Chapter 7 Mom
MIA
Mom wanted to meet him on a Friday and she said it the way she said things she had already decided, which was without asking and without particular interest in debate.
She said it at the kitchen table on Tuesday morning over her tea, watching me move around the kitchen the way she watched everything, with the patient attention of someone who was reading something in the movement itself rather than in anything I had said.
Bring him here, she said. Friday. Dinner. Seven o'clock.
Mom, I started.
I am not going to be here forever, Mia.
Do not say that.
It is a fact. She wrapped both hands around her mug. And I would like to see who my daughter is falling for while I still can.
I am not falling for anyone, I said. It is an arrangement. It is complicated.
It always is, she said. Seven o'clock. Do not be late.
I texted him from my room with my back against the door.
Mia: My mom wants to meet you. Friday. Dinner at my place.
Caleb: Your place.
Mia: Small. The paint is peeling in the bathroom. She will probably cry at least twice. Fair warning.
Caleb: I don't care about the paint.
Mia: You will notice it.
Caleb: I care about you.
I stared at those four words for what was probably an embarrassing amount of time.
Mia: That is extremely cheesy.
Caleb: You like it.
Mia: I do not like it.
Caleb: You are smiling right now. I can tell from here.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
I was smiling.
Mia: Friday. Seven. Do not be late.
Caleb: I am never late.
I spent the next four days cleaning the apartment in a way I had not cleaned it since before the diagnosis, every surface and every corner and the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush I then immediately threw away. Mom watched from the couch and told me he was not going to notice the dust and I kept cleaning because she was wrong and I needed something to do with my hands.
Friday at seven sharp I was standing at the window watching the street.
He parked across from our building and got out and checked his hair in the side mirror and straightened his jacket and I had to put my hand over my mouth.
He was nervous.
Caleb Kessler, team captain, draft prospect, a person who had stood in front of media and scouts and arenas full of people without visibly feeling anything, was nervous about dinner with my mother in a small apartment with peeling paint.
I opened the door before he knocked.
Right on time, he said.
Exactly, I said.
He stepped inside and his eyes moved across the apartment. The small kitchen with the squeaky faucet. The old couch. The stack of hospital billing statements on the counter that I had forgotten to hide. He looked at them for one second and then looked away, and I thought about that decision, the looking away, the deliberate choice not to make it a thing, and I hated that it meant something to me.
Mom came out in her pink beanie and her clean sweater and she looked at him with the expression of a woman who had already formed an opinion and was simply in the process of confirming it.
So you are Caleb, she said.
Yes ma'am.
You are taller than I expected from the photos.
People say that, he said.
She laughed. It was quiet and tired but completely real, and I watched him register it, the way something behind his eyes softened without his face doing anything obvious to indicate it.
Mom pulled me into the kitchen the moment she could.
He is very cute, she whispered.
Mom.
He looks at you like you are the most interesting person in the room.
He is performing, I said.
She looked at me with those impossible eyes.
Mm, she said.
Just mm.
Dinner was terrible in all the ways food could be terrible when someone who was supposed to be resting had insisted on cooking anyway. Cold spaghetti. Sauce that was more water than tomato. Noodles that had been on the stove too long.
Caleb ate every single bite.
He ate it with the focused attention of someone who was genuinely hungry and also very much aware that the person who had made this food had done so as an act of love and that the appropriate response to an act of love was eating it.
This is delicious, he said.
You are lying, Mom said.
I am being polite, he said.
Same thing, she said. She smiled at him. Sit back down. I want to hear about the scout.
We ate and they talked and I sat at my own kitchen table and felt the carefully constructed box I had been keeping my feelings in develop a very significant structural crack.
He asked her real questions and listened to the actual answers. Not the performing-interest version of listening but the actual version, where you remember what the person said and ask the next question based on what they told you rather than what you were going to ask anyway.
When Mom went to rest Caleb and I sat on the couch in the lamplight and it was quiet and ordinary and completely unlike anything a press conference had ever felt like.
Your mom is something else, he said.
I know.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then my phone rang.
Dr. Patel.
I answered and the world went sideways in approximately four sentences.
When I put it down my hands were not entirely steady.
The scan, I said. There are findings they want to discuss. Monday morning.
He did not say anything immediately.
He reached over and put his hand over mine.
I did not pull away.
Sitting there on the couch in the lamplight with his warm hand over my cold one, I understood for the first time that thirty thousand dollars was not going to be the most expensive part of this arrangement after all.
The most expensive part was going to be the leaving.