Chapter 2 #2
She doesn’t know it but her words, meant to be helpful, make me feel worse.
I hate not being there for my mother. When she was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer two years ago, she wouldn’t let me leave my dream job to help her, and she’s become more stubborn since.
Foregoing treatment, being temperamental with her nurses, not taking her medicine, and suffering from a declining appetite.
I’m afraid I don’t have much time left with her, and I’m not sure how I’ll manage; she’s all I’ve ever known.
I pull Morgan in for a hug, to thank her for being willing to facilitate a grocery pickup.
It saves me time, and more time means more spent with my mom.
When her fingers tighten around me, I fight the hollow pit churning in my stomach.
It tortures me—being so careless with her. I drop my hands and jerk away.
After our goodbyes, I pull out of the parking lot, loaded down with my mother’s favorites including her most recent obsession, yellow dragon fruit. Max sniffs at the bags but doesn’t disturb them. Instead, he lays down and rests his head on a loaf of bread.
Driving through town, the weather has people and tourists milling about.
With the window rolled down, the hum of local chatter in front of the café and the scent of crisp foothill air rushes into the opened window, and I smile.
Usually, I’m surrounded by the nearby water from creeks and waterfalls, or the whine of wind gently tossing the pines by my cabin.
Occasionally, the squawk of dispatch alerts or the incessant weather radio relaying the current conditions fills the rustic wood walls.
Rarely do I have visitors at my place. Even more unique, anyone that isn’t a ranger or officer.
It’s just me and Max.
I pass some of the other businesses that have found homes in the historic buildings. A small craft brewery, a quaint bed-and-breakfast to compete with the area motels, and the Pinebrook diner.
Our town is the gateway to the wild beauty of Yosemite.
The drive to my mother’s isn’t long from Pete’s Market, and soon my tires crackle with the tiny gravel of a non-city road.
I pass Old Man John’s orchards and lift a hand to the few seasonal employees scattered among the rows.
It’s mostly apple trees, but he maintains several apricot, too—they were his wife’s favorite.
I smile at that. She’s still with him in a way—like he’s keeping a piece of her memory rooted to his home. When the time comes, I hope I can keep my mother’s memory alive in the small things, too.
Another mile and I’m at my mother’s. A three-car garage sits on the bottom of the hill off to the left-hand side, and I maneuver my truck so the back seat lines up with concrete steps.
In retrospect, the idea of thirty plus steps from the driveway to the main home wasn’t the best idea, but I remember her face when we moved here, full of excitement for all the untapped potential.
She’d saved and saved for a house for us.
As a single mom working three jobs to make ends meet in the expensive state of California, she deserved this.
We moved from our one-bedroom apartment to this house surrounded by nature and rolling foothills. Orchards and horse pastures engulfed us, giving my mother what she wanted all along—the perfect place to raise her only child.
I’ll never know how she did it. Those long hours at the diner, editing manuscripts on the side while also having her own personal laundry business.
The woman never slept. Eventually, her side gig of editing became a not-so-side job, and she did that until the bone-chilling diagnosis two years ago.
Since then, she’s declined to the point she can’t work anymore.
It’s funny how little you think about it when you’re a child. I used to watch her move through the mundane without a thought—packing lunches, wiping tears, holding everything together like it was nothing while juggling multiple jobs.
Now I’m the one reminding her to eat, helping her with steps she once carried me down, or holding her hand in waiting rooms. It’s strange, this shift, and most days it breaks my heart.
Opening the back door, I allow Max out to use the bathroom, and afterward he sniffs around the overgrown shrubs skirting the parameter of the garage as I gather the bags on each arm.
“Max, hier,” I say before shutting my truck door and climbing the ascending stairs.
He bounds after me to stick by my side with his wagging tail.
He loves it here, dare I say even more than the cabin.
When we visit, he’ll lay on the back porch overlooking the view of horses roaming the neighbor’s pasture.
For such a high energy dog, this place calms him.
“Braver Hund.” I praise without the command in my tone. It’s no longer work while we’re here.
I make it up to the house, unfastening the small white fence that outlines the property, and step through after Max bolts to the front door.
I knock once, but open the door a crack so she doesn’t have to come let me in.
“Mom! It’s just me.” Shutting the door behind me, I bring the bags to the kitchen island and set them on the Formica countertop.
Like most of the house, the kitchen hasn’t been upgraded since the ’80s.
The cabinets are the original dark oak with flat-panel doors.
The brass knobs clash with the avocado-green backsplash, which in turn collides with the bold checkered linoleum floor running throughout the kitchen and dining space.
The only relatively new thing in the kitchen is the refrigerator I bought her last year after the old one quit, and even the stainless steel of that doesn’t mix well with her aged white stove and bulky microwave that sits in the corner next to her hanging rotten bananas.
“Mom?” I shout again.
“I’m coming. Hold your damn horses.” She groans from the narrow hallway that leads to the primary bedroom, guest room, and hall bath.
I sigh, digging out the fresh bananas from one of the grocery bags before I step to replace the blackened ones on her stand.
In another world, one where my sixty-four-year-old mother wasn’t battling terminal cancer, she’d use these overripe bananas to make bread.
One of my favorites growing up. Although, as I crept into my teen years, I devoured any and all fruit I could get my hands on in the house, leaving my mother with none to make bread or muffins.
“What’s all this?” My mother rounds the corner of the hall, eyeballing the island full of food.
I grin at her, studying her petite frame that’s grown thinner. Her clothes hang looser now than they used to. Her skin, pale and almost translucent, stretches over her prominent cheekbones, creating a gaunt appearance.
I grew up used to seeing dark circles under my mother’s eyes.
