This Is Not Over Part 9

How are you going to fleece people out of their security deposits now? Ha ha, fleece, sheets, get it?

Oh, I get it. It's not enough for you to screw up my business, my life. You want to rub my nose in it. You want to be sure I know it was you, as if it could have been anyone else.

How can a virtual stranger gloat about the destruction of another? She must be pure evil.

I don't think I've ever felt this kind of rage before. I'm shaking with it. I'm parked in front of my mother's senior living community, but there's no way I can go inside, not in this condition. With my luck, this would be one of her more alert days, when she picks up on and synthesizes what's in the air around her. I can't bear to be the cause of her agitation. I can't run the risk.

I'll just drop the flowers off at the front desk and say something's come up. An emergency. It's not like she antic.i.p.ates my visits. She won't miss me.

The sun through my windshield is blinding, painfully so. I rest my head on the steering wheel, trying to block it out. All of it.

I must have done something for it to have come to this. We're not just bystanders to disaster. We have to be contributors. Because if we're complicit in some way, we also have some power. I can't bear the alternative.

It's part of why I subsidize Thad. Because I created him, through what I did or didn't do, through action or inaction. I said something wrong, many somethings; more likely, I failed to say anything of value. My love wasn't enough. But I can correct that. Thad and I have texted ten times so far this morning.

But right now, I'm furious with myself.

Larry might know what to do about the rental, and about Dawn, but I can't pick his brain, not after my lies of omission. He doesn't know about the Santa Monica ordinance, and he certainly wouldn't approve of me violating it for years. If I tried to explain why, I'd only expose the extent of premeditation, damaging our trust irrevocably.

I need a new plan, that's all. I can do this. Larry isn't the only one with brains in this family.

I can't kick out the current guests. Where would they go? By the time I parted ways with Violet, I let her think she'd put the fear of G.o.d into me. She would never suspect that I'd honor the next two weeks' worth of reservations.

It's risky, but I need some buffer money until I decide my next move. I need to have enough to pay Thad's rent for the next few months. I can't cut him off cold turkey. He'd panic, and that would send him right back to drugs, if he's ever left them. He says he has. You have to trust me, he texted this morning. I'm clean.

I want to trust him, so badly, yet I have to wonder. Is it possible that all this talk is because somehow, through some junkie sixth sense, he can see that his money is in peril?

No, that's ridiculous.

He's clean, and I have to come clean. We finally have something in common.

But how can I come clean? Larry's mother had an affair, and he's never forgiven her. He says it's not about the affair per se; it's about the dishonesty, about her lack of character. He would never forgive or see me the same way again. Even if he didn't divorce me, I'd have to live every day knowing that in his eyes, I'd been soiled, permanently.

"h.e.l.lo?" I say. I recognize the number. It's one I called earlier today, relieved to get the voicemail.

"This is Claire Turner. You canceled my reservation for next month?"

"I did. I'm so sorry. I hope I properly conveyed that in the message."

"You did. You properly conveyed it." Her tone is pointed. No one understands a family emergency anymore? It wasn't a lie. My family is on the verge of crisis. "Now what am I supposed to do? All the good rentals are taken."

"I'm sure that's not true. I refunded you in full."

"Yes, but now in order to get something equally nice, we have to spend more money. That's how it works when you wait until the last minute. Not that we did wait until the last minute."

I can't worry about Claire Turner right now, and her vacation in jeopardy. "I've already apologized, and issued a refund."

"That's not good enough. You should give us the difference in what we're going to have to spend now."

"If you read the contract at Getaway.com, I'm not liable for any-"

"This is about decency! It's about treating people how you'd want to be treated. We've been planning this vacation for months. My children were looking forward to staying by the beach. Do you want to break the news to them?"

At another time, I might have paid her the difference, just to avoid the confrontation. "I'm very sorry. I wish there was something I could do for you."

"That's not good enough."

She sounds like a young mother. I've been there myself. "Things happen in life that we're not expecting, and that we're not prepared for. It's good to get practice at rolling with them. I hope that you're fortunate enough that this is the worst setback you ever experience. I truly do."

"How dare you patronize me!"

I look toward the building that houses my degenerating mother, the one who barely remembers me on a good day. "Good luck to you." As she continues to sputter, I disconnect the call.

The h.e.l.l with her. With all of them.

As a fireball hurtles upward through my body, I make my last call. It's to the one reservation that's come in since Dawn posted her review, and I'm ready for what he's about to say. In fact, some small part of me relishes it.

"My wife told me not to book with you. That you'd say there's a green stain on the couch in the shape of an antelope, and you'll need to keep the whole deposit."

"Yes," I say. "That sounds just like me."

