Kiss Her Once for Me (62)

“Don’t hello me,” Linds snaps. “You’ve been avoiding my calls. Were you ever going to tell me you’re getting married?”

“Um… No?”

My mother scoffs, and I sit up in bed, leaning back against the carved wood headboard in preparation for her impending tantrum. The room is bathed in midmorning light, and Andrew isn’t in bed beside me, his sheets already cool to my touch. I don’t have time to wonder where he is, because Linds.

“Are you being serious, Elena?” she squawks. “You weren’t going to tell me you have a fiancé? I know I haven’t always been the best mother,” Linds begins to whine, “but the idea that my only daughter would get engaged without telling me—that I would have to find out from pictures on the internet—makes me feel completely worthless, Elena Jane.”

“I was kidding, Mom,” I drone out the lie. “Of course I was going to tell you. Did the, uh”—I cringe at my own cowardice but barrel on anyway—“official engagement announcement arrive in the mail?”

“No, but I’ve been staying with a friend in Tempe,” she says, her spirits sounding vastly improved already. “So, tell me everything! How did you two meet? How did he pop the question?”

I don’t want to do this with her, especially not at—I pull the phone away from my face to check the time—nine in the morning after a night of mulled wine and semi-questionable choices.

I go for a subject change. “How’s Ted doing?”

“Ted who?”

“Ted… your husband…?”The man you married only one month after meeting him. Like mother, like daughter.

“Oh, that prick. Fucking gone is how he is. And good riddance. It’s fine. Doesn’t matter,” she insists. It sounds like it matters quite a lot, but I’m not going to argue with my mother about her love life. Lindsey Oliver is an exemplary reminder that all relationships are doomed to fail. Probably within a calendar year. “I’m swearing off men for a bit. For real this time, Elena. I’m fucking done with the whole lot of them. Maybe I’ll give women a try, like you did.”

“I didn’t ‘give women a try,’ Mom. I’m bisexual.”

“Not anymore, apparently. Now you’re getting married!”

I check the time on my phone again. What was that—three whole minutes before Linds said something biphobic? “That’s not how bisexuality works. I will always be bisexual, even if I marry a man. Even if I only date men!”

Linds is not interested in a lesson on bi erasure. “Tell me about your fella! He looks expensive in these Instagram photos. You know, now that Ted and I are over, I could use a little money to get my own place, and—”

Of course. She didn’t call to congratulate me on my engagement. She called me because she saw my fiancé’s Gucci loafers in a photo and figured she could get more than a few hundred bucks out of me. “Look, Mom, I gotta go—”

“Don’t you dare hang up on me. When is the wedding?”

“There isn’t really a wedding. It’s just going to be me and Andrew at the courthouse.”

“And me, because I’m your mother.”

Only biologically. “You’d have to fly into Portland, and I know you hate traveling anywhere moist.”

“I will suffer frizzy hair to see my baby girl walk down the aisle.”

I grit my teeth and try not to think about last Christmas, when she left me alone for the holidays. For this, though, she’ll get on a plane.

“Send me the details for the wedding,” my mother demands. All she ever does is demand.

“Okay,” I agree, because that’s all I ever do, too. “Goodbye, Linds.”

“Wait! About the money you sent me…”

I Venmoed her two hundred dollars last week. My checking account is currently down to $13.23. “What about the money?”

“Well, see, the battery died on the Corolla, and since I don’t have a running car, I haven’t been able to get to work, so I’m going to need another five hundred to get it fixed.”

“I don’t have five hundred dollars right now.”

A pause. “But that new beau of yours seems like he’s got money….”

“I can’t ask Andrew for money.”

She sniffles, inducing the fake tears that served as the insincere soundtrack to my childhood. “Are you just going to let me get fired? I have no car, Elena!”

I feel that twinge of guilt, that obligation to the only family member I have. I wish I had a mom like Katherine, so desperate to spend time with me she plans it in an Excel spreadsheet. I wish I had a sibling who called me stupid nicknames. I wish I had a grandma who called me sugar and only cared about my happiness. But I don’t.

I have a dad I haven’t spoken to in three years, and I have Linds. And sure, Linds only calls when she wants something, but at least sometimes she calls.

“I’m working… a new job, sort of,” I tell her. “I’ll have some money coming in soon, and I’ll pay for the new battery then.”

The fake tears cease. “Good. Glad to hear it. Venmo me when you can. Love ya.”

Linds hangs up, and I toss my iPhone onto Andrew’s vacant pillow. The love ya is an automated response; I know it’s not rooted in any true maternal affection, but still, I cling to it. I want it to mean something.