“Thanks. I love it. Now, what can I get you?”
“I’m gonna try that cassa-whatever cake,” Nick says. “And a latte.”
“Cassata alla Siciliana,” Paige repeats.
“Yeah, that one.”
“Not the chocolate cake?” I ask, and he shakes his head.
“A bit of variety is the spice of life. How about you, babe?” he asks me, and I snap to attention at his use of the word babe—despite being more than happy with his departure from Ernie.
“I’d like a cappuccino and a slice of the chocolate and raspberry cake, please, Paige.” I turn to Nick and add, “Which means you can try some of mine, babe.”
Our orders placed and delivered, we sit at a table by the window and dig into our cakes.
“This cassa thing is great,” Nick says, devouring his slice of cake in a matter of seconds.
I giggle. “You sound like Gab. Thing is the most commonly used word in her vocabulary.”
“She’s a woman after my own heart. How’s yours?”
I slip some of the chocolate and raspberry cake into my mouth and declare it to be as close to perfection as any cake can be.
Nick places his hand on mine and leans in toward me. “Well, keep grinning like you’re in ecstasy. We’re on Candid Camera.” He nods his head discretely at a guy out on the sidewalk, his phone held up as he blatantly photographs us.
“Sure.” I fix my smile to ecstatic. “How long have I got to hold this?” I ask through my teeth.
“Hold it…hold it…and, we’re clear.”
“I wonder if that was one of Miranda’s people.”
He lifts his shoulders. “Who knows? But if he’s not, hopefully he’ll post them.”
“With that wonderful celebrity couple hashtag of ours.”
“You know, Nerick is growing on me,” he says as he steals a large piece of my cake with his fork.
“Hey!” I protest.
He slides it into his mouth and grins at me.
“Go get your own.”
He shakes his head. “Can’t. Coach would kill me if he knew I’d had that cassa one, let alone having a second slice.”
“Cassa thing, don’t you mean?”
He smiles at me. “You’re super cute, you know that?”
Taken aback, I reply, “For an ordinary girl.”
“Believe me when I say, Ernie, there’s not a whole lot that’s ordinary about you.”
“That’s quite a compliment coming from half of Nerick.”
“Eat up. I’m taking you somewhere.”
I crinkle my forehead. “But Miranda’s remit for today was for us to visit a café.”
“I don’t give a crap what Miranda’s remit for today was. We’re going someplace.”
I grin at him. “You rebel.”
A few minutes later, we’ve finished our cakes, Nick’s posed for some selfies with a couple of guys in suits, and we’re back in his truck, heading away from the city.
“Where are we going?” I ask as the tall city buildings give way to leafy suburbs.
“I thought I’d show you where I’m from. You know, in case anyone asks you any awkward questions about me at the Kickoff Party on Friday.”
“I’ve done my research on you,” I say.
“Oh yeah? What do you know?”
“Well, I know you’re the only boy in a family of six kids.”
“I told you that.”
I tap the side of my head. “It all goes into my Nicholas John Zachary dossier, you know.”
“You know my middle name? How come I don’t know yours?”
“Do you think people will question you on it?”
“Well, no. but I’d like to know what it is, all the same.”
“It’s Meredith, after my mom.”
“Mine’s John, after my dad.”
I smile at him. “Well, aren’t we a matching pair.”
His features tighten. “And we’ve both lost the parent we’re named for,” he says softly.
“Yeah,” I reply, biting my lip. I turn and look out the window. “Only, my mom didn’t pass away. Not like your dad.”
He turns to look at me in alarm. “Oh. When you said she’s gone, did you mean she left your dad?”
I pull my arms into my sides as a stab of sadness digs into my belly. Talking about my mom is hard for me, and my deeply held sorrow threatens to spill over.
Nick senses my hesitation. “Hey, you don’t need to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“No, it’s okay. Sometimes it helps to talk.” I wring my hands in my lap, battling to keep the sadness from engulfing me.
Nick pulls the car onto a side street and parks. “Tell me.”
“My mom, she got sick. Really sick.”
“Oh, Ernie.” He looks at me, and my throat tightens as tears threaten my eyes.
“She can’t live at home anymore.” I swallow and press on. “She’s in a care home now, and she’s been there for months. Five, actually. We all have a day of the week each to visit her. Me, my brother, my dad, and Gab and Granny. You know those two move as a unit.” I try out a smile as I think of my dear mom. “My turn is tonight.”
He reaches across and places a hand on my knee. “I’m so sorry, Erin. Which hospice is she in?”
I shake my head and do my best to push the pain worming its way through my insides away. “She’s not in a hospice. She’s in a unit for people with dementia. She’s got Alzheimer’s. It’s called early onset because she got it young.” To my dismay, my throat catches, and my tears begin to roll down my cheeks. I tilt my head back and wipe my cheeks with my fingers.
Nick gives my knee a rub. “Tell me about her.”
“Oh,” I say, stalling for time. You see, the thing is, as much as I love my mom, I don’t like to talk about her anymore. Not since she got sick. It’s too much for me, and I end up crying every time. Seeing her the way she is now, so changed, so unlike the mom I knew, well, it’s so very hard to bear.
