Blood Sugar(34)

The person who would know what kind of cake he liked when he could eat that sort of thing, before he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which he told me happened when he collapsed on the playground when he was seven years old, feeling parched, begging someone, anyone, for a sip of water, was the person who he spoke with three times a day. The person who meant the most to him in the whole wide world, the person who knew him best. His mother. So one day, when he was in the shower, I grabbed her phone number off his cell. I called Gertrude the next day.

That was my first mistake.





CHAPTER 24


    COBRA



Gertrude answered her phone with a neutral “Hello.” I used my chipper voice and introduced myself: “Hi! It’s Ruby, Jason’s girlfriend. I’m so excited to meet you at his birthday party.” And then I asked her about what kind of cake her son liked. I expected an energetic answer about chocolate or carrot or red velvet, but instead my question was met with cold silence.

What I didn’t know then, when I made that phone call, was that Jason was abandoned by his mother when he was two years old. She left Georgia and moved to Florida. She told family and friends that she had to escape since his father was so terrible and abusive. But if he was so terrible and abusive, how could she leave her small child alone with him?

Some mothers have been known to summon the strength to lift cars off their babies. Others have fled from war-torn countries with nothing but rags on their backs to offer a safer life to their young. Some mothers perjure themselves and give false alibis in court, preventing their criminal children from being locked up, endangering the lives of others to keep their own offspring free. This innate determination to protect one’s own and the irrational, unconditional love of a mother for her child are what fuels the continuation of the human race. Plenty of mothers endure abusive relationships and traumatic divorces and ugly custody battles to ensure they get to raise their own children. So what kind of mother leaves without taking her son with her? A bad mother. Maybe a mentally ill mother. Maybe a narcissist. Perhaps even a sociopath.

So Jason was raised by a stern single dad who could sometimes be cruel. There were rules and expectations and chores, and there was yelling, and the occasional spanking, and a few times the belt was taken out, and in a small percentage of those times the metal buckle end was used. His father was certainly not perfect. And like so many teenage boys, Jason grew to hate him. Not because he was evil, but because he was there.

Since Gertrude wasn’t there, to get frustrated, or yell, or have a meltdown, or say an unkind word, or embarrass him in front of his friends, or make a mistake, or spank him, or hit him with a leather belt, in Jason’s mind she became a saint. The perfect mother. The enormous affront of her abandoning him was too much for his young emotions to dissect, so instead he focused on the positive little things. Like the sound of her voice on the phone that became so familiar as they chatted over the years. Or the little gifts she would sometimes mail, like a baseball cap or a toy car. Or the birthday cards he would get that always started out with “Dear Son” and ended with “Love, Mom.” He cherished those cards and as a boy would run his hand over the words Son and Mom again and again to make sure they were real.

Gertrude was able to be maternal to a point, from seven hundred miles away, on her own terms. And Jason clung to these maternal gestures like an undernourished flower planted in the shade of a much bigger tree desperately clinging to the smallest sliver of sunlight. Gertrude was the villain. It was so clear. But since she wasn’t the one in the trenches raising him, for a long time in Jason’s mind she was the hero.

Jason said he was going to explain everything to me, about his mom, about how she left when he was little. And how then, senior year of high school, when he turned eighteen, he punched his dad in the face and his dad punched him back and then kicked him out of the house, yelling, “You can come home when you apologize!”

But Jason never apologized. And he never went home. Instead he moved in with his high school girlfriend, Cindy. They had been dating for two years and it was pretty serious. Living at her house with her folks was okay for a couple of weeks, but her parents wouldn’t let him stay forever. Not unless he and Cindy got married. This was the type of small town where people grew up, married each other young, hung around, got local jobs, and had kids of their own, who then started the cycle all over again. So Cindy’s parents wanting a ring on her finger from a mall jewelry store paid for in installments by her high school boyfriend was not out of the ordinary. They would welcome their son-in-law into their home with open arms, but not a young man who was merely their teenage daughter’s boyfriend.

The wrinkle was, Jason wasn’t sure he wanted to get married at eighteen. Having a chronic illness was a curse for all the obvious reasons, but it was also a blessing. It forced him to do research about his health, be an advocate for himself, learn how to ask doctors intelligent questions, and investigate different types of food and exercise. It made him more worldly than the average small-town Georgia kid, and although he held no judgment about those who stayed, he had a sneaking suspicion that his future could hold more than working at the AutoZone in the next town over.

He loved Cindy deeply in that teenage “I might die without you” way, but marrying her seemed like a big decision to have to make under such extreme circumstances. So he turned to the comforting voice of his mother. He called her and filled her in. She didn’t like the idea of Jason getting married one bit, but she took great delight in learning he finally had a major falling-out with his father and hated him as much as she did.