I had too much else to do.
Plus, I didn’t want to talk to her.
If she really needs to talk to me, I decided, she’ll call back.
Which she did.
She called back the next day while I was folding laundry, but I let it go to voicemail.
She called again while I was out on a run. Then again while I was at the grocery store.
Honestly, at some point, it got a little stalkerish.
“What do you need?” I asked, when she finally had me.
She took a breath. “I need to ask a really, really big favor of you.”
I braced myself for the question. Whatever it was, the answer was no.
“It’s going to sound very abrupt,” she went on, “but that’s partly because it’s hard to get ahold of you and I’m afraid you’re going to hang up any second.”
She was right. I might hang up any second.
She took a breath. Then, in a burst: “I need you to come to Massachusetts and live with me.”
I blinked.
“Just for a while,” she added. “Not forever! A year at the most.”
“A year?”
“At the most.”
I was stunned by the question. Stunned that she had even asked it—or thought to ask it. We were not estranged, exactly, but we sure as hell weren’t close. It was such a ridiculous, never-gonna-happen thing to propose, I couldn’t believe she’d even said the words. “I’m not moving to Massachusetts, Diana. That’s bananas.”
I hadn’t called her “Mom” in years. Ten years, to be exact. Not since the day she’d walked out on me and my dad. The same day I’d started calling my father “Ted.”
At first, it was just to annoy them, to say that if they wanted to be treated like parents, they’d have to act like parents and stay miserably together. But the longer they stayed apart, the more it became a way of turning them into adults of no special significance that I just happened to know.
By this point, they were just Diana and Ted to me. I could barely imagine that they’d ever been anyone else.
“I’m serious,” Diana said.
“You can’t be.”
“Don’t give me your answer right away,” she said. “Take some—”
“No,” I said.
She hesitated.
“No,” I said again, with more emphasis, as if she’d tried to argue.
“You haven’t even heard the rest of the idea.”
“The rest of the idea doesn’t matter.”
“One year”—now she was bargaining, like she had any kind of a chance—“and then you go back to Texas like it never happened.”
“That’s not how it works. I’d have to stay there several years and earn a promotion before I could find a new position.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means if I did what you’re asking, I’d give up my whole life. Everything.”
“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound very appealing,” Diana said.
“That’s why it’s so simple. No.”
“I get it,” she went on. “I’ve been over and over it in my head. You didn’t want to move here with me when you were fifteen—”
“Sixteen,” I corrected.
“When you actually still needed me,” she continued, “and so why you’d be willing to come now, when you’re all grown up, and also pretty much hate me—”
“I don’t hate you,” I said, on principle. But I didn’t like her very much, either.
“You have less reason than ever to come, and I knew before I called that you’d say no. But I just had to try.”
I closed my eyes. “Why?”
“Because I need you.”
Something in her voice was off.
I’d talked to her maybe four times a year in the decade since she’d moved across the country—the obligatory calls on Christmas, Thanksgiving, and birthdays. But I still could read her voice—too well. I’d grown up with that voice. I knew its pitch, and its cadence, and its rhythms. That voice was the model for my own. I couldn’t unknow it if I tried.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I’m having a little eye problem, and I can’t see as well as I used to.”
“What kind of eye problem?” I asked. I knew a lot about eyes. And problems. “Are you going blind or something?” I asked.
A sigh. Like I was really demanding too much info. “Sort of.”
“What does that mean?”
“Only in the one eye. And not going, exactly. More like already gone.”
I mentally flipped through my medical knowledge of eyes. Cataracts? Macular degeneration? Diabetic retinopathy? “You’ve gone blind in one eye? Just one?”
“It’s glaucoma, or something. Some kind of ’oma. They did a surgery, and there was a good chance I’d lose my sight, and I knew that going in. It just turns out it’s harder to see with one eye than you might think. Especially when you’ve been spoiled for so long with two.”
I wasn’t sure I’d call having two eyes being “spoiled,” but okay.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
A sarcastic pause that read, Please.
“You let them do surgery on your eye, but you can’t even tell me what’s wrong with it?”
She gave a sharp sigh. “I’m not really a details person, Cassie.”
That flash of irritation in her voice gave me permission, suddenly, to be irritated, too. Was it really too much to expect her to retain the most basic details of her health situation? The woman was in her midfifties, and she was acting like a ninety-year-old biddy.
But I couldn’t keep the irritation going. Even though it’s so much easier to judge than to relate, I couldn’t help but feel empathy. It must be a hell of a thing to lose half your sight. For anybody—but especially an artist, of all people. Her entire professional life was about looking, and seeing, and perceiving. Of course she was irritated. Probably panicked as well.
“How is the other eye?” I asked then, more softly.
“Okay for now.”
It’s never a good idea to feel too much empathy for patients. But she wasn’t my patient, I reminded myself. She was my mother.
