And the truth is it didn’t matter—she tried her best; he knows she’s still trying. Other kids had a mom at home; Jeremy and Jenny had their dad. And what Jeremy really feels now, as a grown-ass adult (as Jenny would say), is the acute need to take care of his mom the way his dad would.
She gets lost. She’s been forgetting things.
He pokes at his salad and returns to his soup. “Is this something I should worry about? As a matter of genetics, I mean? Gramps didn’t have it, but what about your mom?”
“Died young.”
“I know, but what if what happened with her was an early sign of dementia or—”
“No. Totally different,” his mother adds, and then, unnecessarily, “I’m not her. It wasn’t contagious.” She reaches across the table and touches his arm. “It’s not something you’ll get.”
It’s always been a little awkward when she tries to nurture, because it’s not her nature; his sister was the first to point this out to him. Back from another failed shopping expedition on which tweenage Jenny had been determined to find a fashion intersection with the cool girls who’d been merciless in trolling his sister because of her feral opposition to everything they represented, their mother had, unfortunately, bought into Jenny’s fiction that she wanted, needed, to be accepted. Five hours and $362.45 of Forever 21 later, Jenny had a wardrobe she would never wear and was flopped facedown on her brother’s bed in tears, since all she really had wanted was a mom who would tell her she didn’t need to curry favor with those little bitches. That she could be loved the way she was. And their mother did love Jenny—loved them both unconditionally, no question about it. She could even say the right words, once their father helped her disentangle the Gordian workings of a twelve-year-old girl’s mind.
But she nevertheless has always, in his opinion, lacked the basic tools to truly connect and console.
He doesn’t resent it. Or does he? Always disconcerting, growing up, when he’d have to explain to teachers that no, his mom was away working, and his dad would be bringing the class snacks, or whatever. Kimmy, the psych major, was of the opinion that a father could never provide his children what a mother would. Jenny was of the opinion that Kimmy was a pretentious bitch and was quick to point out Kimmy also claimed she was a virgin because she’d only had anal sex.
At the time he wished he hadn’t shared with his sister that intimate detail, but it turned out Jenny, in the case of Kimmy, was proved absolutely right. He was still paying off their trip to Thailand, where she’d left him for a scuba instructor and then used his PayPal account for another six months before Jeremy figured it out and changed the password.
“You don’t need to worry about this, or about me. I’m just old,” his mother is saying to him, trying to lighten the mood. “We seniors start to slip.”
He wonders again what the doctor really told her or if she went to the clinic at all.
“You’re not even fifty,” he points out. His phone chimes, and he can’t stop himself from glancing down at the text screen, and while his mother says nothing, he’s well aware of her opinions about phone etiquette and braves her irritation at the interruption.
Message from Jenny. His mother complains that she never gets texts from her daughter; he gets from his sister at minimum a dozen a day. With a flurry of taps on the screen keyboard, he tells Jenny where he is and whom he’s with and, defensive, in a variation on an old theme, multitasking with only a slight distracted delay, suggests to his mother: “Maybe you’re feeling job lag.”
“I like my job.”
Here we go again, he thinks. “Your job.” Sipping soup and talking: “Reinsurance.”
“International risk mitigation.”
“Reinsurance,” he repeats, even more sarcastically.
“Somebody has to do it.”
“And you’ve been there how long? Flying red-eyes to wherever, whenever, East Bumfuck. Jesus, Mom—the sleep deprivation alone. And jet lag. Long term, you know what that does to you? They’ve done studies of old flight attendants. It’s not good. I mean, no wonder you have brain rot.”
“I like my job.” She says it again because it’s true. “I’m fine, Jemmy, really.”
A sour warning frown—it’s Jenny’s pet name for him, from when she was little, and his sister’s still the only one Jeremy allows to make use of it. Is his mom breaking the rule on purpose, or did she forget? “Shouldn’t you have gotten promoted or something? Running your own team, sending other people out to do the shit work? You’re smart.” He means it. Whenever she came home from a long trip and had a little time off, she would be right there to help him with schoolwork. She rocked with history and the world, geopolitics, capital cities of every country, the myriad troubles with China, Russia, the Middle East. “Dad used to always brag on how you got yanked out of basic and sent to Berlin on special assignment at, what, eighteen?”
“I think I was twenty.” She says this modestly but seems pleased that Jeremy remembers. “Your father liked to spin stories.”
“You’re saying it didn’t happen?”
“It wasn’t nearly as colorful as he made it sound,” she says in a tone that lets him know she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. He’s trawled these waters before during their lunches, but she never takes the bait.
There’s so much about her she won’t let him in on. Could that be how it is with every parent? They have whole other lives before their kids are born and no obligation to share. His dad used to say their mom’s guardedness came from what had happened with her mother. Something else she doesn’t like to talk about. But at least with that, he understands why.
“Do you think it bugged him?”
“Who?”
“Dad.”
“Do I think what bugged him?”
“You being the breadwinner, him staying home?”
She nods and hesitates. “I don’t know so much that we made a decision as that it was just kind of how things worked out.” And Jeremy marvels, irritably, at how quickly she turns it around on him: “How would you feel if Kimmy made all the money and you had to raise the kids?”
“Mom, I broke up with her almost two years ago.”
An awkward pause. His mother looks momentarily caught out, and he realizes that she’s forgotten.
“We talked all about it; you said it was probably for the best. Remember?”
She clearly doesn’t. Color flushes her cheeks; she looks down at her empty plate.
“Jet lag, I guess,” Jeremy deadpans.
Ignoring the dig, she answers a question he didn’t ask. “We made a life. Your dad and I. Or tried to. We made a home.”
“Where you hardly ever were.”
“A home isn’t necessarily a fixed place.”
“Oh.” Jeremy pounces. “Let’s see. There was me and Jen and Dad—and, well, yeah, you sometimes, in person, but a lot of times just like swooping in with the phone call from a galaxy far, far away.” He doesn’t mean for it to sound so bitter, but the words just tumble out and swarm like Furies.
“We were on the forefront of Skype,” his mother jokes.