Chapter 14
14
Lexi
The smell of the place reminds me of a rehab Jim was in for a time while we were still trying to figure out what was wrong with him. From the start, he feared ALS, but one doctor after another told him not to jump to conclusions until they knew for certain.
He was sure of it a long time before they finally confirmed it.
Tom checks in at the reception desk and gets guest passes for us. As we walk toward his mother’s room at the end of a long hallway, he casually reaches for my hand, as if that’s something we do every day. Maybe it will be.
“Remember that she won’t know me. It can be upsetting, even for people who don’t know her.”
“I understand.” At least, I think I do. Thankfully, I don’t have much experience with dementia.
He knocks softly on the door before he enters a bright, cheerful space with one bed, a TV mounted on the wall, family photos in frames on another wall and a view of a garden that must be lovely in the summer. His mother is seated in a comfortable recliner chair, looking at the TV, and doesn’t react to our arrival.
Tom releases my hand and moves into her line of vision. “Hi, Mom. It’s your son, Tommy, and I’ve brought my friend Lexi to meet you.”
His words sear me. Imagine having to introduce yourself to your own mother.
“My son passed away.”
“No, Mom, that was Dad. I’m still here.”
“No, Tommy died.”
I can’t bear this for him, so I step forward. “Hi, Mrs. Hammett, I’m Tommy’s friend Lexi. He brought me to meet you.”
She takes a careful look at me and then shifts her gaze back to him. “Tommy didn’t die?”
“No, Ma, I’m right here.”
She begins to cry.
When he gets down on his knees to comfort her, my heart is completely lost to him. If a man is judged by how he treats his mother, he gets an A-plus.
“Tommy, I want to go home.”
“They take such good care of you here.”
“I hate it here.”
“I know, Ma.”
“What’s your name?”
“I’m your son, Tommy.”
I ache for him. It’s unbearable, but he’s nothing but patient with her as he answers the same questions over and over.
A nurse pushing a wheelchair comes to collect her for dinner.
I check my watch. It’s only four thirty, but everything is earlier in here. I remember that, too, from when Jim was in a similar facility for a time.
After Tom and the nurse help his mother move to the wheelchair, Tom leans in to kiss her cheek.
“I’ll see you again soon, Ma, okay?”
She gives him a blank look. “Okay.”
The nurse smiles at me as she rolls Mrs. Hammett out of the room.
I go right to him and hold out my arms.
He steps into my embrace, drops his head to my shoulder and holds on to me.
“You’re such a good son.”
“No, I’m not. She’s living in a place she hates.”
“She’s safe and clean and well fed and has a beautiful private room that I’m sure you pay extra for. I have no doubt you and your sisters have done everything humanly possible to make her comfortable.”
“I wish it could be more.”
“I know that feeling, all too well.”
“Yes, you do.” He raises his head and gazes into my eyes. “Thank you for coming and for stepping in to help when I needed it.”
“I’m very glad to have gotten to meet her.” I force a small smile. “Tommy.”
He gives me a side-eyed look. “That’s reserved for my ma and my oldest friends.”
“Is that right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve known you for twenty years. That makes me one of your oldest friends.”
“Wait a minute…”
With a laugh, I turn to leave the room, relieved to have been there for him when he needed me. It feels good to give back to him after his extraordinary generosity over the last nine months.
Everything about this feels good, if I’m being honest. That’s both scary and exhilarating, I decide as I drive him home. I’m still hoping to see the girls tonight. I need to talk it out with my people, the ones who understand the enormity of this moment better than anyone.
Tom
I’m wrecked after the visit with my mom, but that’s nothing new. Seeing her always devastates me. That she thought I was dead made this time extra difficult. Did she somehow sense that I had a close call? Lexi was amazing, the way she stepped in and tried to help. Having her there to hold me afterward made all the difference.
She makes everything better.
When we get home, I head straight for the chair, exhausted by the outing and the emotional wallop that always comes with seeing my mom.
“Can I get you anything?” Lexi asks.
“I’m good. I might take a nap.”
“Do you mind if I run out for a bit? Some of my widow friends are getting together for dinner.”
“Of course not. Go ahead and have a nice time.”
“You’ll be all right?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“And no showers while you’re home alone?”
“I won’t do that again until I’m fully healed. I promise.”
“Thank you. Can I bring you back some dinner?”
“I’ll pick at what we have here.” I can tell she’s torn about leaving me. “It’s all good, Lex. Go have a nice time with your friends. I’ll be right here—in the chair—when you get home.”
“Too soon, Tommy. Far too soon.”
I cough out a laugh that makes me instantly regret it. I’m ready for the full-body soreness to let up any time now.
After she goes up to her room to get ready for her dinner out, I doze through SportsCenter , coming to when she appears next to me—looking and smelling too good to be true. “You’re gorgeous.”
“Thank you.”
