“Close the door,” you said.
I did, then turned back to you.
“I hope this isn’t about that one time at my house,” you said. “That was fun. It was a birthday present. I assume you weren’t planning on us gettingmarried.”
And then you laughed, a small chuckle, like it was a joke to you. I was a joke to you.
As ifIwas the one being unreasonable. I wasn’t even talking about that time we were together. It didn’t evenoccurto you that I meant something, someoneelse.
“What about... my mother?” I said, choking out the words.
“Oh.” You broke eye contact. “It’s a difficult situation for everyone, with your mother being so sick. I get that. I’m not trying to get in the middle of that. I’m not.”
“But you... already are.”
“Look.” You got out of the chair and walked over to me. “Understand, your dad and mom’s relationship is different now. You know what I mean. But he’s never going to leave her. He’s never going to stop taking care of her. I’m just a different part of his life.”
But his life was with Mom. Mom and Dad, ’til death do they part.
You raised a hand, as if taking a vow. “I will never do anything that would make your father leave your mother. He’ll always be with her. He’ll always take care of her. He’ll alwaysloveher. I would never in a million years interfere with that.”
I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t believe, couldn’t comprehend your reaction. People acted this way? People thought this way?
I wanted to yell, to cry, to grab you and do something violent to you. But my feet remained planted. My throat felt so thick and heavy I could hardly breathe. It felt like a nightmare, where you want to scream but can’t summon your voice.
You looked at your watch. “Bill needs me for a deposition. I’m already late.”
I didn’t move. You grabbed your stuff and walked past me. Me, the immobile statue, the stupid kid, the impotent, useless fiddler while Rome burned around me.
It was the last time I laid eyes on you for nineteen years.
—
Three months later. The day before Thanksgiving, 2003. I talked to my mother until she fell asleep in her bed, gently snoring, lying on her back.
Then I put on a coat and gloves and went outside for some air, onto the back patio. The temperatures had dropped, but I didn’t care. I always wanted fresh air after putting my mother to bed. I needed to smell something different, feel something different. I’d never been sick, really sick, so I couldn’t imagine what that was like. But I certainly knew how it felt to watch someone you love deteriorate.
I’d had some time to get used to it. It had been more than a year since her stroke. What made it harder, these last few months, was that I was going to school every day, starting college at the U of C, experiencing all the nerves and excitement and rigors of a new academic and social environment—starting my life, in many senses—while my mother was withering away at home with a shit for a husband.
The wind whipped up outside. I put my face into it, let it carry my hair, let it sink inside my coat. I stood there, eyes closed, for some time.
It was only when I turned to go back inside that I saw it. On a table next to our gas grill.
A bottle of champagne, empty. And two glasses, tinted red—flutes, they call them, but cheap ones, plastic, the kind you’d buy at a convenience store for a picnic or outdoor concert.
Except my mother didn’t drink alcohol, not since the stroke. She couldn’t.
Two glasses, not one. Two plastic, red-tinted glasses.
I walked over and stared at it. A bottle of Laurent-Perrier ultra brut champagne. I had no idea about champagne, if Laurent-Perrier was some fancy brand or something cheap—but I did know that it wasn’t the kind of thing you usually drank with your buddies on the back porch.
I wiped my mouth and stood and stared at the bottle, at those twin plastic glasses, for so long that my body started trembling from the cold.
Then I went inside and grabbed a plastic garbage bag. I returned outside and swept the bottle and two glasses inside the bag and tied it off, praying my mother never saw any of this.
I didn’t say a word to my father that night. I just went to my room and closed the door.
—