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“Holly suggested hiring a nurse. You know, someone who could be here with her all the time.” He turns to me. “Then you wouldn’t have to take on as much.”
What could he mean by that? Is he hinting that I haven’t been doing a good job? That we need an outsider to be here with Mom because I can’t be trusted to take care of her? Maybe Jackie told him how I let her watchReal Housewives. Or that I haven’t been as strict with her diet as she was. So, I’ve let her eat some of her favorite meals without cutting out the salt entirely. So what? She should be able to enjoy the food she eats while she still can.
Though, he said Holly made the suggestion. Which, frankly, she has no business doing in the first place. We’re her family by marriage, not by blood, and we don’t need to drain the rest of my savings to hire a nurse to come in and do what I’m already doing. I’m down to just four-hundred dollars in my savings account right now, and that’s all I have until I start working again.
Besides, being able to care for Mom is my responsibility. I’m able to make up for all the time I’ve lost while I was out on the road. I’m not going to let some stranger take that from me.
“I’m doing fine,” I tell him. “The setup we have now is fine. I have the weekends to decompress, and that’s all I need. We don’t need someone else coming in here to take care of Mom. She has enough trouble remembering who we are.”
Marty nods but remains quiet. He flips through the channels once more, and eventually hands me the remote and says he needs to head home. “We can talk more about the baby gate with Jackie. I’ll let her know what you said, though.”
In other words, Jackie wants to install the baby gate, and that means the baby gatewillbe installed at some point. Whenever Jackie gets an idea in her head, she runs with it until the issue is resolved to her satisfaction. Even if said idea involves Marty or me, what Jackie says goes. It’s always been that way. She’s three inches shorter than me and can’t weigh more than a hundred twenty pounds soaking wet, and she still finds a way to boss us all around. It must be an oldest-child thing.
Mom wakes up a half hour later, yawning as she walks slowly down the hall. I race up the stairs to guide her down, and the moment her eyes land on me, she smiles so brightly that it lights up her entire face. “Rosa, you’re here.” As soon as her feet touch the carpet on the first floor, she pulls me into a tight hug. So tight I can barely breathe. “I’ve missed you so much.”
Rosa was Mom’s younger sister. She died eight years ago after a long battle with lung cancer. I know she was around a lot when I was a baby, but her visits became less frequent once she got a job as a flight attendant. From the many stories I heard growing up, Rosa lived a full, wild life. She never married or had kids but was always visiting one of the many boyfriends she had spread across the globe.
I remember four distinct things about her: she loved owls so much she had one tattooed on her hip, her favorite drink was a whiskey on the rocks, she had a massive crush on John Travolta, and always had a pack of cigarettes in her purse.
Mom told me more than once that I looked like her, and right now, she seems to think I am her.
Part of me wants to tell her the truth, and perhaps that’s what I should do. But that would mean revealing her sister is dead, and I can’t stomach seeing that heartbroken look on her face right now. The one that steals the color from her cheeks the moment she realizes her disease has, once again, played a trick on her mind.
There’s gonna come a day when we’ll have to put her safety above her happiness.Marty’s words from earlier float back to me. However, playing along with Mom’s current version of reality wouldn’t put her in any danger. Certainly not physical danger, anyway. And I’m sure not even in a mental or emotional sense, really. I mean, will she even remember this exchange in the morning? Probably not.
If only for today, I want her to live inside the memory that her mind has brought forth. There’s happiness there. I see it as clear as day in her smile.
“I missed you too,” I tell her, taking on the role of Rosa. “It’s good to see you.”
“Dios mío,look at you,” she says, pulling back to hold my face in her hands. “Still have the smooth skin of a newborn baby.” Mom sits next to me on the couch and takes my hands in hers. “Tell me, how has life been treating you?”
I have no idea what year she thinks it is, or how long it’s been in her mind since she’s seen Rosa, so I have to be careful here. Anything out of the ordinary could shatter the memory and force Mom back into the present.
“Uh, good,” I tell her, trying to ease the shakiness out of my voice. Rosa was confident as hell, and that’s what I need to be. “You know, same old, same old. A new day, a new city, a new man. What could be better than that?”
Mom barks out a laugh and playfully smacks my knee. “Ay,nena, you’re wild. I love it.”
She sits there, quietly smiling at me for a moment before she pats my leg again. “Do you remember that summer when we snuck out during la Noche de San Juan to meet the boys down the street from Abuelita’s house to skinny-dip in the ocean?”
My mother sneaking out to go skinny-dipping with boys? Adorable. And a story she definitely never would’ve shared with me, at least not while I was young enough to do the same.
“I do, yeah,” I say with a nostalgic sigh. “That was a crazy night.”
“Not as crazy as when we got those tattoos!”
Tattoo? I had no idea my mom had a tattoo. Shit, is she going to ask to see the owl on my hip? I hope not. Maybe if I keep the focus on her, the owl won’t come up. “Where did you get yours again? I can’t remember.”
She wags a finger at me. “All that ayahuasca is melting your brain cells.”
Jesus Christ. Aunt Rosa did ayahuasca?
Mom reaches for the hem of her nightgown and lifts it to expose her upper thigh. There, about an inch lower than her panty line is the faded silhouette of a wolf with its snout lifted toward the sky as if howling at the moon.
“Remember now?” she says with a chuckle as she tugs her nightgown back into place.
I wish I did. I wish I was there when she got it, and I wish I knew why she chose a wolf, of all things. What does that symbolize for her, I wonder? As tempted as I am to ask her, I worry I’m already treading water after not remembering what she got in the first place. “I do. It still looks good as new.”
We chat like this for, I don’t know how long, with me asking Mom about her favorite memories of childhood, and Mom sharing stories I’ve never heard before. She lets out a loud snort as she laughs through her tale about how she and Rosa snuck into a Menudo concert and flashed Ricky Martin. I learn about Mom’s brief stint as a card dealer at a casino, and she speaks fondly of her grandmother, who seemed incredibly strict, but was also a gifted cook.
