by B. E. Baker
He shrugs. “It’s nothing.”
“We’re going to see my mom,” I whisper. “She’s got early onset Alzheimer’s and it’s pretty bad. I hope Megan’s right. I hope she’s having a good day, because it’s my parents’ anniversary.”
Trig’s eyes widen and he wraps one arm around my shoulders. I feel something different then. Something I can’t identify.
“And the Tupperware?” he asks.
“Peach cobbler,” I say. “My parents didn’t have much of a budget when they got married, so my Aunt Jane made them a cobbler instead of buying a fancy wedding cake. We’ve celebrated with peach cobbler every year since. It took them a long time to have me. My mom miscarried a lot. But even so, I’ve been around for twenty-six celebrations. This would have been their thirty-third year married if my dad hadn’t passed.”
He leans down and kisses my forehead. “I’m glad I can share this with you.”
I march down the hall toward Mom’s room, my shoulders squared. I’m prepared for her to have no idea who I am. Or at least, I’m as prepared as I can be.
When I round the corner and walk into her room, she’s wearing a bright yellow dress and her hair’s brushed and pulled back. She turns toward me and her eyes light up.
“Geode! You remembered.”
I will not cry. I will not cry. My mom’s here today, here with me and I won’t waste any time being sad.
I let go of Trig’s hand to race across the room and hug her. “You look beautiful, Mom. Yellow has always been your best color.”
She squeezes me tightly and then pulls back to look at me. “Every color is your color with those eyes and that hair. My beautiful, beautiful little baby.” She turns back toward the doorway. “And who’s this handsome man?”
“I’m Geo’s boyfriend, Mrs. Polson. My name is Trig, and I’m happy to meet you.” Trig strides across the room and holds out a hand to shake.
My mom swishes around me and pulls him in for a hug. “It’s wonderful to meet you, Trig. Wait, Trig? Geo and Trig? You two sound like notes for a math class.” Her laugh is warm.
“I never thought of that,” I say. “I guess we do.”
Trig slides his arm around my shoulders again. “We fit together really well. Names are just the beginning.”
“I can see that,” Mom says. “I’ve been so worried about her over the past few years. She shut down after Mark, you know, closed herself off entirely. You must be a pretty special guy to bring her to life like this.”
Trig’s eyes shutter and he nods. “Thank you, Mrs. Polson. I appreciate that. You have a very unique daughter.”
“Of course I do.” She notices the albums he’s carrying under his free arm. “Have you seen her as a child yet? Maybe we should have let those agencies photograph her. We could have been millionaires if we had, I bet. She was much prettier than Shirley Temple ever was. And she can sing, too. Has she ever sung for you?”
I shush her, but Trig looks like he’s not going to let that drop for good. I groan. “Mom, stop.”
She reaches for an album and sits on her bed. I sit on one side, and Trig settles down on the other. If he’s uncomfortable about sitting on her bed, he doesn’t show it.
Mom wastes no time opening the old books. “Look here.” She points. “Look at those eyes.”
I’m three or four maybe in the photo, wearing a swimsuit that’s clearly too small, my hair surrounding my face in a messy halo of ink. She traces my face with a finger, her eyes soft. My heart swells so big I can’t take it, so I hop up, open the cobbler and flag down an aide for some bowls and spoons. “Happy Anniversary, Mom.”
“Thanks, G. Your dad would be just as proud of you as I am. I wish he was here.”
So do I.
“But at least his death brought you back home to me.”
I shake my head. “I moved back when you got sick, Mom. Over a year before Dad passed.”
“Oh that’s right,” she says, patting my arm. “I remember. I’m sorry you had to give up that big fancy job.”
“I get by just fine, Mom.”
“Fine, yes. Everything is fine.” Her finger traces the photos on the next page absently.
