The Last Time We Say Goodbye Part 24

That's more than the hotel for the entire trip.

"Wow," Mom breathes as we stare up in horror at the board with the different packages on it. "That is pricey."

"Don't worry, Mom," I say quickly, whipping out my wallet. "I got it."

"With your MIT fund? I don't think so." She produces a gold credit card I've never seen before and ignores my raised eyebrows. I've never known my mother to buy anything on credit.

"The VIP tour, please," she says to the woman behind the counter, and slides the gold card across the marble. "We want to see it all."

Graceland is what I expected it would be: a lot of sixties and seventies glitz, bright colors, s.h.a.g carpet, gold-plated handles in the bathroom of the Priscilla-Elvis's private jet. Mom and I stand in front of a fake backdrop of the famous front gates and have our picture taken. We wander from room to room, Mom oohing and aahing over Elvis's jumpsuit collection, and chuckling over the one room with the zebra-striped walls and red velvet couches, and standing soberly in front of his grave, staring at his death date, which is also her birth date, where it's written in stone.

She's having a good time, I think, which was the point of this little adventure. I wanted to show her that it's possible to have a good time.

We haven't thought about Ty for the entire day.

"I needed this," she says later. We've just finished dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Memphis, and Mom is slurping down a giant margarita. I'm obviously going to have to drive us back to the hotel. "I really needed this."

"Me too," I say.

"Can we just . . . not go home?" she says with a sigh. "We could stay here. Visit Elvis every day."

I smile. I know she doesn't mean it. But this is my cue to tell her about my so-crazy-it-might-actually-work plan.

"You remember what Gayle said, about selling the house?"

Mom stirs her drink. "Gayle always has her strong opinions, doesn't she?"

"I think it's a great idea."

She stops. "You think we should move."

"I think you should move," I elaborate. "To Ma.s.sachusetts. With me."

"You want me to move to MIT?" she says with a laugh. She thinks I'm joking. "I don't think I'd fit in your twin bed."

"Not my dorm room. An apartment or a little house or something. Freshmen are required to live on campus, but they make an exception if you're going to live with your parents." I reach into my backpack and pull out a sheaf of papers, which I set down on the table in front of her. "There are all kinds of places. This one is like a ten-minute walk to campus, two-bedroom, washer-and-dryer hookups, hardwood floors. Nice, see? And it's not unaffordable. Not when you factor in that I would have been paying around four hundred a month for student housing."

She stares down at the paper. "You've been giving this some thought, I see. And what would I do in Ma.s.sachusetts?"

I rifle through the pages until I land on one with a large red brick building framed by leafy green trees. "This is Mount Auburn Hospital. It's listed as one of the best places in New England for medical professionals to work, in terms of both pay and environment. It's attached to Harvard Medical School." I sit back and let her look at the "About Us" page I printed. "It's less than two miles from MIT, approximately a nine-minute drive. There are currently sixteen job openings for registered nurses, one in the surgical wing like you're doing now, but that one's a night shift."

Mom hates night shifts.

"But"-I keep going before she can shoot me down-"you could always start nights and move to days once you're established. Or . . ." I bite my lip, then just come out and say it: "There are two positions open in the maternity ward. One in labor and delivery, and one in the nursery."

"I could work with the babies," Mom says.

"You love babies."

"I do love babies," she agrees, covering her mouth with her hand in a way that suggests she's considering it.

"So maybe Gayle is right, just this one time," I conclude.

"No." Mom shakes her head.

"No?"

"The babies would be worse, Lexie."

"How would babies be worse? Everyone's so happy around babies. It's the happiest part of the hospital."

"Babies die, too. Most of the time, yes, it would be wonderful to work in maternity. But every once in a while, more often than you might think, I'd have to watch some mother lose her baby. I don't think I could live with that." She picks up her drink, licks a piece of salt off the side of her gla.s.s. "Besides, those nurses in the nursery don't need to use their nursing skills. They change diapers and feed babies bottles and give baths all day. I want to do more than that. I want to learn. I want to be an excellent nurse. Not a babysitter."

"Okay, well, there are thirteen other RN positions open at Mount Auburn. I'm sure you could be an excellent nurse in one of those."

She finishes off her margarita, then sets the gla.s.s down and looks at me.

I can tell by her face that she's going to say no.

"What you've done here is very sweet, Lexie," she says. "But I can't go to Ma.s.sachusetts with you. You need to live this next part of your life on your own. You deserve that. You deserve to live in the dorms so you can make all of the lifelong friends you're going to make in the dorms. You need to eat at the cafeteria and stay up all night cramming for finals and go to parties and have fun, without having to worry about anyone else. You need your own life."

"Yes, I need my own life. But so do you," I argue. It's been kicking around in my brain ever since Sadie asked me if I was bringing my mom to college. At first I was like, no way, who does that? But then I started to see the logic in the idea. The simple beauty of it. If Mom came to MIT with me, it wouldn't be the way I pictured it, with the late-night discussions in the dorm and strolling down the sidewalks with a group of friends. But it could be better. Because then Mom wouldn't be alone, and we could escape Nebraska and what happened in our garage. We would never have to go back. We could start fresh. Both of us.

"My life is over," Mom says again.

I exhale a frustrated breath. "Just think about it for a while, okay? It's a good plan. If you think about it-"

She sits up straighter. "No. My answer is no, honey. It's always going to be no. But I love you for the offer."

"Mom-"

"This discussion is over," she says in her official mother voice. She pulls out the gold credit card. "I'll get the check."