Those three jobs she worked to afford this house, to pay for my travel baseball league in high school, and eventually my college education—none of it allowed for a full night’s rest. But now …
now her tired eyes are heavier, pained. When she looks at me, with her deep-set gaze and those blue-gray eyes still soft with warmth and affection, I have to look away sometimes.
It’s too much.
And I hate myself for it.
“It’s food, Mom. I got all your favorites. How are you feeling today? Old Man John said he brought you some peach pie.”
She nods, surveying the bags of groceries like she does each week I bring them. We both know she won’t eat it all, but she gives me this. Pretending to show interest, still protecting my feelings, as mothers do.
Her nose scrunches when she digs through a bag and spots some cabbage, the action shifting the oxygen tubing in her nose. The thin, clear plastic encircles her ears, looping beneath her chin before splitting into two prongs that rest just inside her nostrils.
The portable tank, which she keeps by her side at all times now, is new in the last several months.
She’d made it so long after her diagnosis without it she refused at first. Not wanting to wheel around the tank that emits a faint rhythmic hiss with each inhalation.
She’d told the doctor to go screw himself.
However, her weakened lungs knew she needed it, and she finally relented.
Since then, her energy and stamina to walk longer distances has improved, and I’ve noticed it’s helped her dizzy spells and headaches.
“Yep. Saved you a large piece of pie over there.” She points a wrinkled finger toward the microwave.
Most sugary, greasy, carb-loaded food doesn’t make it into my diet, so I give her a look—curious, and waiting for something sarcastic to follow.
“Thanks. That’s awfully nice of you to …
share.” I eyeball the pie all there, minus a forkful.
Large piece, huh? “I’m going to put these away and I’ll come join you in the living room. Can I get you anything?”
“I’m not dead yet, Noah. I’m perfectly capable of getting my own shit.” She bats a hand through the air, and I chuckle, grinning at her.
Instead of commenting, I rustle through the groceries and fill the fridge while she shuffles toward where she spends most of her time. It’s then I notice more new patches of missing hair.
Chemotherapy treatments have taken their toll.
Her once voluminous, warm brown hair now sits thinner and streaked with gray.
She had it cut short, a pixie cut she called it, when she first began her treatments, and she’s lost half of it.
Whatever hair left is limp and brittle, but she tucks it behind her ears anyway.
I listen to the news she’s clicked on, putting away the groceries and doing the dishes in the sink. There’s no dishwasher, and though the nurse who stops in to care for her most days does them for me, it’s not her job.
As I wipe the counters, I come across the pill box my mother stores all her medicine in.
Pain management meds, anti-nausea, steroids, blood thinners—all tossed together to help make my mom’s life more manageable.
It’s separated into fourteen sections: two for each day of the week, A.M. and P.M. She leaves each top open after she’s taken that day’s pills, and I refill it on Sundays for her.
However, today’s Wednesday A.M. pills haven’t been taken.
This shouldn’t be happening. Not with a nurse coming to check on her, and I …
I should be making sure she’s doing everything she needs to do.
Ideally, she needs a live-in nurse, or even a caretaker, to stay with her full time.
I’ve pitched the idea of me moving in with her, but she refuses to let me.
I dump the pills into a tiny paper cup and fill a glass of cold water from the tap before marching into the living room.
“You didn’t take your morning pills. Didn’t your nurse check?” I ask, holding out the cup of medication to her.
She takes it, dumping the gamut into her mouth and swallowing them with a sip of the water I brought her. “I fired Anna,” she says.
“Her name was Adrienne.”
“Whatever.” She turns up the volume to hear the local meteorologist give a warning about an intense storm system set to move into our area this weekend.
“Mom,” I say, folding myself onto the floral couch next to her recliner. “How about I move in. I’ll stay in my old room, and it’ll be—”
“No.”
“Mom. You can’t be missing your medicine and firing your nurses.”
“You will not move in with me, Noah. End of discussion.” Her dry lips purse as if the discomfort of her raising her voice at me caused her pain. A subtle rasp accompanies her exhalations, her chest rising and falling with added effort.
I’m torn between saying more and not causing her anymore stress.
Max barks at something from the back porch, and I glance out the sliding glass doors that run parallel to the couch. The neighbor’s horses made their way toward the fence to graze, and Max is itching to jump down and go say hi.
I push up from the couch, catching my mother’s glaring eye, and I shake my head. When I open the door to the porch, Max greets me, whining and licking his lips.
“Nein. Platz,” I command. He whines but lays down as instructed, and I take a seat next to him in one of the ragged outdoor chairs. Arm hanging loose at my side, I rub his head.
I love this view. Pines as far as the eye can see, weaving throughout the open pasture and fanning in clumps on each side of the fence line.
No wonder my mother never wanted to leave.
Even after I moved out on my own after college.
Honestly, I think this place has done wonders for her health.
Allowing her the two years and counting she’s had since her diagnosis.
If only she’d let me do more.
My stomach twists into knots and I swallow. Max nudges my hand, looking up at me with knowing eyes.
I want to honor my mother’s wishes, to allow her peace in her own world, but the other part of me, the selfish son who needs to keep his mother as long as possible, wants to subject her to every treatment, every medicine, twenty-four-hour care—to prolong her precious life at any cost.
The horses gallop free with strong hooves that pound the earth as I lean forward and bury my head in my hands.
It’s a crushing and relentless weight. No matter what I do, the shadow of failure haunts me and over and over a gnawing voice whispers, you’re not doing enough. Eventually, you’ll be alone.
I cast a look at my mother through the glass as she licks the tip of her pointer finger and flips a page in her book.
I’m not ready for that.