“Anyway,” she went on, “it’s not so bad. I just can’t seem to get a handle on spatial relationships. I keep pouring coffee and missing the cup. Tripping, too. Palms, knees—all scraped to hell. Fell down the stairs the other day. And there’s no driving anymore. I doubt that’s ever coming back.”
“You fell down the stairs?”
“I’m fine. Point is, I could use some help. Not forever.”
“A year at the most,” I repeated.
“Exactly!” she said, like we were getting somewhere. “While I adjust. There’s a therapy you can do to help speed things along. Learn to use the one eye like a pro. But it takes a while.”
“A year?”
“Nine months to a year. Then we’re done.”
You had to admire the optimism.
I pushed the empathy back. I was not going to feel sorry for her. People suffered worse things all the time. We’d just picked up a guy last week who’d severed his hand cutting boards to make a playhouse for his kids.
But my mind was on alert now. This was happening. She was really asking. A year. That was a lifetime. I didn’t have a year to give away. “Can’t you hire a caregiver?”
She burst out with a laugh, like I had to be joking. “Sweetheart, I’m an artist!” Then, like it went without saying, “I am dead broke.”
“Can’t Ted help you?”
“Why on earth would he even consider doing that?”
She had a point there.
I tried again. “But you have health insurance, right?”
“It’s terrible. It’s worse than not having insurance at all.”
“Don’t you have friends?” I asked.
“Of course I have friends!” She sounded insulted. “But they have their own families to look after.”
“But I live in Texas!” I said, feeling my argument weaken.
“It’s just a two-day drive,” she said, like, Easy. “You can stay with me. For free! I have a spare room in the attic with white curtains with pom-pom trim and a window that overlooks the harbor.”
She waited, like pom-pom curtains might do the trick.
Then she added, “Think of all the money you could save on rent! Just for a year. Maybe less.”
I shook my head. “I have a life here. Friends.”
“A boyfriend?” she asked.
“No boyfriend.”
“Someone you’re sleeping with, then?” Then, like she was making air quotes, she added, “A sex buddy?”
“Mom!” I shrieked, forgetting I didn’t call her that anymore. “That is not the term.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m too busy for that, anyway,” I added.
“Too busy for what?”
“Too busy for dating. I don’t have time.”
There was a pause, and then she said, “I don’t understand.”
“Look, I just don’t do love,” I said. How had we landed on this subject?
I could hear the frown in her voice. “You don’t do love?”
No way out but through. “It’s not my thing.”
“You don’t do any kind of love? At all?”
“I don’t do romantic love,” I specified. “The dumb kind.”
She paused a second, and I could tell she was deciding whether to take that topic on. “Great, then, I guess,” she said at last, letting it go. “One less thing to hold you back.”
This was the most substance we’d worked into a conversation in years.
“I do love my job, though,” I said, to get us back on track. This might have been a good moment to tell her that I had just received an award for valor. But I didn’t.
“We’ve got firemen up here, you know,” she said, as if that made any sense.
“Firefighters,” I corrected.
“And we’ve got plenty of fires,” she said, sounding almost proud. “Tons of them. This whole part of the country’s a smoldering tinderbox just waiting to go up in flames.”
What was her point?
“There are fire stations on just about every corner,” she went on. “Maybe you could do some kind of exchange.”
“That’s not how it works, Diana. I’d have to give up my job.”
“Just for a year.”
“I’m not a foreign exchange student,” I said. “They don’t hold your place.”
She let that one pass. Then, with new determination, she said, “When have I ever asked you for anything?”
I sighed.
“Never,” she answered for me. “I have never asked you for anything.”
True enough. She had once asked me to forgive her, in a letter—one I hadn’t even replied to. But that wasn’t something we talked about.
“Just this once,” she said. “I promise I will never, ever ask you for help again.”
It was too much. My head was spinning. I just needed to shut this day down. I thought about tonight, and the guys, and the way they chanted my name at the banquet. Then I thought about what it would feel like to leave them, and I said something so true it was mean.
“I’d really like to help you, Diana,” I said. “But I just can’t leave my family.”
* * *
NOT TEN MINUTES after I hung up, as I finished rinsing off my plaque in the sink, my phone rang again. I thought it would be my mom, trying again, and I planned to ignore her … but it was my dad.
I never ignored my dad.
“Your mother just called me and told me you said no,” he said when I answered.
What were they—in cahoots? “You knew?”
“When she couldn’t get you last week, she called me.”
“Why would she do that? You two are divorced.”
“This matter concerns the whole family.”
“Not really.”
“How could you say no to her?” he demanded. “She needs you.”
“Can we talk about this later?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter when we talk about it,” my dad said, rolling out his most authoritative voice. “You’re going.”
“I already said no.”
“Change your mind.”
“I’m not going to change my mind,” I said, like he was completely nuts.
“She’s your mother, and she needs you, and you’re going.”
“You’re telling me to leave my job, my apartment, my life—everything?”
