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“Ah, there you are,” my mother announces when she sees me. “Perfect timing. They’re just starting my infusion. Did you get the books I ordered?”
I hand her the bag and take the recliner beside her. Leaning back, I kick my feet up and toss my hands behind my head. “In all their smutty glory.”
My mother and her nurse, Astrid, laugh. My mother is a dirty romance book junky. Minus the dirty parts, I always found her continued faith and love of romance to be a bit baffling considering my father fucked his assistant and then her best friend and left her with nothing except for me after telling her he never loved her. As far as I know, she never dated anyone after him, but somehow loves to live vicariously through the pages of books. I’m only too happy to supply her habit, occasionally being a sucker enough to read some of them to her if she’s not feeling well.
My father, as you’ve garnered, was a class-A asshole to everyone in his life, including his only son and wife. He made all his money after my parents divorced, selling his first company for millions and then his second one for billions, only to divorce his second and third wives and eventually die alone of liver disease. Ironically, as his only surviving heir, I inherited everything and subsequently bought my mother the condo of her dreams, gave her enough money that she’d never have to work again, and sent her on a four-week cruise around Europe.
It wasn’t until she returned home and I came to visit her that I heard her coughing. She blew it off and claimed it was just a cold and it would pass. Except it didn’t. Finally, I forced her to get a chest x-ray and after that, a biopsy, and now here we are, treating her non-small cell lung cancer that has spread to her nearby lymph nodes.
Sometimes being a doctor sucks. Especially a doctor who currently doesn’t have the happiest or brightest outlook on life. Actually, life deserves double middle fingers and can fuck off accordingly. The only thing that’s managed to make me smile in I don’t even know how long is Katy Barrows.
But despite my less-than-rosy disposition, there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for my mother or to make her happy, so we don’t talk about her cancer or prognosis, and I let her focus on me when she’s not focused on her romance books.
Case in point…
“You’re smiling,” my mother accuses, and I close my eyes, pretending to rest comfortably and casually when her words make me feel anything but. I hadn’t realized I was smiling.
“I got stuck in another elevator today.” With a beautiful woman who now works for me though, I still remember what her kisses taste like.
My mother laughs because unlike me, nothing gets her down or holds her there long. “How many times does that make it now?”
“Three,” I answer without missing a beat or bothering to open my eyes.
“Remind me never to get on an elevator with you,” Astrid teases, and my stupid, traitorous smile grows. That’s the same thing Katy said.
“See, and I was hoping that smile was because you were going to tell me that you’ve met a funny, vivacious, brilliant woman, and you’re giving me a grandchild.”
I groan. Loudly. “Please, don’t start with that again.”
“I’ll be back to check on you in a bit.” Astrid politely sees herself out, leaving me alone with my baby-hungry mother.
“Lizbeth called me.”
“What?” My eyes pop open, and I jerk up, bringing the feet of the recliner back down as I sit up and glare at my mother. “Mom, what are you doing? You go from talking about new women and grandbabies to my ex-fucking-wife?”
She ignores the curse. For an Irish woman who grew up in South Boston and swears like a biker at a rally, she rarely tolerates that in me. “She said you’re not returning her calls.”
I blink at her, nonplussed. “I’m not. Why would I? We’re divorced.”
“She says she needs to speak to you. That it’s important.”
I roll my eyes derisively. “Oh, I’m sure it is. And I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that she wants a bigger bank account and a husband to rely on because her trust fund is gone.” I raise a you know I’m right eyebrow at her. “Besides, I don’t know why you’re even bringing her up. You never liked her. She’s a lying, conniving, backstabbing, life-ruining snake.”
It’s a fact my mother can’t argue.
When Liz and I met, fell in love, and got married, we talked about starting a family one day. I wanted kids. I’ve wanted kids for a while. And not just to please my mother. I want to be the dad mine never was. But when I started bringing it up, Liz would always have a reason why it wasn’t a good time. And for a while, with the hours I was working, I let it ride. Then I started to push because I was more than ready, we’d been married for four years, and I wasn’t getting any younger.
Eventually, she relented, and we started trying and trying, but after six or so months of nothing, I was starting to get concerned. She blew it off, saying maybe it wasn’t meant to be. More than that, she refused to go for testing of any kind and wouldn’t even discuss fertility treatments. I suggested adoption, but she wouldn’t entertain that either.
Anytime I’d try to talk about any of this with her, she’d grow angry and dismissive and blame me for a hundred things that were all out of my control and not related to starting a family. It was wearing on me and silently breaking my heart.
Then one day, after a particularly long, awful shift, I didn’t want to go home. Liz was out late at a hospital administration dinner, and the thought of going home to an empty house was too much. I went to a local restaurant and ran into one of Liz’s friends who also happened to be her GYN. We got to talking, and I confessed that I was stressed that we were having so much trouble getting pregnant.
She looked at me as if I had three heads and asked me when Liz had her tubal ligation reversed. Naturally, you could imagine my shock, and when I asked her what fucking tubal ligation, she turned pale and told me she couldn’t speak further about it and had only mentioned it because she thought I knew. Of course she did. Because why wouldn’t I know that while I was out of town at a conference a year prior, my wife went behind my back and had her tubes tied and never told me?
Only that wasn’t the final blow. It was simply the tip of the iceberg, and things got worse from there. Much, much worse. So as far as I’m concerned, she’s not owed me picking up her calls, and she has a ton of fucking nerve calling my sick mother.
“Fine. You’re right. I fucking hated Liz.” My mother purses her lips to the side in her universal display of I’m conceding the battle, but not the war. “But there has to be someone else who could do it.”
