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“What are you doing home? Are you home?” her mom asked as an afterthought. “Honey, maybe she’s calling us from work.” Again her mom forgot to move the phone away from her mouth.
Mina looked at the bag of chocolate chips and all the promises it offered her. Delicious escape. Delicious calories. Uncomfortable stomach reactions if she ate the whole bag.
She sighed, then popped the two chips in her mouth. “I’m not at work today because Levi woke up with the flu. I took him to Urgent Care, and I’ve stayed home with him for the day. Like he stayed home with me.”
“You could get sick,” her mom said.
“I’ve already had the flu. Levi took care of me. Took me to the ER. Made me dinner every night. Remember? I texted you and told you I was being taken care of.”
“You don’t know what other diseases you could have caught at the Urgent Care.”
“Mom, I work with college students who live in dorms. If I’m going to catch something, it will probably be from them, not from the strangers I didn’t interact with at the Urgent Care while wearing a face mask.” Mina hated the face mask but recognized the prudence of it. Despite what her mother seemed to think, she wasn’t a complete idiot.
“I just think you should move closer to home. Like your brother.” Throwing “like your brother” into the sentence made that one worth five chocolate chips.
“I’m not moving home. I have a good job that I like. I bought a house. I have a boyfriend.” She bit her tongue against saying and I think we’re serious, because the first conversation she had with someone about the seriousness of her relationship with her boyfriend wasn’t going to be with her mother.
“You’re supposed to be happy for me,” she said, unable to control the whine in her voice. Going away to college had been hard, and her mother had struggled to let go of her youngest child. Her mother had given up struggling when Mina had been diagnosed. Since then all their conversations had been a constant refrain of “when are you coming home?” And at every opportunity, Mina had moved farther and farther away. She wanted to tell herself it wasn’t acting out, just taking the best opportunity available, but that wasn’t the entire truth.
She could have applied to graduate schools close to home, and she hadn’t. Though she hadn’t told her mother that.
She reached for the bag of chips, anticipating her mother’s next response. But it didn’t come, and Mina was left leaning forward, her fingers rustling the plastic of the bag when her mom said, “I am happy for you. I’m just scared that something will go wrong, and we won’t be there to help you.”
“What could go wrong?” Mina asked before she could stop herself. Then she leaned back on the couch, not taking any chips for this one. Even if she would need the chocolate when her mom started in on her list, she didn’t deserve any for speaking without thinking.
“You could get sick again.”
“Of course. So could anyone. Luckily my virus count is almost undetectable, and so me getting sick isn’t that much different than you getting sick. And you’d be insulted if I said I had to live near you because I was worried you’d fall and break your hip. Right?”
“You could lose your job.”
“So could Michael. Actually, it seems more likely that Michael would lose his job, given the instability in his industry right now.” She had to grit her teeth as she said the words, even though her brother would probably never know that she’d thrown him under the bus.
“And what really do you know about Levi’s intentions? All those other boyfriends said they would stick with you, but they couldn’t honestly handle the repercussions of your illness. How do you know he’s different?”
Mina grabbed the whole bag of chips from the coffee table and set it on the couch next to her. Screw a later upset stomach. Screw a few extra pounds. Screw having to explain to Levi where all his chocolate chips went. This conversation was only getting more stressful.
She popped a chip in her mouth. “I don’t know that he’s going to be different any more than you know he’s not going to be.” And not all of the men she’d been with had broken up with her because of her HIV. A couple of times they broke things off because it just wasn’t right.
