot of stuff, but she'd still cook dinner for us every night and make sure we had a nice, big steak at least once a week. She'd spoil us on birthdays and Christmases, turning what should've been minor happenings into grand events. “This might be my last Christmas, so we've got to have a big one,” she'd say as she unloaded presents under the tree. “We love you, Mom. Don't die,” we'd say. She was there for every special moment of our lives, right by our sides, encouraging us no matter what. Fuck, I remember her coming to all my basketball games throughout the years, even when she was going through treatment. She'd sit at the top of the bleachers with a turban atop her head and a surgical mask on her face, away from all the other parents because her white blood count was so low. “Way to go, Danny Boy,” she'd yell through her mask as loud as her little cancer lungs could manage.

As the years clicked by, she was still standing. But my siblings and I became desensitized to how amazing it was that she continued to fight. She had been telling us that it could be her last Christmas/her last birthday/her last Mother's Day for several years now. It started to feel like a boy-who-cried-wolf situation. It seemed that she was never going to die. Our mom had cancer. So the fuck what?

“I have cancer, you know,” she'd sometimes remind me.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sick of the cancer spiel, Little Debi,” I'd say back.

But the point remained. She did still have cancer. She was still our mom. She had managed to stay alive. And now the poor thing was losing her husband to Lou Gehrig's disease, facing a future where she'd have to continue to battle the disease/the world alone, as if she were an orphan again. She was in panic mode, not only about what life was like now, but also about what life was going to look like for her in a year or so. If she survived the cancer, she was going to potentially be faced with a whole new set of challenges. It was really going to be Little Debi versus the world. She was going to have to learn how to operate in a world without my dad at her side. My siblings and I couldn't stay around here forever. She would have to learn how to run the house. Pay the bills. File the taxes. Take care of the dogs. She had gone through hell, was going through hell, and had even more hell to go through.

And here I was, calling her an asshole, not giving her the support or love she needed, that she had earned and deserved. I needed to be more grateful.

I looked at the poor thing nestled into all the blankets. She looked worn down by life, her face like the fingertip of a kid who'd been in the swimming pool too long, her eyebrows like they'd been rubbed away by a giant eraser, her head all marked up like a damaged pumpkin from having various skin cancer spots removed.

I looked back down at my “loudmouthed bitch” comment.

Jesus, Dan, have a little sympathy, I thought.

I crossed out the comment, then ripped the page out, tore it to pieces, and tossed it in the garbage atop latex gloves, bandages, and syringes. My mom wasn't a loudmouthed bitch. She was a chemo warrior, a hero. If I ever got cancer I'd probably be like, Welp, guess I'm going to die, then ungracefully die in the most shameful and embarrassing bout with cancer ever recorded.

But not her. She cared about being our mom way too much to give up. So what if she made fun of me to the nurses. So what if she brought up that I used to shit in front of people for money. She had few joys left in her life. I couldn't take this one away from her. She had paid her dues. She liked to make people laugh. So what if it was at my expense.

My mom adjusted in her chair, causing the moose antlers to fall to the floor. I picked them back up, dusted them off, and placed them back on her cue ball head.

As I did, she woke up and half opened her eyes. “Hey, Danny Boy, you're still here, sweetheart?” she managed to say, her voice now groggy, as if she'd been asleep for a decade, as if her body were too weak to focus on anything but the fight with cancer.

“Sorry I woke you. Just putting your antlers back on,” I said.

She managed a smile. “Guess what I still have?”

She held up my old rabbit's foot I had given her years ago. “I bring it to every chemo. You were such a little sweetheart for giving it to me. And it's working, because the old bag is still kicking.”

I smiled back at her, a little teary eyed. “I know chemo sucks ass, but you'll fight through this round,” I said.

“Yeah, I can't leave you kids without a mom,” she said.

A nurse just starting her shift came over to check on all the tubing and machines and add a new pouch of chemo drugs. “I just love your moose hat,” she said.

My mom smiled as big as she could manage. “Thanks. Oh, this is my son, Danny.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, now a little friendlier than before.

“He went to Berkeley … but he's not as smart as he looks. One time I caught him eating his own shit out of his diaper,” the Cancer Comedian said.

The nurse and I laughed as I nodded to confirm the story, my face red again. “You are too funny. My goodness, Debi. What would we do up here without you?”

“And he used to shit for money,” my mom said as she smiled and closed her eyes to go back into her chemo coma. “He made twelve dollars once.”

The nurse looked at me as if I was insane. I just shrugged.

“She's a real fighter. You should be proud of her,” the nurse said.

“I am.”

I stopped at Shivers on the way home and got her the biggest Diet Coke they sell.

 

A VISIT TO THE QUEEN B

My dad and I were spending a lot of time around his office finalizing some things before the ALS tsunami completely swept through. He was still in the process of selling his newspaper business. He had a buyer, so they were just working through the last details. Over the years, his newspaper business not only earned him a nice living, but also kept him occupied and gave him an excuse to get out of the house and away from his wife and his little asshole children. His work had also been his dream. His father had been in the newspaper business. He was in the newspaper business. Plus, he was good at it. It was sad to see it go. If only he were as good at not getting Lou Gehrig's disease as he was at his job, we wouldn't have been in this damn mess.

Although we now had the communication device, my dad didn't like using it. It was more for down the road, so he could talk like Stephen Hawking when he started to look like him. Our family could understand him, but strangers couldn't. A lot of “What?”s and silences greeted anything he said. So, at the office I ended up acting as a translator while he talked over the phone to the lawyers and businessmen about selling the papers.

“We received the noncompete forms and will sign them,” my dad would say.

“What?” the lawyers and businessmen on the other end of the phone would say.

“We received the noncompete forms and will sign them,” I would say.

“Who's that?” the lawyers and businessmen would ask.

“That's my son Dan. He's helping me around the office because I can't speak or move very well,” my dad would then labor.

“What?”

“I'm Bob's son Dan. I'm just helping him out around the office because of the Lou Gehrig's disease and whatnot. I'm a hero of sorts,” I'd say.