by Linda Seed
“Has she seen a doctor?”
“She says she has.”
“Well, what did he say?”
The thing was, Lisa had been vague about that. Either she hadn’t gotten a firm diagnosis, or she had and she didn’t want to tell her son what it was.
“I just want to hang around until I know what’s going on,” he told Cassie. “I hope it’s okay, with Thor and all …”
“Of course it’s okay. Don’t worry about Thor. He’s fine.” In fact, she was beginning to rely on the dog’s steady, warm presence. “Just take care of your mom.”
Chapter 33
It was four more days before Brian came back, and when he did, it was just to check in, spend the night with Cassie, and pick up Thor to take the dog down to LA with him.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be there, and it’s not fair to you to ask you to keep taking care of him,” Brian told her. He’d just arrived in San Luis Obispo and was tired from the drive north. Cassie had come to his house with Thor to meet him.
“I didn’t mind.”
“Well, still. I kind of miss him.”
When Brian and Thor had first reunited, the dog had squealed, jumped in the air, and wagged his tail so hard it seemed like he might sprain his butt. Brian had gotten down on the floor with him, vigorously rubbing his fur and talking baby talk to him.
“I kind of hoped you’d be staying,” Cassie said.
Brian wanted that—God, how he wanted that—but things with his mother were … weird. Too weird for him to turn his back on her.
“She’s depressed. And I think she’s sick, Cass. I can’t leave her alone until I know what’s going on.”
Not that it would be easy to leave Cassie, either.
He’d thought she was beautiful before, but making progress with her business had made her positively glow. People said that—that somebody glowed—but Cassie seemed to have a light within her that brightened everything in her vicinity.
He wanted to be one of those things—one of those lucky people in her orbit who were bathed in that light. But he also wanted to be able to look at himself in a mirror. He didn’t want to abandon his mother the way she had abandoned him.
But going back down south tomorrow was going to be one of the hardest things he’d ever done, especially with Cassie looking the way she looked, and with her skin feeling the way it felt under his hands.…
They took each other’s clothes off and fell into bed for a long and glorious time, then they showered and dressed and went out to dinner. Then they came back to his place and undressed and fell into bed again.
“Is she still talking about you moving down there?” Cassie asked when they were lying in his bed in each other’s arms, both of them satisfied and damp with sweat.
“Yeah. She is. She started out by saying I could be closer to Ike. Then, when that didn’t work, she talked about the entertainment industry and my career.”
“You’ve built your career living in San Luis Obispo this whole time,” Cassie pointed out. “You’re self-contained. It’s not like you need a producer and a Hollywood studio.”
“I told her that.” He stroked Cassie’s shoulder with one hand while he talked. “But … it’s not really about that. I think she’s sick, and she knows it, and she doesn’t want to be alone.”
Listening to him, Cassie started to feel a little sick herself. Was this how it was going to end? Was Brian going to move away from the Central Coast just as Cassie was building something substantial for herself here?
“She doesn’t have a diagnosis?” she asked.
Brian shrugged. “If she does, she won’t tell me what it is. But she’s got severe headaches. Dizziness. Nausea and stomach pain. And she’s so tired. She barely gets out of bed anymore.”
“Was she like that when you got there? It seems like the first couple of times you called, you didn’t mention anything about her being sick.”
Brian considered Cassie’s question. Had Lisa seemed sick when Brian had first shown up? She’d seemed angry. Sad. Dispirited. She hadn’t had much appetite, and she’d already been complaining of headaches and dizziness. But things had grown worse over the course of his stay.
It was possible that whatever was wrong with her had more to do with stress and heartbreak than with physical illness.
“I don’t know what’s going on with her.”
“Maybe you should talk to Lorenzo,” Cassie suggested.
Brian had a visceral reaction to the idea of talking to that asshole, but the more he thought about it, the more he thought Cassie might be right. After all, Lorenzo and Lisa had been living together, and he’d been handling all of her personal business. Who better to know if she really did have a significant health problem?
Brian called Lorenzo the next morning while he was out walking Thor around the neighborhood. Cassie had already left for work, and Brian was planning to make the drive down south later that morning.
Brian had Lorenzo’s cell phone number from when they’d all been staying at Otter Bluff together. Now he dialed it, and Lorenzo picked up on the second ring.
“Pronto.”
Lorenzo’s pretentious Italian way of answering the phone made Brian grit his teeth as he willed his head not to explode.
“Lorenzo, it’s Brian. Cavanaugh. Lisa’s son.”
“Ah. Brian. If Lisa told you to call …”
“She didn’t. And, to be honest, I’d rather be talking to pretty much anybody else in the world right now. But I have to ask you something.”
He told Lorenzo about Lisa’s health issues and asked if Lorenzo knew anything about it. Had Lisa been to a doctor lately? Had she been diagnosed with anything worrisome? Had he observed her symptoms before he’d left?
Lorenzo let out a scoff. “You’re her son. Surely you know this act by now, no?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about how she’s not just a visual artist. She dabbles in performance as well.”
