I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready. Not ready.
The words flooded my brain in a useless mantra. Who is ever ready? Even through long illness and inevitable demise, the heart still hopes, like a child who still believes in magic.
Addled, I left without paying my bill at the bacon, lettuce, and overripe tomato café. I texted an apology to Suzanne for leaving her with the nosy copy editor and my check. She wrote back to ask if I was ok. I tried to reply, but the whole process of written telephone communication via a handheld device capable of technological tasks beyond imagination seemed suddenly ridiculous to me. Everything seemed ridiculous. As if all the effort to create plasma-TV screens, 3-D everything, cars that could parallel park themselves, and phones that could video chat while surfing the net and washing your dog was just a distraction from the fact that none of it can make you immortal. It’s all smoke and mirrors to hide the knowledge that your heart can still break, your eyes can still cry, and the people you love will leave you.
After the owl incident, the rest of the drive home takes on that surreal quality that things get after something weird has happened. Especially after something weird has happened in the midst of some life-altering milestone like the death of a parent.
A possum traipses out across the street as possums are known to do. I see it in enough time to slow down and let it pass, but it looks at me on its way across the blacktop like it has some knowledge of the owl incident of five minutes before.
Watch it, lady, the possum says to me, its voice the sarcastic rasp of a two-pack-a-day comedian. We’re supposed to be out here. You’re supposed to be at home. So take your carrot cake and your lemons and get yourself back inside your empty condo with the horrible lighting in the bathroom and the portfolio you hide under the couch but pull out and dream over when everyone else is asleep. By the way, Nina, you’re isolating yourself again—bad move.
I’m amazed at the level of insight for a possum.
I make it home without turning anything into roadkill and park in my usual spot in the bowels of the parking garage below my condo building. Jack, my newly ex-husband after a matter of several expensive months, used to park next to me in sort of a building-wide “you park there, I park here, and these are our spots” arrangement. Jack’s spot is still empty. I’m sure there’s much discussion over who will get his place, but so far no one wants to be the first to park there. They all know that parking there means my marriage is over, and they don’t want to be part of the fallout.
As promised, as soon as I get inside the condo I head for a knife and fork. As I’m slicing a piece of the cake and shoving off ideas of how I could have photographed it, my cell phone rings and a picture of my mother in a gaudy Christmas sweater lights the screen.
Mom is calling me after midnight. This isn’t good.
“I’m that woman again, Nina,” Mom says after perfunctory small talk, none of which addresses the time of night. “You know what I mean?”
“Not really,” I say and take my plate of false security onto the balcony.
I love the view from my balcony—downtown lit up in the near distance, Appalachian Mountains drawing a wavy line across the North Carolina sky. Tonight though, the mountainscape looks like the heartbeat on a hospital monitor.
“Back when you kids were little,” Mom says. “I was just so lonely.”
I go back inside to get the rest of the cake. I’m wrecked from months of visiting my father at the nursing home, from fighting with Jack, from reassuring our overly perceptive teenage daughter that everything will be fine. Wrecked from lack of sleep and tears in the middle of the day. Wrecked.
“Was Lola not awake?” I ask, back on the balcony again, looking out over the view that I’m going to have to give up now that I’m single and soon-to-be out of job—another reason for my daughter, Cassie, to hate me. Not that she cares about my job, but this building has a pool and teenage boys who live here and if we have to go live with Grandma then she’s just going to die, Mother. Do you hear me—die. Apparently this, all of this, is all my fault.
“I guess she’s asleep,” Mom says in confirmation that she’d rather be pouring out her sadness to her other daughter—the younger one, the more important one—but that I’ll have to do. “Back then,” Mom continues, “I was the only one of my friends to have kids. Everyone else was pursuing their career, and I was home changing diapers. I had dreams, too, you know.”
“Really?” I ask, actually interested. “Of doing what?”
“Exactly,” she says. “No one will ever know. Not even me.”
I sigh more heavily than I should.
“I’d see the women in their fancy business suits and high heels buying exotic foods at the grocery,” Mom continues, oblivious to me as usual. “They’d be carrying around that little basket that says ‘I don’t need to know what I’m eating next Tuesday because that’s Ashley’s bday and we’re all going downtown to celebrate.’”
“Who’s Ashley?” I ask.
“They’re all Ashley,” Mother spits into the phone and then puts on an old-school, Valley Girl voice. “Hi, I’m Ashley, I don’t think I invited you. Oh, and by the way, you have baby vomit on your shoulder.”
She does a fair job of sounding authentic, and I almost laugh. But I don’t laugh, even though it was funny. She needs to tell someone all these things, and secretly I’m glad that Lola missed her call. I’ll take being second choice right now just to be included.
“I