We don't have much to say to each other for the rest of the night. Or during breakfast the next morning. Or in the car on the way back to Nebraska, which is going to be about an eleven-hour drive. Mom drives for the first forty-eight minutes without saying more than "Looks like good weather today, doesn't it?" and that's when I decide I can't take it anymore.

"Pull over," I say.

"What?" She glances at me. "Do you have to go to the bathroom? You went before we left."

"No, just pull over, right here."

She brings the car to a stop at the side of the interstate. "What's the matter? Are you feeling sick?"

"Your life is not over. That's bulls.h.i.t."

Her eyes flash. "Alexis. Watch your mouth."

"It's bulls.h.i.t," I say again for emphasis, and this time I'm able to swear with conviction. Ty would be proud. "You're forty-four years old. The average life expectancy for a female in the United States is eighty-one. You're not overweight, and you don't smoke, and you're drinking a lot now, but I like to think that it's a phase and as soon as you stop feeling so f.u.c.king sorry for yourself you'll quit doing that, and you work on your feet for most of the day, and you like vegetables, and you go to church, which studies have shown adds about seven-point-five years to a person's life, and you brush your teeth. If anyone's going to live to be a hundred, Mom, it's you. So stop saying your life is over. It's not even halfway over. And yes, your son died, and that's awful, and that hurts, but it's not your fault. And you know what? Everybody dies, and everybody loses people they love-everybody-and that is not an excuse for you to f.u.c.king die. I love you, and I need you to be my mother, and I need you to have a life. So get over yourself."

I take a much-needed breath.

We sit there. The turn signal is still on, blinking. Cars are blasting by us at seventy-five miles an hour. Mom looks straight ahead.

I just said the f word. Twice. To my mother.

I called her out on her drinking. I told her to get over herself.

"Mom, I-"

She holds a hand up.

"All right," she says, although I don't know if she means All right, I've had enough, now get out of the car and walk, you ingrate or All right, you're grounded or All right, I'll stop saying that my life is over.

"Mom?"

She sighs, then pulls the car back onto the highway.

"Would you look in my purse?" she says after we've gone about ten miles. "There's a book in there."

I forage through her purse until I find a small and yellowed paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.

"This?" I hold it up, surprised.

She nods. "I was supposed to read it in eighth grade. I thought maybe you could read it to me now. To pa.s.s the time."

"Okay." It's odd, but at least she's not yelling at me. I flip to the first page.

"'When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow,'" I begin.

Mom lets out a slow breath. "Yes. I knew this would be good."

So I continue reading. For the next seven-and-a-half hours, stopping for pee breaks and lunch and once because Mom feels the urgent need for a Diet c.o.ke, I read. I read about Scout and Boo Radley and Mayella Violet Ewell. I read until my voice is hoa.r.s.e.

When I'm done, Mom says, "I always wanted Atticus Finch to be my father. I used to imagine it, like I was secretly adopted and Gregory Peck was my biological father."

"I thought you said you hadn't read the book."

"I saw the movie," she says. "Have you seen it?"

"Yeah. In eighth grade, I think. You're right, Gregory Peck is, like, golden. So all this time I was reading, you knew how the story was going to end."

"I wanted to hear the words," she explains. "I knew how it ended, but I wanted to go slowly and see how it would all work itself out." She yawns against her hand.

"How about I drive for this last bit?" I offer.

She pulls over and we swap places.

We've gone about a mile, just outside Kansas City, when she starts to cry. I don't even notice at first, but at one point I lean over to adjust the radio and notice the wetness on her face, the trail of gleaming tears from the corner of her eye to the edge of her jaw.

I smell Ty's cologne.

I wonder if Mom smells it. If that's what's set off her crying.

"Are you okay?" I ask her gently. "We can stop."

She shakes her head and exhales in a shudder, then opens up her purse and starts to dig around for her pack of tissues. "I'm fine. It's just . . ."

SMELL ME, says Ty's cologne. I DEMAND TO BE SMELLED. SMELL ME NOW.

I glance in the rearview mirror, and then I see him, I see him clear as day, sitting in the backseat, his head against the window, like he always used to sit, looking out.

It's a miracle that I don't wreck the car.

Mom says, "It's just that, I don't know why we never did that before. Graceland. All these years we've been so close, a day's drive, and we've never gone. Why didn't we?"

Because Dad hates to travel, I think but do not say. Look up the word homebody in the dictionary, and there will be a picture of Dad.

"We should have gone," Mom whispers, wiping at her face.

"We've gone now," I answer shakily. "Graceland-check."

"Yes, but I wish . . . ," she says, and I know she wants to say we should have gone when Ty was alive.

But Ty hated Elvis. He didn't appreciate being subjected to Mom's obsession with the King. He said so many times.

My eyes flick back to the mirror.

Ty is still there. A chill runs through me like a trickle of ice water.

"Hey, uh, I think the lady in that red car behind us is texting," I say. "That's dangerous."

Mom turns to look. She gazes right through where Ty is curled in the backseat. She turns back to me. "You should let her pa.s.s you. It's always better to be behind the road hazard."

I let the red car pa.s.s. Mom gives a disapproving look to the driver, but the lady doesn't notice.

I try to keep my hands steady on the wheel.

Mom gets a tissue out of her purse and blows her nose. The tears keep coming, an endless river of grief. Ty stays with us too. All the way back to Nebraska.

I WAIT. Until we're unpacked. Until we've eaten dinner. Until Mom is asleep. Then I slip down into Ty's room.

It's quiet.

I look at the mirror. The clock radio. The shadow in the corner cast by the closet door.

He's not here. But I want him to be.

"I want to talk to you," I say. "Ty."