Dignity.
I picture my last waxing appointment and shudder.
So, yeah, because I want more from my career than most people ever get, I usually have to saynoto things most people wouldn’t pass up.
Like buffets. Or happy hours.
Or hot French teachers who moonlight as dance instructors.
And when you put it like that, buffets and happy hours sound pretty lame.
Chapter Fifteen
BEAU
Iris has gonequiet on me. Not her style.
“You slowing down?” I nod toward her barely touched burrito.
She jumps like I’ve startled her and then takes an enormous bite. “No,” she mumbles through a mouthful.
This girl. I want to smile so bad my face aches. But she doesn’t need to know how happy I am to see her eating. It makes me even happier to see how at home she seems here. With me.
When she’s conquered the bite, she swipes her lips with her knuckles. “So, what’s your usual Saturday morning routine? What am I keeping you from?”
I blow out a breath and put my focus back on the road. “Nothing special. Coffee and breakfast with a few friends.” I don’t tell her I mean a Cajun Table gathering at Dwyers’s downtown.
“Oh—” I hear alarm in her voice and feel her eyes on me. “I’m sorry to make you change your plans.”
I shake my head. “It’s a big bunch of us. More of a standing date for whoever can make it. No big deal.”
I also don’t tell her what I know without a doubt: if I were there with them, speaking French and eating biscuits and hash browns, I’d be thinking about her, wondering what she was up to this morning.
Because that’s all I did last night after her lesson. And all this week. And last week. And the one before that. It’s like the feel of her in my arms leaves an imprint that’s impossible to shake. She stays with me.
“Do you and your friends have a Sunday thing too?” she asks. “Is that why you said tomorrow wasn’t a better day for you?”
I grip the steering wheel. Most of the people in my life already know about Mom. And they’re always asking about her. I know it’s just because they care or they’re trying to show that they care, but Alzheimer’s is a one-way street. And what am I supposed to say?She’s worse. She asked where my father was six times yesterday and forgot the way back to her room. Thanks for asking.
So I don’t want to go there with Iris. I skirt the ugly truth as best I can.
“I take my mom to lunch on Sundays.”
Iris’s face lights up. “That’s so sweet.”
I want to tell her it’s not sweet. It’s a routine. Not that I don’t want to have lunch with Mom. I do. But I do it—same time, same day, same restaurant—to try to keep her from slipping away. To make time stand still. Even though it doesn’t work.
“What?” she asks. I give her a quick glance and find her brows knit. “What’s with the face?”
I put my gaze back on the road. “What face?”
“The gloomy face.”
“I have a gloomy face?”
“Yes,” she says emphatically. “It’s different from your usual resting face.”
I turn my frown on her. “I have a usual resting face?”