I love her shy smile and how she’s easily embarrassed, although she has no reason to be. I’m so gone over her, and relieved that I can finally show her how I feel without having to worry about scaring her off. If the heart attack and stent procedure didn’t scare her off, that is. I hate how she still looks at me with fear of what might happen if she leaves me alone.
Hopefully, that will pass in time, because I want her to look at me the way she did outside the nursing home earlier when she admitted to feeling desire for me. I want more desire and less fear.
When she’s put on her coat and grabbed her purse and keys, she hesitates at the top of the stairs, as if she’s still worried about leaving me.
“Go, will you? Sheesh, I can’t get you out of my hair for five minutes.”
“Okay, tough guy. I’m going. Call me if you need anything.”
“I’m not going to need anything except for you to come home after you’ve had a great time with your friends.”
“I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Drive safe.”
A short time after she leaves, I get up to look for my discharge paperwork. There’s one detail in particular I’d like to revisit. The paperwork is half an inch thick and full of dos and don’ts for patients recovering from the stent procedure. On page twelve, I find the item I’m looking for.
Resumption of sexual activity can take place between two and eight weeks following the procedure, depending upon the patient’s pain level and general rate of recovery.
“Yes!”
That’s way better than six weeks or ninety days or some other random number they might assign to my condition.
Since I’m feeling stronger every day, I can work with the two-week parameter. One week down. One to go. I can’t wait to tell Lexi this news.
Lexi
Traffic is the usual disaster, and I’m about fifteen minutes late to meet the girls, but they won’t mind. I’ve had friends in the past who’d be annoyed if someone was late, and once I was caring for Jim full time, those same friends fell by the wayside, unwilling to be inconvenienced by the slow-motion catastrophe unfolding in my life.
Plenty of others were right there, pitching in as they could and never turning away from the horror of his illness. I still hold them close, even if I don’t see them as much as I did before everything changed. These days, I find myself gravitating to friends who are in the same season I am, putting shattered lives back together one day at a time. Although I see my other friends, I find it hard to relate to their soccer-mom lives, their upwardly mobile career challenges, their husband gripes and all the regular-life stuff that they’re understandably annoyed by.
I usually find myself biting my tongue in their presence, wanting to say, Shut up already. I never got to have kids because my husband was too sick to have sex, and since he’s been gone, I can’t afford kids because of the millstone of debt around my neck that I’ll never be rid of. I want to remind them to count their blessings, even on days when their lives are out of control, when their kids are melting down and their husband has gone golfing—again. They have no idea how lucky they are to be so annoyed by regular life.
But who wants to hear that?
No one does, and since I find myself biting my tongue almost every minute I’m with them, I don’t see them very often.
My widow friends, on the other hand, never annoy me the way the others do. They dwell in a place of gratitude and optimism after having survived the worst thing. They never gripe about normal-life stuff because they know all too well how quickly a normal life can be ripped apart. They take nothing—and no one—for granted, and they don’t sweat the small stuff like someone being fifteen minutes late.
“Oh, hey, you made it.” Joy jumps up to hug me when she sees me heading for our usual table.
I return her tight embrace. Joy gives the best hugs. “I made it.”
Brielle hugs me and moves over to make room for me on the bench seat. “We’re so glad you did.”
“How’s Tom?” Naomi asks.
“He’s doing great. I took him for a ride today to check some of his work projects and to see his mom at her care facility. She has dementia.”
“Didn’t you have work?” Hallie asks as she dips a chip in salsa.
“Well… I did until I got laid off.”
“Oh no,” Joy says. “Shit.”
“What does it say about the job that I’m relieved more than scared?”
“You hated that job,” Brielle says bluntly.
“I’m not sorry to lose it, because it will force me to find something that doesn’t make me feel like I’m dead inside after every day I spend there.”
Joy raises her margarita in a toast to me. “That’s the spirit. You’re going to find something wonderful. I know it.”
“Enough about me. Tell me everything that’s going on with you guys.”
“Oh, no, no,” Brielle says. “I want more deets on what’s happening with the high school crush.”
“He’s become my adult crush. There might’ve been some kissing over the weekend.”
“Lexi!” Naomi says dramatically. “His heart can’t take it.”
“He tells me his heart is never better than it is when I’m close by.”
Their chorus of awwwws is too cute.
“I like him so much for you,” Joy says. “The way he stepped up for you when you needed a way out of your parents’ basement and how he’s taken such sweet care of you for all these months without an ounce of pressure for anything more has earned him a permanent place in my heart.”
“Mine, too,” I tell her with a smile. She’s the most loving, generous person, and when she says she wants only the best of everything for all of us, we believe her. “What about you and the new guy?”
“Well… I might’ve had a sleepover the other night.”
This is huge news. She hasn’t been with anyone since Craig died.
Once again, we all speak as one. “ And? ”
“Mama got her freak on.” Despite the way she says that, her eyes are full of tears.
“Aw, sweetie.” Brielle puts an arm around Joy. “Are you okay?”