I wipe fresh tears from my cheeks. “You know, I prefer to remember the woman she once was: happy, confident, someone you could rely on for anything.”
“She sounds like a great mom.”
“She is. Well, she was.” I look down at my hands as I think of the mom who loved me with such ferocity it took my breath away. Now? Now she’s a hologram of her former self. “I guess she looks like Mom, and sometimes she acts like her too, but really, she’s so different now.”
Now, when I visit her, recognition only flickers in her eyes, and I’ve got to remind her who I am. And that place. As I picture it, I shudder. It’s not the staff, who are all amazing human beings. It’s the institutional feeling of the place, and the fact that every person in there is old and dying, waiting around for the inevitable to happen. Mom’s only just turned fifty-four, and she’s in a special dementia home with a bunch of patients decades older than her. She’s the youngest by about a gazillion years, and the prettiest. Next to the wizened faces and stooped figures of the other patients, she looks young and healthy, and when she smiles—which sometimes she still does—she looks so much like the woman she once was, it sucks the air from my lungs as my sense of loss swells inside.
“I’m sorry, Erin. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, it’s fine. Really,” I say as I wipe my nose with my sleeve, something Mom would have told me off about for sure. “I should be used to it by now. She’s been in the home for five months.” I attempt a smile when I add, “This is not breaking news for anyone.”
“Forget ‘should.’ There aren’t any rules to this. It’s got to be so tough for you, for your mom, for your whole family.”
I sniff back the tears, wishing I had a tissue or ten. “It’s not a fun day out at the fair, that’s for sure.”
“I can’t imagine even how hard it must be.” He shakes his head and slips my hand into his. “At least my dad died just like that. One day he was a healthy, vibrant guy, and the next he was dead from a massive heart attack.
”
“You were only a kid, right?” I ask, leaping at the chance to move the spotlight off of me, even if it is to another heartbreaking topic.
“Yeah, I was twelve and a half.”
“So young.” I think of my dad now and what he’s been through, slowly losing the love of his life like that. Despite it all, he’s been incredibly strong for Tim and me. I couldn’t bear to lose him so suddenly like that. Especially not now.
“I was young, you’re right, but I’m not sure I’d be where I am today if he hadn’t died like that.” He gets a far-off look in his eyes. “You see, after he passed away, I got serious about stuff: looking after my mom, trying hard in school, trying even harder at rugby.”
“Did you think you had become the ‘man of the house,’ as my granny would put it?”
“Looking back, that might have been a small part of it, but I’m from a family of pretty darn strong women who were more than capable of coping on their own. I guess, I wanted to make my dad proud.” He lets out a low, gruff laugh. “Not that he was around to see any of it.”
I squeeze his hand. “I bet if he could see you, he’d be super proud.”
“Yeah.” His eyes slide to mine, and he gives me a small smile. “Look at us. Parked on some suburban side street, feeling sad over our parents.” He places his other hand over mine. “Do you want to go someplace?”
“I want to see where you grew up.”
“Okay,” he says as he puts the car in gear.
As we drive to his childhood stomping ground, he tells me more about his dad, about how much he loved rugby and would have loved to have seen his son play. I share with him some of the good times with my mom before the horrible condition took its debilitating grip on her.
It’s so easy to talk to him, to open up and share my life with him. And I feel safe doing it, like we’ve known each other for a long time.
We’ve come a long, long way, that’s for sure.
Eventually, after the leafy suburbs have given way to less affluent ones and the homes have shrunk in size, we turn down a side street. He parks the car by a large open field with a club at one end.
“This is where I first fell in love with the game,” he says. “I had an awesome coach. Barty, we used to call him, short for Syd Bartram. He was hard but fair, and he really put me through my paces.”
“Let’s get out and take a look.”
As we walk across the grass—Nick with ease in his sensible sneakers and me tottering on my toes so my habitual high heels don’t sink into the ground—he points out the club rooms, the field where he played many games, and the area of grass where he got tackled by a freakishly huge thirteen-year-old and broke his arm.
“This place is really important to you, isn’t it?”
“Five older sisters with a Snow White costume, remember?”
“Well, I’ve seen you in a woman’s T-shirt already, but I bet you looked so pretty as Snow White. I have got to see the photos.”
He shakes his head. “No way.”
“So there are photos! How can I get a hold of those, I wonder?”
“You won’t, simple as that. How about we head back to the car and I show you the house I grew up in.”
“Does your mom still live there?”
“Nah. I bought her a place in a nicer part of town a while back. She didn’t want me to, believe me. She gave me this whole spiel on how I’d worked hard and my money should be for me to choose what I use it for. So, I ‘chose’ to buy her a house. She couldn’t argue with that in the end, could she?”
Nick bought his mom a house? Is this guy for real? “That’s, ah, that’s really nice of you.”
He lifts his shoulders. “What can I say? I’m a nice guy.” He flashes me his cheeky smirk.
He drives us to a nearby street, and we pull in beside a small house with a low fence and a car parked on the front lawn. It’s neat and tidy but clearly nowhere near affluent.
“Is this where you grew up?” I ask.
