Around the Bend (14 page)

This time, my mother’s doctor was old, grizzled and a man of few words. Joel Gifford, M.D., stood six and a half feet tall, with white hair, a rough, bushy white beard, and a loosened, blue-striped tie at the neck of a slightly wrinkled blue oxford shirt. If trustworthy had a face, it would be his. “She did fine.”

“The catheterization was successful?”

The doctor nodded. His beard did a little jig.

“Will there be any side effects? Problems?”

“Time will tell. We’ll watch her for a few days.”

“And then—”

His green eyes met mine, and in them, I read knowledge that he held, but wasn’t sharing. “You need to talk to your mother about that.”

“What do you mean?”

He put a hand on my shoulder, and the sternness in his face softened for a moment. For a moment, he resembled my late Grandfather Delaney, who’d played Santa, and had a way of
telling a story that took an afternoon but never managed to bore his audience. “Talk to her. Talk a lot. That’s all I can say.”

He gave me a pat, then turned and left, a tall man with a slight shuffle in his gait, as if trying to keep his height, his presence, to a minimum.

I held my cell phone, wanting to call Nick, but didn’t. Instead, I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes, remembering the first morning I’d woken up in Nick’s apartment. He’d pulled me into his arms, held me tight, and somehow our conversation drifted toward the type of house he’d build if he ever had enough time and money.

I’d bolted from the bed, claiming I wanted a shower. Nick tried to tease me back under the covers. He’d promised to cook me breakfast. Instead, I’d gotten dressed and ducked down to the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts, returning with a bag of artery-clogging fried holes.

We’d laughed, we’d eaten, but we hadn’t talked—really talked about anything deep and meaningful. I thought back over our relationship and realized that the closer Nick got, the more often I ran out the door. Found other things to occupy our mouths and time so that I could push off the heavy stuff until tomorrow.

Now where had that gotten me? Nick was gone, probably for good. And my mother was ill. Heavy stuff was sitting in the next room and I couldn’t ignore it anymore or buy myself time with some doughnuts.

A few minutes later, I sat in another hospital room, this one almost an exact replica of the one in Indiana, right down to the antiseptic smell, the sounds, the sheets, the cheery but cheesy décor. I wondered if you could travel the country and
visit hospitals like hotels, interchanging one for the other and not tell which was which. Would a facility in Boston be any different from one in Texas, save for the addition of a few
r’
s in the nurses’ diction?

“Hilary,” my mother said, the syllables slightly garbled, her voice groggy, her movements nearly as slurred as her speech.

“Hey, Ma.” I sat down on the bed beside her, sinking into the vinyl mattress, my hand snaking across the knit blanket to take hers. “How you doing?”

She took a moment to rouse herself, gather her wits. “I feel like a vampire who got kidnapped and drained by the Red Cross, but other than that, okay.”

I sat back, surprised. “Did you just make a joke?”

“Hey, I’m learning a new skill every day.” She shook off a little more of the grogginess, becoming more of herself. Showing more of the bulldog, less of the woman who’d just been under anesthesia moments before.

I grinned. “Hey, if you can become Jay Leno, that gives me hope that I might be able to do something else, too. Something I’ve been dreaming about for a while now.”

“Like what?” She pressed the button on her bed, raising her head a few inches.

“I’ll only tell you if you promise not to laugh.”

“I can’t laugh. I just had surgery. And you know how surgery goes, sometimes they take out the wrong thing. Like a funny bone.”

I did the laughing for her. “That’s two jokes in five minutes. What did they put in your anesthesia?”

“Nothing.” She brushed her hair back off her face, the usually pouffy style now flattened by her time in bed, the blue
paper surgical cap that had spent an hour on her head. “Tell me about your dream.”

I drew in a breath, and with it, the courage to give voice to a thought that had lain dormant for years, never becoming much more than a flitting idea, something I had shared with no one but Nick, who had bugged me for years to pursue the thought. All those hours behind the wheel of the minivan had kick-started my imagination somewhere along the road, making me wonder what roads were open in my own life, if I decided to veer off the current path. “I was thinking of maybe opening my own restaurant.”

“Your own restaurant? But—” Ma cut off the objection, slid a smile onto her face. “I think you’d be great at that.”

