Read Online When the Messenger Is Hot by Elizabeth Crane - Free Book Online Page B

makes her feel like she has some control over her life which we both know she doesn’t now, if she ever did, and because I can’t decide which frightens me more, me driving at all with her in the passenger seat ( what if she tries to have a conversation while I’m driving what if I drive too fast or slow what if she tells me to make a left turn but there’s no left turn signal what if I have a terrible accident and kill my dying mother what if I have a terrible accident and something worse than death happens to my dying mother what if she yells at me? ) or her driving on drugs. Which is followed by me agreeing to continue on the trip just a little ways (in reality three interminable highway exits during which she flips off a truck driver and honks at an old lady [not any kind of change from her normal driving patterns] and misses the exit [to which she says, Whoops! and giggles even though I know that this spacey part of the tour is the abnormal part]) to the fabric and crafts store to pick up some yarn for a needlepoint she’s making for my cousin’s new baby. This of course is followed by a variety of thought patterns, like how I’m thirty-six and still single and she’s not going to be making any needlepoint anything for my baby, like how I’ve failed as a daughter, like how I might have considered this a lot sooner, how surely if I’d gone to medical school or taught children in Third World countries or written an Oprah book or achieved some other phenomenal thing she’d have been proud of me in spite of my not having given her a grandchild and a son-in-law or even a live-in boyfriend or lesbian life partner. All of which I actually did consider sooner, which clearly indicates my true nature as a selfish, horrible child. I try to pretend I don’t notice the weird tone after I compliment her new car and she responds by saying, Glad to hear that, in which I sense she’s glad to hear that because it’s about to be mine. I tell her I’d really rather skip the Pre-Season Ornament Extravaganza at Fountains of Wayne but decide not to mention that it’s because I’m afraid she won’t be here when the actual season comes around.
    That said, I believe the doctor when he says the unpronounceable drugs are working and that my mother is showing great improvement. I am nonchalant helping her look through brochures for those stairway elevator-seat things and I sob underneath my pillow when I go to bed, grateful that the noisy oxygen machine is probably drowning me out anyway. I tell her all the things I’m grateful for that she’s done for me and I do not take it personally when she says only, That’s nice, sweetheart , and then falls asleep in the middle of my long list instead of bursting into tears of gratitude herself followed by a deep and profound TV-movie moment of near-death enlightenment and reconciliation.
    And I believe my father when he says she’s feeling a lot better just the week before I come home for Thanksgiving and that she’s only on the oxygen tank for half the day now as opposed to 24/7. I feel certain that she is on the road to recovery and I forget that she still has some cancer in the only lung she has. I fly home for Thanksgiving and arrive at an empty house and a note that says, “Went to a party at the Forestas’, back around ten. Salami and provolone and some nice smoked mozz. in fridge,” which I take to mean that my mother is cured, and I call my friends to discuss and analyze the miracle cure. And when my mother comes home as beautiful and put together as ever but still attached to the oxygen tank and has to sit down on the second stair from the exhaustion, I retain the assumption that she’s still cured but just tired and following the precautionary miracle cure maintenance of using the oxygen and not overexerting herself. I help her up the stairs and I try to ignore how much she sounds like Grandma