"You're sure? It's no trouble." She paused, lifted her brows. "I haven't seen much of you lately."
"These are the consequences, Mom. You tell me to find someone special, you have to expect I'll spend time with her."
She reached for a dish towel. "It's a price I'll happily pay, my darling son."
"Anything else I can do for you while you have me here?"
"Mom!" Magnolia shouted from down the hall. "I think my water broke."
"Are you sure you didn't have a little accident? That happened to me more than once," she called back, suddenly wandering in circles around the kitchen.
She opened the oven, closed it. Opened the freezer, closed it. I watched, not sure what I was supposed to do in this situation.
"Mom! I would know if I had a little accident, don't you think?"
"I said the same thing," my mother replied, now opening the cupboards and drawers. "They sent me home from the hospital twice and told me to stop thinking my water broke every time I sneezed too hard."
"What are you looking for?" I asked.
She waved my question away. "Oh, nothing, honey, nothing. Just my phone. And my keys. Yes, I'm sure I left them around here. I should call your father. But he's at the golf course and you know he never takes his phone out with him. So, I'll have to call the course. And Rob! Good grief, he's in New York City. I don't even know who to call there. I have a friend, Eleanor Greene, who lives in New York City. But I haven't spoken to her in ages. She's such a complainer. Everything is a problem with her. That's why I don't call." Her keys and phone were on the small table beside the back door as always. "And my pocketbook, I'm looking for my pocketbook. I'm sure it's around here."
I blinked at her for a second. "Okay. You keep looking. I'll just check on Maggie." Around the corner, I found the door to the under-the-stairs powder room open and my sister tossing hand towels on the floor. "Everything all right?"
She pressed her foot to one of the towels and moved it around the floor. "Everything will be fine," she replied with forced calm. "Mom's flipping out, isn't she?"
I glanced back in the direction of the rattling pots and pans. My mother operated on three speeds: steamroller, scatterbrained, or stoned. There were no other options—I'd looked—but there were mix-and-match combos. She could be stoned and steamrolling, as was often the case, or stoned and scatterbrained. I didn't think she was stoned right now but she was running at max scatterbrained. "Not more than I'd expect."
"I knew I should've stayed with Zelda today," she murmured. "She was in class until four and I didn't want to bother her with exams coming up but at least I'd know she wouldn't lose her shit when it was go-time." She glanced up from her pile of tiny towels. "Everything will be fine."
I heard more clanging from the kitchen and a slammed door, which had me smothering a laugh while I rubbed my temples. My sister was having babies, my mother was panicking, and Jasper needed me to fight for her.
I asked for none of this.
Not one bit.
And yet— "Do you think you can make it into my truck? Is it too high for you to climb in?"
Magnolia pressed a hand to her lower back. "If you give me a hand, I'm sure it will be all right."
"And you can tell me where you need to go?"
She nodded. "Yeah. For sure. But you don't—"
"You really think I'd leave you here with Mom while she roots through the frying pans for her phone? Not a chance. We're feeding her some weed gummies and getting you to the hospital before anything else happens."
"What about Jasper? You need to talk to her."
I brought an arm around Magnolia's shoulders and led her out of the bathroom. "I'll talk to her later. Or tomorrow. I know she'll understand this."
We entered the kitchen to find Mom with her arm elbow deep in a bag of flour.
"We are not baking right now, Grandma," Magnolia said. "It's baby time. My husband is a four-hour train ride away and I had five more days to prepare and I didn't get the lemon chicken and orzo like I really wanted but it is baby time. Remove yourself from the flour."
"I thought I might've dropped my phone," she replied. "The last time I had it, I was thinking about baking some chocolate chip cookies but I don't think it's in here."
"Probably not," I said. Scatterbrained. So scatterbrained.
"Please do me a favor and get your special candies so you can calm the fuck down. I am going to give birth to two babies in the next few hours, preferably with my husband by my side, and I need you to turn all of this"—Magnolia waved both hands at my mother—"way down."
"Right, yes, okay." My mother dusted her arm off as she walked in another circle around the kitchen until she stopped at a cookie jar in the shape of a fat monk and plucked a small zip-top bag with a dozen purple jellies from inside. "Time to go, then!"
I grabbed the bag Magnolia pointed out near the door plus my mother's keys and phone, which were exactly where she'd left them after coming in from the market not long ago. "Yep. Time to go."
29
Jasper
I stared down at my phone for a long moment before tapping the icon beside my mother's number. Since leaving the NCVC offices—a former electronics store in a semi-abandoned strip mall—this evening, I'd fought off the nagging urge to call my mom. I never felt this way. I couldn't remember a single moment in the past twenty years when I'd needed my mother but I knew, for reasons that made no sense, I needed her right now.
I stared out at the tarmac and the workers in reflective gear that flashed back at me as the call rang. I hated taking red-eye flights. I hated half sleeping and half waking in a different time zone, and then pretending I was a functional human. I hated it but I hated my overwhelmingly beige hotel room more. I didn't want to stay in Sacramento another night.
"Hello? Jasper?"
"Mom," I said, tears immediately burning my eyes for no good reason. "I hope it's not too late to call."
"No, it's only a bit after ten and anyway, it's never too late," she said. "Are you flying in or out tonight?"
My mother knew airport noises the way I knew congressional districts. Another two minutes of her listening to the noises behind me and she'd be able to name the airport right down to the terminal and concourse. "Out. Heading back to Boston. I'm in Sacramento. There was an interview."
That felt like an appropriate description of the events. There was an interview. I was not interviewed. I was systematically backed into corners with questions that reached a little too far into confidential territories and repeatedly chided into sharing specific details about my work on previous campaigns. But hey, I blabbed about my former boss's bathroom habits on cable news. As far as they were concerned, nothing was sacred with me.
"Oh! I wish you'd told me! I could've flown down and taken you out to dinner."
Only my mother would think a flight from Seattle to Sacramento was a reasonable commute for dinner. "No, it's okay. I was tied up most of the day."