I glance up nervously and sure enough, her eyes have become glazed. My throat closes up. Hang on a little longer Mom. I need you so much, especially right now. I want to know what you think about Trig. I want to tell you I’m finally planning a wedding, and even if it hurts like the slice of a blade sometimes, I’m doing it. I want to know what I should do about Rob, and how I’m supposed to talk to him now.
I know I’m not a baby. I’m not a kid. I’m a grown woman, but I need my mom more than ever right now.
But when I look at her, she blinks and blinks. “Have I had lunch already? Because I don’t think I’m supposed to eat cake until I’ve eaten lunch.”
I inhale several times. “No, Mom, it’s me, Geo. And it’s not cake. I brought cobbler because it’s January 26.”
“Of course it’s cobbler, but that’s in the cake family, isn’t it? I’m not an idiot.”
“You’re one of the smartest people I know,” I say.
She frowns at me. “How do I know you?”
I choke on a sob. “My name is Geo.”
“Your name is Geo you said? I have a daughter named Geode, but we call her Geo sometimes.”
I nod then. If I keep insisting I’m someone she doesn’t know me as, she gets irritable. “That’s amazing. It’s not a common name. She must have been a special person.”
“She is a special person. She’s not dead.”
“No, of course not,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
A tear forms in my eye and I wipe it away as quickly as I can. I should be happy for the fifteen minutes I had, but it’s never enough, not really. It’s never what I need.
So I try to be what she needs instead, because that’s something I can control. Trig helps. He’s completely calm and personable. Mom thinks he’s a new employee and flirts shamelessly, but it could have gone so much worse. Sometimes she gets scared that she can’t remember things and that makes her mad.
It’s really hard when she’s angry.
We look over her wedding album and listen to her recount details about her wedding day that I’ve heard a million times and could share myself, word perfect. I think back to all the times she shared the details with me as a kid, Dad stopping her to interject things here and there.
Once she’s told the story of how they met, I stand up and thank her for sharing her peach cobbler with us.
“I’m not so sure I should have eaten that,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve had lunch yet, and they’re very strict about that here.”
“You haven’t,” I say, “but one day a year of sweets before lunch is okay. It’s a special day.”
She nods. “Yes, you only get married once.” Her eyes meet mine. “I hope my daughter gets married one day. I really want to see that. She was engaged before, you know, but the fellow died off at war in Iraq or somewhere. I forget some of the details.”
I pat her arm. “It’s okay, Mom.”
“Geode?” Her eyes widen. “Is that you?”
I hug her tightly and blink back more tears. “It’s me, Mom. I came to wish you a Happy Anniversary.”
I leave the albums there. The staff knows to collect them when she takes a nap so she won’t get angry and destroy them. I’ll collect them next Monday at my weekly visit.
Trig pulls me against him the moment we’re in the hallway and wraps one arm over my shoulders. “You’re brave, Geo. So brave.”
He keeps his arm over my shoulders as we walk down the hall and out to the parking lot. He walks me to the passenger side of the car and opens the door, but instead of letting me slide into my seat, he pulls me against him, my face pressed to his chest.
Something breaks inside and I sob against his chest. “I wish you could have met her before.”
“Me too,” he says. “But even today, it was obvious she’s a wonderful
lady.”
“It’s gotten so much worse now that my dad’s gone. He centered her somehow,” I say. “In a way I can’t, and he always knew what to say and do. Half the time, she gets so mad at me, and I make it worse.”
“You’re going. You’re there for her. That’s enough.” He finally releases me and I slide down into the car, numb.
Once he gets in, he leans over and buckles my seatbelt. “Are you okay to head for the airport? Or do you want to stop somewhere? Get some tea, or maybe I don’t know, a stiff drink?”
I laugh. “That’s kind. I’m fine though. I’m sorry I’ve already made you as late as I have. Let’s head for the airport.”
He stares at me for a moment, but then he puts the car in gear and pulls out of the parking lot and toward the freeway.
“It seems like your parents were really happy,” he says.
