It hadn’t been the plan. The plan had been something outrageous. Something to get every gossip at every party, event, whatever to whisper about it.
Instead, he’d seen this vintage ring and…
Well, it didn’t do to think about getting her a ring that suited her. It was just a ring. It was just money. And it got the job done regardless.
His phone rang, a welcome distraction from the frustrating circle of his thoughts. He answered, only to be shocked to hear his name in his mother’s voice.
“Mother.” He was surprised to hear from her. He always was. She rarely reached out herself. He had to make most overtures. They did not see eye to eye and likely never would. She wished to suffer. He did not wish her to. It was a stalemate even he could not cross.
“Zervou, thank you for taking my call.”
Always so formal. So distant. Because he could never quite figure out what she wanted from him. Not help, not money. Nothing to make her life easier. But she was never happy with him staying away, either.
He simply could not make her happy, so he stayed out of her life beyond taking care of what he could without her refusal.
“Of course. Is there something I can do for you?”
There was a beat of silence, that frustrated sigh he was so used to. She’d been a warm, happy woman once. Sometimes he wondered if that vision of her he had in his mind from before his father was murdered was made up. Some trauma-induced fiction. Maybe she’d never been that woman.
But Zervou knew better. He was too much of a realist not to know better.
His father’s death had broken something inside of her, and no amount of trying to mend it on his part could repair it.Hecould not repair it. Because she did not wish it to be repaired. She wanted to be broken, miserable, crushed by the weight of life and its unfairness. Sometimes, he couldn’t even blame her for that.
Sometimes.
“Your grandmother has…deteriorated,” Mother said after a time. “Even the in-home nursing is not meeting her needs at this point. Our head nurse has recommended palliative care.”
He waited to feel something, but the truth of the matter was he had little to no relationship with his grandmother. She had not been a part of his childhood, having disapproved of his mother marrying his father, who had been poor. It had been a little joke when he’d been a young boy: Mama’s rich, snobby parents thumbing their nose at true love.
Some joke. Love was but a temporary thing, for his mother had loved nothing and no one since Father had died.
After the murder, Mother had refused help from her affluent family. At first, Zervou had assumed it was pride. Hurt that her family had turned its back on her for following her heart.
Eventually he’d learned whatever heart his mother had once had was long gone. He didn’t even think it was pride in her way. It was that dedication to misery. Because only when his grandmother’s health had failed did his mother go back into the family fold. Always eager to make a martyr of herself.
Zervou had been long gone by that time, since his mother wanted nothing from him. Wanted to give him nothing. So he hadn’t interfered. Only offered the necessary funds—mostly refused, occasionally accepted as a last resort.
“You have the funds at your fingertips, if you’d use them.” He tried to ensure his remaining words would not come off bitter. He knew the answer before he even asked, and still… “Would you like me to make the arrangements for you? I can arrange for the best—”
“Of course not. This is not why I called.” So offended. So…familiar.
It was his turn to sigh. “Then why have you called, Mother?”
“You cannot simply throw money at this,” she said, so cloaked in her disapproval.
“Then what do you require of me?” He pinched the bridge of his nose where a headache began to drum. “You have never wanted more than monetary help, and eventhatyou have not wanted until you could not care for your mother yourself.”
“She is your grandmother.”
He’d hardly call her that, but there was no point in the old argument. “So you want me to suffer as you suffer? Tell me how. Perhaps I can pretend.”Thatwas bitter and pointed, but he found he could not care in the moment. Nothing he had ever done had touched his mother after his father’s death, and he had no hope it ever would. Anything he offered now was a kind of…gesture to his long dead father.
“That is not what I want.”
Isn’t it?But he did not say this out loud. The arguments were old. Stale. He’d had to make his peace with never getting through to his mother. He’d had to make his peace with this being what they were.
Without his father, she had no love to give. And so he had lost both parents that day. It had been difficult. Perhaps there were still scars there, but he was a grown man who had learned how to deal. His money would always be available to her, but he would not drown in her misery.
She wouldn’t tell him how, so how could he?