“You were just about to tell me what a crazy idea it was.”

“I was not—” Ma bit her lip. “Okay, yes I was. But I’d be wrong. You’ve done a good job with Ernie’s, and I bet you’d do a great job with your own place, too.”

I rose and went to the window. The heater at my knees blasted hot air straight up, giving me a desert-worthy facial. “Ma, you don’t know that. You only know what I’ve told you.”

“I’ve been to Ernie’s. Several times.”

I dropped to the corner of the heater, perched on the closed control panel. “You’ve eaten at Ernie’s? When?”

She nodded. “The girls and I go there almost every Tuesday night before we go to Betty’s house to play cards. And it’s not a bad place at all. I was wrong for ever calling it a strip joint and for giving you a hard time for working there. The girls and I enjoy our Tuesday night nachos and margaritas.”

Tuesdays were the nights I spent mainly in the office, paying bills, placing orders for the next week, filling out the
schedule. Ernie generally handled the floor, because it was one of our least busy nights. She’d been there, what’s more enjoyed it, and never come to see me? Never mentioned the visit? “Why didn’t Ernie ever tell me?”

“I told him not to.” My mother smoothed the blanket in front of her, creasing a fold that didn’t need to be creased. “I was afraid that if you knew I was coming to the restaurant, you’d…”

“What?”

She shook her head and reached for the foam cup of ice water on her table. “Never mind, it’s not important.”

I leaned my elbows on my knees, pressing forward, closer. “No, it is. Tell me.”

She hesitated, just as I had done a hundred times when confronting difficult subjects.

Okay,
started
confronting the difficult subjects. I hadn’t actually tackled too many until this trip. For more than thirty years, I’d done my best to avoid them.

When I was three, maybe four, I’d put my fingers into the flame on the gas stove, fascinated by the way the dancing colors shifted from orange to blue, to nearly white. I wanted to capture some of that, hold it in my palm, play with the beauty.

The burn had seemed to sear all the way to my toes. I remember my father scooping me up, rushing me to the sink, turning on the cold water with one hand, while he opened the fridge with his toe, grabbed the butter out with his other hand and smoothed it all over my red, throbbing fingers. My mother had called the ambulance, coordinating their arrival and the subsequent medical treatment like a general on the battlefield.

Ever since, I’d stayed away from stoves. I didn’t cook, ever.
In fact, I couldn’t cook for beans, and left everything kitchen related up to Nick, who wasn’t much better at it than me, which was why we both kept a slew of take-out menus near the phone. I could manage Ernie’s Bar & Grille, could taste a dish and tell if it would be a hit or a flop, but stayed far away from anything potentially flambé.

Heart-wise, I’d touched the emotional stove one too many times and been burned, too. It had made me skittish around Nick, around any man. Just as I’d learned to stay away from the kitchen stove, I’d learned to avoid confrontation, discussion and debate of topics that tread too close to teary eyes and broken hearts.

Now, in a too-warm Utah hospital room, I watched my mother—a woman I’d always thought of as cold and distant, unfeeling, an emotional stone—fold and refold the edge of a blanket. What if she had simply been burned once too often, too? And was only holding her fingers back from the flame? What if
that
was what made her hesitate about opening up to me, too?

Could we really be that similar?

“Tell me why, Ma,” I said, softer now. As if I held the burn balm in my hand, and was trying to coax her back into the kitchen.

She met my gaze finally, her face pale in the overhead light, wan from the ordeal of the trip, the surgery. The cup went back to her end table, and she went back to folding the blanket’s edge. “I…I didn’t want you to be embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed? Why would I…” But then I realized that a week ago I probably would have been. I thought back to who we’d been before this trip, to the relationship we used to have.

If my mother had shown up with her friends in Ernie’s back then, I’d have braced myself for the worst. For her complaints, for her nitpicking, and not seen it as interest in my life, but as her taking an opportunity to complain. Again. Hadn’t that been my exact attitude on the sidewalk outside her house a few days ago?

And I’d have been embarrassed, yes. I would have stood there in Ernie’s, feeling awkward and unsure of what to say to her, to her friends.