“If you could stop talking around it and just tell me—”
“She might be sick, Brian. What do I know? It’s possible. But it’s also possible that her ailments only show up when she wants somebody to do something for her.”
Apparently, Brian still retained some loyalty to his mother despite everything, because the statement outraged him, made him want to reach through the phone and pull out the asshole’s lungs.
“Hey, you know what? Fuck you, Lorenzo.”
Lorenzo laughed. “I thought there was no resemblance between you and your mother, but now I think I was wrong. Ciao, Brian.”
“Fuck your ciao. You’re not even fucking Italian.” But he was talking to no one—Lorenzo had already hung up.
Later that day, Brian drove to Los Angeles resolving to get to the bottom of whatever was going on with his mom.
“You’re going to see your doctor, and I’m going with you,” he told her shortly after he arrived. Lisa had been up and around when he’d gotten here—she was even working on a new painting—but now she was in bed, though it was only two p.m.
“I’ve already seen my doctor.”
“Okay. When?”
“While you were gone. I told her it was urgent, and she made time for me.”
“Well, I want to talk to her. What’s her name?”
“I’m not going to tell you her name.” Lisa was lying on top of the covers, one forearm covering her eyes as though the light hurt her.
“But I need to know what’s going on.”
“And I need you to understand that some things are private, Brian.”
Despite what Lorenzo had said, Brian’s deepest fear wasn’t that Lisa was making things up. It was that she was truly sick—maybe dying—and he’d been too insensitive to see it.
“Please, Mom.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, his weight causing the mattress to shift. “I need to know what’s going on so I can know how to help you.”
“You’re helping me just by being here.�
�� She patted his hand. “You don’t know how much.”
He sighed. “Can I get you anything?”
“No thank you, dear. I just need to lie here until the pain passes.”
Cassie focused on work now that Brian was gone again. She finished her last days at Central Coast Escapes, supervised the building of her display cases, acquired and arranged furniture, and had her health department inspection. She applied for and received a business license and made plans for her grand opening.
She spoke to Brian on the phone every night, and she tried not to be pissy about the fact that he was still gone and had no concrete plan for when he might return.
But not being pissy was starting to get hard.
“You’re going to miss my grand opening.” She tried to keep any hint of a whine out of her voice.
“I can drive up there for it.”
“I’ve worked really hard, Brian, and this is a big deal for me.”
“That’s why I’ll drive up for it. Why are you angry, Cassie?”
So much for keeping the pissiness out of her voice. Clearly, she’d failed at that, and now she had to defend her attitude.
“It’s just … I miss you.” She said it in as matter-of-fact a tone of voice as she could muster.
“I miss you, too.”
“Well, you wouldn’t if you were here.” Okay, that was maybe a little petulant. She was big enough to admit that.
“Cassie, we’ve talked about this. You know why I—”
“Yes. I know.”
The thing was, Cassie was more and more certain that Lisa wasn’t sick and that she was simply manipulating Brian to stay in Los Angeles. Part of that might be because Lisa didn’t want Brian and Cassie together, and part of it was undoubtedly that Lisa simply had decided she wanted Brian in her life right now. She hadn’t wanted him around before, but now that Lorenzo had left her without a man at her beck and call, it was suddenly important for Brian to be near her.
Cassie didn’t have hard evidence to back her claim. But Lisa’s symptoms were all things that could not be observed, either by an onlooker or by a physician.
How could you verify that someone had stomach pain? How could you test for a headache? Was there any instrument, any visual clue that could tell you whether someone was dizzy? Or tired?
To Cassie, Lisa’s list of ailments sounded like something you’d hear from a kid who wanted to play hooky from school. Especially when you considered that Lisa wouldn’t tell Brian anything about who her doctor was or what that person had said.
Lisa was playing him, Cassie knew it. But what if she was wrong? She didn’t want to be that person who insisted that her boyfriend abandon his sick mother.
What if Lisa really was ill?
What if Cassie convinced Brian to come back north, then Lisa ended up in the hospital, or worse?
He would never forgive her, and she would never forgive herself.
“Honestly, you’re right. It’s hinky,” Lacy said one day when she and Cassie were at the bakery working on the dine-in seating and the decor. “I mean, yes, it’s possible that she’s sick. Sometimes emotional trauma shows up in the form of physical symptoms, and she’s had some emotional trauma with the lost show and her boyfriend leaving her.”
“But,” Cassie said, continuing her sister’s train of thought, “she’s already proven that she’s willing to manipulate him to try to get him to move down there. That whole thing with the bakery? That was a lot of trouble—and potential expense—just to get your son to come to you.”
The two of them were hanging some botanical prints on the walls, and Cassie held a framed print up to the wall while Lacy stood back and looked at it. “A little higher,” she said. “Okay, there. Now a little to the left.”
Once the print was hung, they went back to their conversation.
“And,” Cassie said, “this is going to be petty, but … he said he would help me with marketing. He’s got a degree in it. And now I need marketing, because my grand opening is coming up. And where is he?”
