Andy ran her hands up and down her face as if she could erase herself from this conversation. She knew she was talented and smart. The problem was that in New York, everyone else had been talented and smart, too. Even the guy working the counter at the bodega was funnier, quicker, more clever than she was.
Laura insisted, “There’s nothing wrong with being normal. Normal people have very meaningful lives. Look at me. It’s not selling out to enjoy yourself.”
Andy said, “I’m thirty-one years old, I haven’t gone on a real date in three years, I have sixty-three thousand dollars in student debt for a degree I never finished and I live in a one-room apartment over my mother’s garage.” Air strained through Andy’s nose as she tried to breathe. Verbalizing the long list had put a tight band around her chest. “The question isn’t what else can I do. It’s what else am I going to fuck up?”
“You’re not fucking up.”
“Mom—”
“You’ve fallen into the habit of feeling low. You can get used to anything, especially bad things. But the only direction now is up. You can’t fall off the floor.”
“Have you ever heard of basements?”
“Basements have floors, too.”
“That’s the ground.”
“But ground is just another word for floor.”
“Ground is like, six feet under.”
“Why do you always have to be so morbid?”
Andy felt a sudden irritation honing her tongue into a razor. She swallowed it back down. They couldn’t argue about curfew or make-up or tight jeans anymore, so these were the fights that she now had with her mother: That basements had floors. The proper direction from which toilet paper should come off the roll. Whether forks should be placed in the dishwasher tines up or tines down. If a grocery cart was called a cart or a buggy. That Laura was pronouncing it wrong when she called the cat “Mr. Perkins” because his name was actually Mr. Purrkins.
Laura said, “I was working with a patient the other day, and the strangest thing happened.”
The cliffhanger-change-of-subject was one of their well-worn paths to truce.
“So strange,” Laura baited.
Andy hesitated, then nodded for her to continue.
“He presented with Broca’s Aphasia. Some right-side paralysis.” Laura was a licensed speech pathologist living in a coastal retirement community. The majority of her patients had experienced some form of debilitating stroke. “He was an IT guy in his previous life, but I guess that doesn’t matter.”
“What happened that was strange?” Andy asked, doing her part.
Laura smiled. “He was telling me about his grandson’s wedding, and I have no idea what he was trying to say, but it came out as ‘blue suede shoes.’ And I had this flash in my head, this sort of memory, to back when Elvis died.”
“Elvis Presley?”
She nodded. “This was ’77, so I would’ve been fourteen years old, more Rod Stewart than Elvis. But anyway. There were these very conservative, beehived ladies at our church, and they were bawling their eyes out that he was gone.”
Andy grinned the way you grin when you know you’re missing something.
Laura gave her the same grin back. Chemo brain, even this far out from her last treatment. She had forgotten the point of her story. “It’s just a funny thing I remembered.”
“I guess the beehive ladies were kind of hypocritical?” Andy tried to jog her memory. “I mean, Elvis was really sexy, right?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Laura patted her hand. “I’m so grateful for you. The strength you gave me while I was sick. The closeness we still have. I cherish that. It’s a gift.” Her mother’s voice started to quiver. “But I’m better now. And I want you to live your life. I want you to be happy, or, failing that, I want you to find peace with yourself. And I don’t think you can do it here, baby. As much as I want to make it easier for you, I know that it’ll never take unless you do it all on your own.”
Andy looked up at the ceiling. She looked out at the empty mall. She finally looked back at her mother.
Laura had tears in her eyes. She shook her head as if in awe. “You’re magnificent. Do you know that?”
Andy forced out a laugh.
“You are magnificent because you are so uniquely you.” Laura pressed her hand to her heart. “You are talented, and you are beautiful, and you’ll find your way, my love, and it will be the right way, no matter what, because it’s the path that you set out for yourself.”
Andy felt a lump in her throat. Her eyes started to water. There was a stillness around them. She could hear the sound of her own blood swooshing through her veins.
“Well.” Laura laughed, another well-worn tactic for lightening an emotional moment. “Gordon thinks I should give you a deadline to move out.”
Gordon. Andy’s father. He was a trusts and estates lawyer. His entire life was deadlines.
Laura said, “But I’m not going to give you a deadline, or an ultimatum.”
Gordon loved ultimatums, too.
“I’m saying if this is your life”—she indicated the police-like, adult-ish uniform—“then embrace it. Accept it. And if you want to do something else”—she squeezed Andy’s hand—“do something else. You’re still young. You don’t have a mortgage or even a car payment. You have your health. You’re smart. You’re free to do whatever you like.”
“Not with my student loan debt.”
“Andrea,” Laura said, “I don’t want to be a doomsayer, but if you continue listlessly spinning around, pretty soon you’ll be forty and find yourself very tired of living inside of a cartwheel.”
“Forty,” Andy repeated, an age that seemed less decrepit every year it drew closer.
“Your father would say—”
“Shit or get off the pot.” Gordon was always telling Andy to move, to make something of herself, to do something. For a long time, she had blamed him for her lethargy. When both of your parents were driven, accomplished people, it was a form of rebellion to be lazy, right? To stubbornly and consistently take the easy road when the hard road was just so . . . hard?
“Dr. Oliver?” an older woman said. That she was invading a quiet mother–daughter moment seemed to be lost on her. “I’m Betsy Barnard. You worked with my father last year. I just wanted to say thank you. You’re a miracle worker.”
Laura stood up to shake the woman’s hand. “You’re very sweet to say that, but he did the work himself.” She slipped into what Andy thought of as her Healing Dr. Oliver Mode, asking open-ended questions about the woman’s father, clearly not quite remembering who he was but making a passable effort so that the woman was just as clearly fooled.
Laura nodded toward Andy. “This is my daughter, Andrea.”
Betsy duplicated the nod with a passing interest. She was beaming under Laura’s attention. Everyone loved her mother, no matter what mode she was in: therapist, friend, business owner, cancer patient, mother. She had a sort of relentless kindness that was kept from being too sugary by her quick, sometimes acerbic wit.
Occasionally, usually after a few drinks, Andy could show these same qualities to strangers, but once they got to know her, they seldom stuck around. Maybe that was Laura’s secret. She had dozens, even hundreds, of friends, but not one single person knew all of the pieces of her.