I looked at her now. I wasn’t sure things had entirely changed, or whether this rush of empathy came from seeing her in a weakened state, a temporary bond forged out of her illness, and a truce called by our trip. Either way, she had wiped the slate clean with me earlier; I could do the same.

“Next time you’re at Ernie’s,” I said, “let me know and I’ll be sure you get the best table.”

Ma arched a brow. “There’s a best table at Ernie’s?”

“Sure there is, Ma. The one with me.”

She bit her lip, then released it. A smile wobbled on her face, then took hold. “I’ll do that, Hilary. I promise.”

When Rosemary Delaney made someone a promise, she kept it. I may have been old enough to have a five-year-old of my own, but the joy of a child who’d been given a gift by a parent rose inside me. I ducked my head, nodded, emotion clogging my voice. “That’d be nice, Ma. Really nice.”

The moment extended between us, that bridge being built as fast as the one on the River Kwai. Neither of us said anything, probably afraid of dislodging any of the newly laid timbers.

After a while, my mother cleared her throat, then released the blanket’s edge. “Tell me how you would do a restaurant different, Hilary.”

So I told her, sharing my dream of a place that offered more than Ernie’s, or any other restaurant, did, that created an environment like home, with sofas and coffee tables, cookies instead of cheesecake after dinner, a warm and friendly place, not so much a restaurant as an environment. As I did, it made me think invariably of Nick, who had loved the idea, too. He’d gone as far as sketching up some furniture for my dream restaurant, helping me create some on-paper plans. But that was as far as it had ever gotten, until now. A piece of paper and an idea he and I had tossed like a verbal football. He was the first and only man I’d ever shared my dreams with. I knew that meant something, but right now, I wasn’t going to visit that. “I guess that psychology degree came in handy after all, because I’ve heard enough people’s problems at Ernie’s to want to design a place that offers some sense of community, of a home away from home. A place where people can gather, laugh, talk. Sort of taking the coffee-shop concept up several notches.”

“I think it’s a
great
idea.” In my mother’s eyes, I read true support. Belief in me. I had never seen that before, and it hit me out of left field. But her next words came with an even stronger punch of surprise. “And if you want a backer, I have a nest egg that’s not going anywhere.”

I started waving it off. “Ma, you don’t have to—”

She grabbed my arm. “Yes, I do. Let me do this for you, Hilary.”

“But, Ma, you’re going to need that money for your retirement. You should hold on to it, pay for a condo in Florida or all those wild Bingo days ahead of you.” I grinned, but she didn’t return the smile.

“I’m really tired now.” She pressed the button on her bed.
The top half lowered with a whine, and a slightly jerky movement. “I think I’ll take a nap, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, okay. Sure thing. I think I’ll go back to the hotel and take a shower.”

But as I left the room, a feeling nagged at me that had nothing to do with restaurants, nest eggs or surgical procedures. I thought back to what Dr. Gifford had said to me in the hall earlier and wondered what had just gone unsaid in that hospital room.

And what secrets my mother was still keeping to herself.

“I haven’t seen him,” Karen told me when I called her after I’d showered, changed and tried again to reach Nick. No answer on his cell phone, no answer at his apartment. I didn’t leave a voice mail—I was not going to make that mistake a second time, just hung up, and tried not to picture all the worst-case scenarios.

“What do you mean, you haven’t seen him?”

On the other end, I could hear Karen shopping. Hangers screeched against metal racks as she searched aimlessly through Macy’s for clothes she didn’t need. “He played at Ernie’s last night, but he hasn’t come over to our house; he hasn’t been down at any of the regular haunts. It’s like he just disappeared. He must be hanging out somewhere new now.”

Or
with
someone new. Man, when I screwed up, I did it royally big. I paced the hotel room my mother and I were sharing. Ran a hand through my wet hair, trying not to imagine Nick with another woman. Not doing too well in that department. “Do you think he’s seeing someone else?”

Karen didn’t say anything for a moment. The hangers stopped moving. She let out a sigh. “He loves you, Hilary.”

“That didn’t answer my question.”

“When are you coming home?” She went back to shopping. I heard the faint ring of cash registers.

“I don’t know. My mother just had surgery. She probably can’t travel for a while.”