“I am. I really am. And, you know, that’s the problem. Everything about it feels so wrong, and yet, it felt so right at the time, and I just…” Joy takes the napkin I hand her. “It’s such a mess.”
“It’s an important step forward,” Hallie says. “You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I do,” Joy says with a sigh. “But it’s made me miss Craig more than I have in a long time. I mean, I always miss him something fierce, but it’s been worse lately.”
Naomi nods in understanding. “Which is also completely normal.”
“What even is normal anymore?” I ask the question before I think too much about it. “I look at my life today, and it bears no resemblance whatsoever to how it was before Jim got sick. I mean… I got laid off today, and I don’t even care when I desperately need the money.”
“That’s because you know there’re far worse things that can happen than losing a job you hated to begin with,” Hallie says.
Brielle nods in agreement. “Ain’t that the truth?”
“You’re right,” I tell Hallie. “I’m numb to disaster.”
“This doesn’t even count as a disaster,” Joy says. “In the grand scheme of things.”
“No, it doesn’t. It’s a wrinkle, and I’ll figure it out. How are things with Robin, Hallie?”
“So far, so great,” she says with a grimace. “Leave it to me to find someone who fits just right who also happens to be battling metastatic breast cancer. That’s a heck of a chapter two.”
Joy puts her hand over Hallie’s. “Nothing says you have to take on her battle, love.”
“Oh, I know, but I seem to be having a problem walking away from it—and her. She’s lovely and fun, and the other day, I met her kids, who are also wonderful. They were so nice and welcoming.”
“How old are they?” Naomi asks.
“Eleven and thirteen.”
“Not usually the most welcoming ages,” Joy says.
“Nope, but these kids have watched their mother fight a disease that could’ve killed her years ago. They know what matters and what doesn’t. They want her happy, even if that means dating a woman after leaving their father.”
“Are they still close to their dad?” I ask.
“Very much so, but they can see both parents are happier apart than they were together, so they’re cool with it.”
“They sound like great kids.”
“They really are. It’s all good, except for the part about how she could die and leave me devastated again. You think there’s something wrong with you for not caring about being laid off, Lex. What level of masochist does it make me to get involved with her knowing what may be coming?”
“Ah, hell,” Joy says. “It’s coming for all of us.”
“See, I know that,” Hallie says. “And I think about what happened to my Gwen and your Craig as an example of how lightning can strike at any time, without warning. It’s all a risk. Every fucking thing is a risk. But some things are riskier than others.”
“Very true,” Brielle says, “which means you have to decide if you can handle it if the worst happens again.”
“I’d probably handle it better than I did the first time around. At least this time, I’d have some warning, you know?”
Gwen’s suicide left Hallie shocked to her core. It’s taken her years to even think about dating again.
“Knowing it’s coming doesn’t always make it easier to accept.”
“Lexi is right,” Joy says. “My grandmother was sick for years before she finally passed, and I was flattened by it anyway. And that’s not the same as losing a significant other.”
“Loss is loss,” Brielle says. “And it all sucks. I’d rather talk about when Lexi is going to start getting busy with Tom Terrific.”
Her nickname for him makes me laugh. “Where’d that come from?”
“That’s how I’ve thought of him since he offered you a place to live and wined and dined you for the better part of a year while he waited for you to be ready for him.”
“Is that what you think he’s been doing?”
“Duh, honey,” Joy says with a grin. “We’ve all thought that.”
“Really?”
“Lexi, sweetheart,” Naomi says, “no man makes dinner for a woman six nights a week and serves it with candles while making her lunch and coffee and doing whatever else he can to make her life easy and sweet without hoping she might someday see him as more than a platonic roommate. You aren’t so far out of the dating loop that you can’t see that, are you?”
“No, but…”
“No buts, my love,” Joy says. “The man is crazy about you and has been from minute one. I only met him on moving day, but I’m crazy about him for the way he’s cared for you without expecting one single thing in exchange. If you ask me, he’s given the master class on how to successfully date a widow without her knowing she’s being wooed.”
Her assessment makes me laugh. “I’m so dumb.”
“No, you’re not!” Brielle laughs along with the others. “You just weren’t ready to see it until you almost lost him and had to ponder life without him, too.”
“I used to be quick on the uptake. Once upon a time.”
“Didn’t we all?” Joy asks. “Chalk it up to widow brain. It’s a real condition.”
We order dinner, and they get more margaritas since they’re Ubering. I stick with water because, clearly, I need to keep my wits about me for when I get home to Tom Terrific. That nickname cracks me up. I love that Brielle calls him that, and she’s right that he’s earned it.
My chicken enchiladas are delicious, but I end up boxing half the meal to take home. The servings at this place are enormous, and I’ve never finished an entire meal in one sitting. I’ll have to hide the enchiladas from Tom, who loves all things Mexican and will be drooling over them.
The girls have given me a lot to think about as I drive home through drizzle and fog that has me taking it slower than usual.