“You’re young. You’ll make it work.”
“Ted,” I said. “I don’t want to make it work.”
“That’s not relevant.”
“I barely know her. She’s practically a stranger.”
“Bullshit. That woman made you. She gave you life.”
“She left me. And she left you, too, buddy, by the way!”
“Are you still mad about that?”
“Yes. No. Both.”
“You can’t stay mad forever.”
“Wanna bet?”
“You’ve got to move on.”
“You moved on with a new wife. I can’t get a new mother.”
“True. But your old one is knocking on your door.”
In a way, I’d felt abandoned again when my dad started dating Carol. And I won’t say that Carol was awful, because she wasn’t technically a bad person, though she was a little prissy for my taste.
The point was, my dad and I had been lonely together for years, like it was our thing. Like we were in a special club of two: People Abandoned by Diana Hanwell. But then he found Carol, an administrator at his school—a divorcée, in her pastel culottes and espadrilles—and then, of all things, he decided to marry her. That was that. He couldn’t be in our loneliness club if he wasn’t lonely anymore.
He left.
Or maybe I kicked him out.
But some part of me flat-out refused to leave that club. It was the principle of the thing. In some funny way, I was still standing up for my teenage self.
Because if I didn’t, who would?
Now, here was my dad going over to my mom’s side. “Why are you advocating for her?” I demanded. “She left you! You loved her, and you were good to her, and she cheated on you.”
He knew all this, of course.
“These things happen, Cassie,” he said. “Life is messy. When you’re older you’ll understand.”
The fact that he wasn’t mad made me madder. “I hope not.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” he said.
What was he doing? Was he trying to model behavior for me? Was this some kind of teachable moment about growth and change? It seemed so patronizing. I might not know everything about forgiveness, but I sure as hell knew you didn’t get there by pretending earth-shattering betrayals had been no big deal.
Your wife cheating on you is a big deal. Your mom abandoning you is a big deal.
I wasn’t going to insult my teenage self and all she’d been through by just shrugging and saying, Nobody’s perfect.
“I think you’ve forgotten how bad it was,” I said. We’d eaten SpaghettiOs for a solid year.
“I probably have,” my dad said.
“Well, I haven’t.”
“Don’t you know that expression, ‘The best revenge is forgetting’?”
“Seems to me like the best revenge would be revenge.”
“Tell me you’re not plotting revenge on your mother.”
What would that even look like? It was far too late for revenge. “Of course not,” I said, though, in a practical sense, by keeping my distance for so long, that’s what I’d been doing for years. “I’m just refusing to give her a pass.”
“Sweetheart,” my dad said tenderly. “Let it go.”
“She’s the one who called me!”
“It’s been a decade.”
“A decade I’ve spent building a nice little life for myself—in Texas
.”
“She needs you.”
“I won’t dismantle my entire life and move across the country for a woman I’m not even close to.”
“I think she’d like to be closer.”
“Too bad. She can’t just demand closeness. She gave up the right to be close to me when she left.”
“She’s not demanding. She’s asking.”
“I can’t believe you’re defending her!”
My dad was quiet for a second. Then he said, “You know, there are people who have no choice but to spend their lives avoiding their mothers. People whose mothers are mean, or toxic, or drunk. People whose mothers hurt them every time they let their guard down. But you are not one of those people. Your mother is actually a nice lady.”
That was a lot of verbiage for my normally strong-but-silent dad. Practically a soliloquy. “How can you say that after what she did to you?”
“People make mistakes.”
“You can’t make me forgive her,” I said, barely able to believe how petulant I sounded.
“You’re right,” my dad said. “I can’t make you.”
For a split second, I thought I’d won.
Then he went on. “But you’re going to go anyway.”
“You’re wrong,” I said.
“I’m right,” he said. “Because you were raised to do the right thing. And she’s the one who raised you.”
Four
THE NEXT MORNING, I was on shift by 6:30 A.M., the cut on my hand bandaged, ready to keep plowing forward with my life.
But the captain must have been watching for me, because as soon as I walked through the doors, she said, over the loudspeaker, “Hanwell. In my office. Now.”
I was passing Hernandez right then, and he crossed himself at the tone of her voice.
I walked to her office all chastened, with my head tilted slightly down, but just as I stepped through her door, my phone went off.
My mother. Again. And it turned out, the guys on shift had changed my ringtone to “Big Bottom” from Spinal Tap. Because that’s what firemen do.
Captain Harris watched me like, Really? as I scrambled to silence it.
“Close the door,” she said.
I closed the door.
“Take a seat.”
I took a seat.
She shuffled through some files on her desk and let me wait. Captain Harris had been one of the first women to join the Austin Fire Department, back in the eighties. She was also the first-ever African American female captain. I idolized her, and admired her, and feared her, too. She’d seen everything and then some, and then some more.
Things You Save in a Fire Page 3