"I'll be sure to note that response in my review."

I feel an unexpected freedom. There are no more reviews. No more hospitality. Nothing some stranger can take away from me. I'm not submitting myself for anyone's approval anymore. "You do that," I say, and click.

19.

Dawn

Hi, Professor Myerson. I just sent you a LinkedIn request. Could you please approve me ASAP? I can use all the contacts I can get. Thanks!

Dawn "Dawnie," my mother says. She throws her arms around my neck, and I can feel her small body wrack with sobs.

I reach to hug her back, because it's the only human thing to do, but I'm reeling. I haven't seen my mother since my wedding day, and we've spoken only once in that time. How did she even find me?

The only thing I can think of is that my address was on my wedding invitation. Rob and I have lived here for our entire relationship. It's a depressing thought, actually. But my mother wouldn't actually save the invitation in its envelope with my return address, would she? She's neither sentimental nor organized enough for that.

These are not the right thoughts, I know. I should be asking her what's wrong, what I can do to help, but I just want her off me. I learned better than to throw my arms around her when I've been distraught. She'd crumble whether it was my heartache or hers; my heartache would become hers, but not in any way that could help me. She'd subsume my pain.

I realized early on that she could handle nothing. She'd wane at the slightest criticism. If I confronted her on a parenting failure (and really, she was a disaster as a mother), she would dissolve into tears and self-recrimination. "You're right, you're right, I'm the worst," she'd weep. I would have had to be a s.a.d.i.s.t to keep on with it. So I'd wind up taking care of her, telling her it wasn't really that bad, but it was. She was messy, distracted, self-involved, ignorant of things that mattered, forgetful in ways both public and private (I can't even count how many times I sat outside buildings waiting for her to drive up in the clunker of the moment). Her affection was absentminded, like she was petting a dog because she liked the feel of fur, not because she loved the dog.

It's inaccurate to say that she was self-absorbed. She was other-absorbed, and that other was her husband and never her child. They got together when she was a child herself, and she had me at fifteen. My father was seven years older, which was actionable in California, but her parents were eager to foist her on him. I guess she'd been a wild child, and they were too old to deal with it since she was an accidental change-of-life baby. So they signed her away and I was born in wedlock, just barely. They were in love. Well, she was utterly, irrevocably, unrelentingly, destructively in love with him.

He must be dead. That's the only reason she would be here, clinging to me.

I release her and look into her ravaged face. She's short like me, but sickly-skinny underneath a very faded denim jacket that might actually be from the eighties. She's got my blue eyes, and her hair is shoulder-length and crunchy-dry, a sort of sandy/wheaty color with darker streaks, a dye job gone wrong or gone too long. Her skin is ruddy, with pockmarks from acne, plus deeply grooved wrinkles.

I thought I'd never see her again, and I was good with that.

"He's dead, isn't he?" I say. She nods and then bursts into a fresh round of tears. I think she's going to grab me again and I involuntarily step back.

Rob steps forward, into the breach, and she hurls herself at him. Her crying takes on an even more hysterical, performative quality, though I know her grief is real. No one could be more bereft, more lost, than my mother without my father.

Ironically, he was just about the least dependable person around. His work ethic was nonexistent. He was fired from job after job as a laborer for being late or lazy or both. After a while, all he could get was temporary a.s.signments from Manpower, and even those were few and far between. He often didn't come home, and it was pretty obvious he was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around. When he was there, he was emotionally absent, staring at the TV, barely talking to either of us. But Mom said constantly, "He's my rock." She meant it as a compliment, not in a can't-get-blood-from-a-stone sort of way.

I'm not thinking any of this consciously, but it's all there when I look at her. Rob's face is suffused with compa.s.sion, and I should be grateful. She's helpless in the best of circ.u.mstances, and someone has to be there for her.

If she'd called to tell me the news, I would have jumped in the car and gone to her; then all of this emotional upheaval would be confined to Eureka. But she has no right to cross my threshold in her hour of need after being MIA for the past three years. She's a.s.suming we'll take her in, put her up, as if she's the child and I'm the mother, just like always.

She mismanaged her entire life, and now she's alone, with no means of support. While I pity her, I can't just forget that her choices cost me my childhood. When she saw my father wasn't holding jobs, she should have gotten one herself, but instead, she chose to believe he would pull it together soon. Her delusion meant we were constantly broke, sometimes hungry, and often evicted. She looked to me for rea.s.surance: that not only was I okay, but she would be okay, too. Practically every year, I was the new girl in a poor school. She has no idea what that's like; she was too fragile to be told. Besides, I don't know how many times she asked, "How was your day?" and then rambled over my answer.