“They were. We all were.”
“I’m sorry your dad passed. You’re lucky to have had the time you did, though.”
I don’t usually think of it like that, and I realize he’s right. A lot of people didn’t get twenty-five really good years. “Are your parents both alive?”
He nods. “They are.”
“And are they still married?”
He nods his head, lips pressed into a tight line, eyes flinty.
“That face isn’t promising. Are they not happy together?”
He barks a laugh. “Not even anything approaching happy. I honestly have no idea why they ever got married. Lust, maybe. That might have been enough back then. Mom looked pretty enough in the photos of her early twenties, I suppose. The hair throws me, but I guess it was normal for that time.”
I raise one eyebrow. “You don’t sound like you like her much.”
He shakes his head. “I know it sounds awful, especially to you. If you’d met my mom, you might get it. Mom’s… a little hard to like. The only person I can think of in the world who sort of likes my mom is Brekka.”
A deep sense of pity that he doesn’t even love his own mother rises up within me. “Surely you have some nice memories?”
“None that I can think of. She hates my dad, and Brekka and I were always a major imposition. Mom and Dad are rarely in the same place anymore and when they are, there’s a lot of alcohol to lubricate the space around them. Mom runs the company, and Dad, well. Dad runs up credit card bills.”
What in the world? “Why don’t they just get divorced?”
“You can thank the Thornton family trust’s prenup for that one.”
“I don’t understand.” But it reinforces my belief that prenups are a death knell for any marriage. I wonder whether Mary’s signing one. I don’t think I’ll even ask. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
“Grandpa Thornton made Mom sign a prenup. Standard fare for my family. No prenup, no wedding.”
“Okay, so your dad could still divorce her, right? Why wouldn’t he?”
“That would be too easy,” Trig says. “My dad grew up spoiled. He’s a trust baby to the core. He spent every dime he was allowed every quarter and then asked his parents for more. When he married my mom, Grandpa and MaMa hoped he’d settle down and spend a little less on partying.”
“Didn’t happen?”
Trig shrugs and I wish I could reach through time and hug little boy Trig. His eyes look so hurt, even now. “Maybe it did, for a while anyway, but it didn’t last. What they didn’t count on was my mother. They didn’t even know she had an MBA when Mom and Dad got married. Mom took an active interest in family finances, not in spending it so much, but in management of the trust corpus. She convinced Dad to give her half his allowance, and she tripled that in the first year. He gave her more the next year. Then Grandpa gave her some, too. Pretty soon Mom was running everything.”
“She sounds like an impressive woman.”
He nods. “Impressive describes Mom to a T. But she’s also heartless, ruthless, and devious. Dad didn’t realize how mean she could be until she caught him with a girlfriend the first time. I think Dad was relieved, honestly. I was seven. I remember because Mom was pregnant with Brekka, and everyone assumed she’d divorce him.”
“Why didn’t she?”
Trig’s mouth twists. “She couldn’t walk away from the empire. She could never amass anywhere near the money she was managing at that point, and she didn’t have a job to put on a résumé, since she was managing family finances. Besides, for Mom it’s never been about spending money. It’s about controlling it. Doubling it. Tripling it. Growing things. If she divorced my Dad, she’d be reduced to a few paltry million.”
“If your dad was relieved when she found out, why didn’t he divorce her? Surely he could have.”
Trig exhales in disgust. “Mom loved running things and feeling powerful, and Dad had grown accustomed to the boost to his allowance. If she left, he’d have to scale his lifestyle way back from his new normal. By then, almost every family asset was managed by Mom, who they all knew would never cheat them or steal from them. Besides not being able to part with the golden goose, no one else had any idea what to do with their assets now that she’d been handling them alone.”
“I always thought being rich made everything easy.”
He shakes his head. “I know, poor little rich kid. No one feels sorry for me because most people have things much harder. I’m not trying to engender pity, but my home life wasn’t perfect, and that old adage is actually true. Money can’t buy everything.”