“It’s not the marketing that’s bothering you,” Lacy said.
“No. It isn’t.”
“It’s that you think she might win.”
Cassie had to admit that her sister knew her very well. Of course that was what was bothering her. What if Lisa got her way? There was no way Cassie was going to move to Los Angeles with Brian now that the bakery was about to be up and running. Would she and Brian have a long-distance relationship? How would that work?
She had to speculate that it wouldn’t work at all, with Lisa whispering in his ear about how Cassie wasn’t good enough for him.
“It’s just … I’m in love with him. I love him.” Cassie felt tears fill her eyes, and she wiped them away with her fingertips. “After all these years of looking, I’ve finally found someone to love, and now …” She gestured around her at the lack of Brian. “Where is he?”
“Oh, Cass.” Lacy rubbed her sister’s shoulder in sympathy. “Be patient. He’s going to have to figure out this thing with his mother on his own. You don’t want him to come back because you forced his hand. You want him to come back because it’s his choice.”
“I know. you’re right.” She sniffled a little and drew in a shaky breath.
“And …” Lacy said.
Cassie looked at her, waiting.
“You don’t want to get too serious until things with Lisa are resolved one way or the other,” Lacy went on. “I mean, imagine if you marry him, and you’ve got the mother-in-law from hell breathing down your neck.”
“I haven’t thought about marriage. I’m not there yet,” Cassie lied.
“Well, you don’t want to go there until you know who’s coming along for the ride.”
Chapter 34
Brian was feeling increasingly frustrated with the direction things had taken. The two women in his life wanted two different things from him, and the two things weren’t compatible.
How was he supposed to choose between his girlfriend and his mother?
“So, what’s the plan?” Ike asked him when they met for lunch one day at a burger place in Westwood. “Are you here full-time now?”
“What? No.” Brian had a half-eaten burger and a plate of fries in front of him, and he picked up a fry and toyed with it. “Of course not.”
Ike shrugged. “It kind of seems that way. You’ve been here a few weeks now. Not that I’m complaining. I like having you around. Still, you haven’t put out a video since you’ve gotten here. You know you can’t do that. You can’t go silent this long without losing views.”
“What are you, my mother? I already have one of those.” Brian sullenly slurped his Coke.
“I’m just saying. You had a good thing in San Luis Obispo. The show was going well, ad revenue was up. You had Cassie. And now you’re here. What’s up with that?”
“I still have Cassie. You put it in the past tense. It’s not past tense. It’s present tense.”
“Okay.” Ike nodded and chewed a bite of his burger. Then he put the burger down and wiped his mouth with a napkin from the dispenser on the table. “Fair enough. But how long is that going to last if you don’t go back? She’s not moving down here to be with you, man. She’s about to open her bakery.”
“I know. Shit. I know that.”
“So what’s going on?”
Brian sat back in the booth and folded his arms across his chest. “Cassie thinks my mother is faking being sick to keep me down here.”
Ike let out a soft laugh.
“What’s that supposed to mean? That laugh?” Brian was indignant.
“The laugh means, Cassie’s not the only one who thinks that’s possible.”
“Wait. What?”
Ike leaned forward and gave Brian an intense look that meant he was about to say something that mattered. “Look. I’ve known you since we were in first grade. You’ve been my best friend all that time. I was there when your mother left, and I was there when she played you over
and over, decade after decade. I’m not new to this situation. I’ve seen it all.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is, Lisa messing with you to get her way would not be unprecedented.”
Brian crumpled his napkin and threw it onto the table. “You know what? Fuck you, man.”
“Yeah, okay.”
There wasn’t much heat in the exchange—they’d known each other too long and too well for either one of them to be truly offended.
“I’ll tell you something else,” Ike said.
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“You might just consider that there’s another reason you’re staying down here other than your mother’s health.”
“And what’s that, Dr. Freud?”
“I think this thing with Cassie is getting serious, and you’re scared shitless. And maybe you’re more comfortable with your dysfunctional relationship with your mother than you are with the idea of something real.”
Brian showed Ike his middle finger.
“Very mature,” Ike said.
Cassie had to hire someone before her grand opening, and she held interviews at the bakery over the course of a week. She’d advertised on Craigslist and in the local paper, and she’d gotten a fair number of responses. The problem was, a lot of the applicants either had no experience with baking or they arrived at the interview so unprepared that Cassie wondered if they were stoned, drunk, pranking her, or all three.
“This just isn’t working,” she told her mother at dinner one night in the Jordan kitchen after two dismal interviews. “I get that I might not find everything I want in a job candidate. But is it too much to ask that they at least be lucid?”
“You’ll find someone.” Nancy patted the back of Cassie’s hand and offered her more pot roast.
“You’re gonna have to offer more than minimum wage if you want a quality candidate.” Vince propped his elbows on the table, folded his hands together, and rested his chin atop them. “I know you’re on a budget, sweetie, but you get what you pay for.”