Nonsense. If anyone is busy here, it’s my mother. She’s immersed in a thousand activities: her book club and mah-jongg and volunteering and jazzercise and crocheting and organic gardening and, new to the list, TV viewing parties. All that in addition to her job as an interior decorator.
That inclination to remain constantly busy is something I confused for indifference to my father’s death when I was growing up. A normal person needs ample time to recover when her husband dies unexpectedly, leaving her alone with two children. Not my mother. She cried for forty-eight hours straight and then seemed to decide that was enough tears for one lifetime.
“Tell me when you’re hungry,” she says. “I made gazpacho.”
“That sounds good.”
“I also picked up some fresh corn. I bet you haven’t had Jersey corn in a long time.”
“I’ve had plenty of corn,” I say. “I can’t be sure where it came from.”
“You used to cut the kernels off the cob and eat them with a fork.”
“I don’t do that anymore.”
“It’s more fun to eat it off the cob, right?”
“Right,” I say and start to laugh. We’ve had this exact same conversation so many times, about the way I eat corn and what produce I can acquire out in California. I know as the day progresses we’ll repeat ourselves many more times. It’s annoyed me in the past, but right now it’s quite comforting to know that no matter how my mother and I talk—over the phone, video chat, text, or in person—or how long we go without talking, we pretty much always end up saying the same things.
“Was I a picky eater when I was little?” I ask.
“Of course,” my mother says. “You know that.”
“I wasn’t sure how bad it was.”
I’m on my second helping of gazpacho. My mother went all out: slices of avocado and sour cream to mix into the soup and rustic bread for dipping. She poured herself one tiny helping and as soon as she finished, she immediately put her dirty dish away.
“I gave up after a while and just let you eat whatever you wanted,” she says. “But your father kept at it. He made you try everything at least once. That man had a lot of patience.”
The word bowls me over: patience. It’s a nicer term for what I’m always doing: delaying, procrastinating, waiting for things to fall into place. With a little calm and resolve, a character flaw becomes a virtue.
I remember as a child I’d ask my father a question, and if I received no response, I’d assume he either didn’t hear me or was ignoring me. And then, after several moments of silence, he’d give an answer, and only then would I realize he had been thinking that whole time. These delayed reactions used to frustrate me greatly. And now, I’m pretty sure I do the same exact thing.
“By the way,” my mother says, “Sydney’s cousin e-mailed me. He wants to start a fund. I think it’s a good idea. It’s a nice way to remember him.”
It makes me think of Joan and how she says songs are reminders. Another way of prolonging people’s memories of you is to die and have someone name something after you. Of course, it’s a far less gratifying option.
“I don’t get it,” I say. “Why is Syd’s cousin e-mailing you?”
She shrugs. “He said he was having trouble getting in touch with you. I forwarded it to you. Whenever you have time. No rush.”
No rush. Either she’s trying to appreciate the fact that I’m in the middle of grieving, or she—like Sydney and Paige and now Joan—has lost faith in my ability to act swiftly on anything. Don’t they realize? I’m just being patient.
But I can’t help but return to the one decision in my life I’m most ashamed of not making with haste. In theory I wanted to be a father, but as Syd and I started taking the necessary steps to turn that into a reality, I became more and more crippled with doubts. Syd thought I was making parenthood more complicated than it had to be. Most of it’s just being there, he’d say. But I knew that even that bare-minimum requirement was harder than it sounded. I haven’t always been there for my family. In fact, much like my father, one day I all but vanished.
“Have you talked to Veronica lately?” I ask.
My mother, incapable of sitting still for too long, is already taking my bowl to the sink. “I talked to her a few days ago. Why?”
“I sent her something in the mail. I was just curious if she got it.”
“Why don’t you call and ask her yourself?”
Sydney would always ask me the same thing. I still don’t have a good answer.
My mother wants to go for a walk, another one of her hobbies. Before we can leave the house, she has to equip herself with ankle weights, a visor, and a wristband pedometer. “How far are we walking?” I ask.
“Around the block,” she says.
It’s not a stroll, it’s a speed walk. Had I known, I wouldn’t have eaten all that bread.
We go by the same houses I used to ride my bike past as a kid. Many have changed colors, some have added extensions, and a few seem to have been demolished and rebuilt. My mother waves to a couple I don’t recognize and announces loudly that I’m her son. All of our old neighbors have moved away. Every single one of them.
“You never wanted to move, Mom?”
“Why? I like it here.”
But I’m asking a slightly different question. “I mean, after Dad died?”
She doesn’t break her stride. “I thought about it,” she says between heavy breaths. “But where was I going to go?” Breath. “I had two kids.” Breath. “One was just a baby.” Breath. “I had to work and keep everything going. I didn’t have time to sit and think about it.” Breath. Breath. Breath. “Actually, that’s probably what saved me.”
I’m still going over those words when we come around the block and I spot our house up ahead. It doesn’t look nearly as ominous as it did this morning, when it seemed to speak of only one single event: the news, arriving as a phone call, that my father had been sideswiped on the highway, all the relatives I barely knew suddenly visiting, pitching in, supporting, until the helping hands dwindled down to just four, my mother’s and mine, caring for the baby who was soon walking and getting into things and whose welfare took precedence over my preteen needs and desires (and hurt) and, later, my teenage needs and desires (and hurt), and through it all, my mother was busy, busy, busy.
Now, I return to the house less as the put-upon boy who was convinced that he alone carried the family’s sorrow and more as the man who’s only now learning the many tricky shapes pain can take, who just heard his mother confess, finally, that it wasn’t a given that she’d make it this far, that it had been a hard and daily struggle. And somehow she, unlike me, managed this feat without changing her name and while keeping the reminders on the walls and protecting the house from unruly backyard bonfires.
“I should get going,” I say once we’re back in the house. “I’ve got something I have to do.”
“You finally come to visit and now you can’t stay?”
There’s the heartbreak I’ve always suspected she feels but rarely shows.