Her life was chaos, and she made that mine, and then she sought absolution. I gave it to her, again and again, because I felt sorry for her. Because I thought she was my father's unwitting victim. Because she didn't know any other way. Because she was the one parent who seemed to love me. Always because. But during those three years of no contact, I realized that it hadn't been real love at all. I'd been used, and it's not going to happen again.

"Was it sudden?" I ask my mom. What I mean is, Did you have time to make arrangements? Was there life insurance? Are you about to get kicked out of your apartment?

"Very sudden," she says. "A ma.s.sive heart attack. He was barely fifty." She just keeps clutching Rob, a man to hold her aloft, the story of her life.

It occurs to me that I've just learned my father is dead. I should have some sort of emotional reaction to this news.

Is this what shock feels like? Or is it possible that I truly don't care? If the shoe was on the other foot-if my father had gotten the news of my death-I don't think he would have given two s.h.i.ts. One, maybe, but definitely not two.

That recognition makes me a little sad. So I guess that's something.

Finally, the embrace between Rob and my mother comes to an end, and we all gravitate toward the couch. It's the same couch we've had since I moved in, a white Jennifer Convertible that we bought new. The springs have become uncomfortable with time, but it does turn into a bed, and I know that my mother will be sleeping on it for one night at least. It's too late to send her back to Eureka.

"He was gone before the ambulance arrived," she says, closing her eyes, tears leaking out and down her cheeks. "I pounded on his chest and I blew into his mouth. I don't know if I did it right. I just tried to do what I saw on TV."

"I'm sure you did all you could," Rob says.

Her eyes are still closed. "I never thought it would happen like this, that I'd have to leave him."

"He left you, Mom." That's what dying is.

"No, I mean, I had to leave his . . . body."

"You left his body in Eureka without making arrangements?"

"I can't afford to have him buried. Isn't that awful?" Now she looks right at me. "He'll be a ward of the state."

"A ward of the state is an orphan," I say. "He's a fifty-two-year-old man." Who died without a penny to his name. Who surely doesn't have life insurance, or a wife who's capable of handling his remains.

I last saw them three years ago, when they were an hour and a half late to my wedding. They missed the ceremony and got tipsy at the reception. My father tried to feel up a bridesmaid, and my mother cried in the bathroom.

They never called to apologize for the scene. They never called at all, in fact. The next Mother's Day, Rob encouraged me to reach out and bury the hatchet. "They don't know there even is a hatchet," I told him. "They think that's normal behavior." He said I should be the bigger person. It seemed like a low bar, but okay.

So I called. My mother asked a generic question like "How's marriage treating you?" half listening to the answer before she went on about her usual struggles with rent and bills and my father. I endured fifteen minutes of this and then she came up for air, saying, "Well, I'll let you go." She already had, years before. After that phone call, I let her go. There was no point in saying that I wouldn't be calling again. It seemed like a safe a.s.sumption that if I didn't reach out, then I would never talk to them again. I didn't figure on a moment like this.

"We'll deal with all of it tomorrow," Rob says. "You don't need to worry. We'll figure out what needs to be done."

I hope he's just being comforting, that he's not actually considering footing the bill. A life of irresponsibility, so much so that they can't even afford a funeral, should not be rewarded with a bailout. But I can't say that in front of my mother. I don't want to kick her when she's down; I just don't feel like it's my job to pick her back up. Not anymore.

"We'll make up the couch for you," he tells her. "Have you eaten?"

I watch my sweet husband make her a plate of our leftover pasta, the pasta that I'd put into a container for his lunch tomorrow, and I'm thinking she doesn't deserve it. She hasn't earned the food out of our mouths.

I don't want to tell Rob I feel this way. He's displaying the characteristics of a good father, but I'm not feeling like I'd be much of a mother. I haven't seen it done, and I don't want to practice now, not like this.

20.

Miranda

Thad, is everything okay?

Just text that one word, "okay." Even "OK" is okay.

Eva is due soon, but I can't help myself. I'm cleaning madly-not just my usual pre-cleaning/straightening, but a full scrubbing of the quartz countertops. My phone is lying close by, and I check often, in case the incoming text fails to ping. Ping, Thad, ping.

I haven't been worrying whether he's alive. I haven't even been checking his social media. For the first time in I don't know how long, I didn't need to. I had genuine contact with my son. How indescribably sweet it's been.

But now I have a much more familiar feeling.

For the past few years, money has been my leverage. Thad might ignore me much of the month, but not in that last week, not just before rent's due. I've often feared that if I turned off the green faucet, he'd have no reason to ever communicate with me. And I needed that scant amount of communication, that paltry recognition that I'm his mother, not just a follower of his Twitter feed.