I take his hand in mine. “Marriage isn’t always bad.”
“My parents’ certainly is. They’re locked in some kind of Sisyphean cycle of earning and spending.”
I gulp. Maybe I’m lucky my poor parents had each other. Even if I can barely afford to pay my Mom’s nursing home bill each month.
“Can I ask you something?” Trig’s eyes are focused on the road, but his voice is tentative, like what he says next matters to him.
“Sure,” I say, thinking how Paisley said I’m a closed book.
“I know it’s none of my business, but I’ve been wondering since you mentioned it to Rob. What’s the Phineas Enrollment?”
I turn to look out the window. “Just the name I can put to my crushed hopes and dreams.”
Trig’s head whips toward me in concern. “What?”
I force a laugh. “I’m just being stupid and melodramatic. There was a clinical trial that’s getting amazing results in California. Milton Phineas is the director. They’re enrolling patients here in Atlanta, but I couldn’t afford it. That’s why I took the gig for this stupid wedding. I can finally afford to enroll Mom, but when I called to tell her doc to do it, the enrollment period had closed early. I guess they had an overwhelming response.”
“What were the goals of the trial?” he asks quietly.
“They perform an injection that helps stabilize the patients. It practically ensures a lucid window of two to six hours once a week. They’re hoping to figure out how to increase that obviously, but can you imagine?” I meet his eyes reluctantly. “My mom would actually be my mom. Every week.”
“Time. The trial would have given you back some of the time Alzheimer’s stole.”
He understands.
14
Trig
When I download all my emails to review on my flight, I notice there’s an email from Scott. I glance at Geo before opening it, but she’s engrossed in something on her laptop. I open the email.
No progress on the details of the Phineas enrollment, so I broadened the scope to investigate target’s life for clues. List of possible matches attached. Dossier on target acquired. Scott.
My finger pauses over the file. I could open this and read almost every detail about Geode from birth to present day. Images collected from the web, her grades and school attendance, social media posts, everything. My finger shakes. I’m greedy, starving, and desperate to find out every detail that I can.
Then I think about Geo’s face when she confessed that her mother was in a nursing
home. The way her lip trembled and she blinked back tears. And when she told me she was too late for the trial. And when she confessed her fiancé died and she got the news on Valentine’s Day.
I don’t want to read all the secret details about her life. I want to find out how things happened and how they shaped who she is today, and how she feels about them now. I don’t want to dig up her secrets. I want her to share them with me in her own time, when she trusts me with them. I want to earn that trust. Not undermine it.
I delete the email.
And then I swear under my breath. I still need Scott to look into the Phineas Enrollment. Idiot. I shoot him an email asking him to get me every detail he can on the clinical trial for Alzheimer’s in Atlanta.
I want details on how to add an enrollee, I tell him specifically, and if it really is past entry time, I want to know how to widen that window so we can add a late enrollee.
If I’ve learned anything in business, it’s that it’s never really too late, not until someone’s dead. If I can get Geo her extra time, I’ll do it.
“Drinks?” Ivy asks.
Geo glances at her watch. “It’s early.”
Ivy tilts her head. “I meant water or soda.”
“Right. A sprite is great.” Geo’s cheeks redden, and I wish I could snap a photo of her in that moment. Eventually she won’t be so surprised by everything in my world and the adorable blushing will stop, or at least slow down.
That thought makes me realize that I don’t have a single photo of her or us.
“I’ll take a coke with lemon,” I say. “And Ivy, do you mind snapping a photo of the two of us?” I offer my phone.
“I’d like one, too,” Geo says.
When Ivy holds up the phone and says, “Cheese,” my smile is genuine.
“Chess?” Geo asks me as the plane taxis.
I shake my head. “I’d love to, I really would, but I’ve got a meeting almost the second we land, and I’ve got a lot of reading to do first.”