“Sure did. Lived here all my life until I left home. The room you can see there is the living room, and the other window was my bedroom. Well, mine and a couple of my sisters.”
“I can’t imagine six kids in that house.”
He chuckles. “Yeah, and all of them female except for me. When there was too much estrogen in the place for me, I’d grab my ball and my boots and head down to the park.”
“Balancing things out with testosterone, huh?”
“Oh, yeah. There was a whole lot of balancing needed, that’s for sure.” He looks out at the house once more. “I know it’s a small place, but we were happy. I got on pretty well with one of my sisters, the one closest to me in age.”
“What’s her name?”
“Talia. She’s only twenty months older than me. She’s cool. We hung out a lot back in the day. All I’ll say is thank God she was a tomboy.”
“So she wasn’t the one to dress you up as Snow White, huh?”
He chuckles, his face bright. “Nope. She wasn’t into all that. Much more of a climb trees and get into trouble kind of sister.”
“She sounds fun.”
“Oh, yeah. She sure is.” A cloud passes over his face, and he runs his fingers through his hair. “She’s had a rough time of it lately.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks. She’s doing better now, but things were rough for a while there for her.” He flicks his eyes to mine and something in his face tells me that whatever it was that she went through affected him, too. He turns the ignition. “Let’s go see where my mate Jono and I used to do handbrake wheelies on gravel.”
I grin at him. “Do I have to?”
“It’s important you know about these things, and anyway, I was really good at the handbrake turns.”
“Just as long as you don’t try to relive your teenage hoodlum days with me.”
He grins. “I make no promises, Ernie.”
We continue our tour of Nick’s past for the next hour or two—without the handbrake turns—and it’s getting late by the time we turn around and head back to the city.
“How are your design aspirations coming along?” he asks.
“Well, I did what you suggested and got myself one of those packages to set up a website. It’s been a major learning curve getting it set up, but what I’ve done looks so great. I even got a logo professionally made. I keep pulling my site up on my phone to see it. I’ll send you the link.”
“Have you got dedicated social media accounts?” he asks, and I nod. “A hashtag?”
“#ErinAndrews,” I announce proudly.
He shoots me a look out of the corner of his eye. “Great work, Ernie.”
“Why, thank you, Big Bird.”
“Big Bird?” he asks with a laugh.
“Well, you’re tall and—”
“Yellow with lots of feathers?” he questions.
“Like I look like Ernie,” I protest.
“Fair call, although you call me Big Bird in public, and I will not be happy.”
“Would you prefer to be Oscar the Grouch, or maybe Mr. Snuffleupagus?”
“Both. Clearly.”
We share a smile, and I echo, “Clearly.”
“Hey, do you want to grab something to eat before you head home?”
“Another unscheduled date?” I ask in mock outrage.
“Yeah, I guess we’re just a couple of crazy kids living the dream.”
“I’ve got to be somewhere,” I say evasively. “But thanks for the offer, Fake Boyfriend.”
“Well, I hope wherever you’ve got to be doesn’t involve a date with another guy.”
“Why? Would you be super jealous?”
“As green as Oscar the Grouch, and just as grouchy.”
“Now, that I’d like to see.” I grin at him. “It’s not a date. I gave up on trying to do that when we started this whole thing.” I pull my eyebrows together. “Why did you ask that?”
“I don’t know. You’re
cute and fun. What guy wouldn’t want that?”
I let out a sigh. “Good men are hard to find, believe me. The world is full of jerks, idiots, and weirdos.”
“Wow. You’ve got some serious issues.”
“Thanks a lot!”
“In case you’re wondering, I’m not seeing anyone on the sly, either.”
“That would be your business if you did,” I reply, wondering why his announcement makes me feel like dancing down the street.
“Oh, one woman is more than I can handle. And you, Erin Andrews, may be non-tall, but you’re a whole lot to handle.”
“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
“It’s meant as one. So, if it’s not a secret date, what is it?”
“I’m, ah, going to see my mom,” I say hesitatingly. “Tonight is my night.”
The mood in the car shifts.
“Where’s her home?”
I point to my left. “It’s about five blocks thatta ways. If you can drop me at the office, I can pick up my car.”
“So, your plan is to get me to drive you miles into the city so you can then drive back all those miles? I’m taking you.” He pulls into another lane and takes the next left turn.
“You don’t need to do that,” I protest.
“It’s done.”
A short drive later, Nick parks the car by the sign for the Manua Rest Home.
I unclip my seat belt and turn to face him. “I know your secret, Nick Zachary. Something you’ve kept hidden from the world.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “You do?”
“Oh, yeah. You try to keep it under wraps, but I have so got your number, mister.”
“Tell me, Super Sleuth, what’s my big secret?”
“You’re a super nice guy, but you hide it with all that partying and carrying on you do, like you’re some kind of rugby pro jerk with the brain of a golf ball. Which you are not.”
“Aren’t you mixing your sports here?” He lifts his hands in surrender. “You got me. Super nice, that’s me.”
I raise my eyes to the sign, Manua Rest Home, and take a deep breath. It always takes me a few moments to prepare myself to walk into that place and see Mom.
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