Not Perfect(26)

But now she wished she could pick up the phone and call her mother. She’d say, Hi, it’s me. And her mother would say, “Hi, sweetie pie,” as she always did, no matter what age Tabitha was. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted from her. To ask her for help? Advice? Until her mother had gotten sick, she had always been the person Tabitha went to first. But then her mother had turned into a baby, introducing Tabitha to people as her mother, which Tabitha hated more than anything. It hurt her to be around her mother—this wasn’t her mother anymore, it was someone else, like a body imposter. And it got so hard to be nice, almost impossible. And she hated that, too.

She thought back to that dinner more than six years ago. It was the exact moment when everything started to change, but it took a while to understand what was going on. They were talking about New York, and Tabitha’s mother thought Yonkers was part of the City, not part of Westchester. Tabitha was shocked at the time; her mother had always been so sharp, and she got really frustrated with her. What was wrong with her? She had lived in Westchester County for thirty years before moving to Pennsylvania! Her mother had gotten flustered, suddenly she wasn’t sure. Tabitha had no idea it was all a blueprint for everything that was going to unfold over the next few years—her mother’s getting more and more confused, Tabitha’s getting more and more mean. There was also the emphysema from all those years of smoking, the forgetting to use the oxygen or to turn off the oxygen when she cooked, and the impossibility of keeping track of her medicine. Once, Tabitha’s mother had taken double the proper dose of steroids for an entire month before anyone realized. Or worse, the inability to open the top of the pill bottle and never telling anyone, so that after days of not taking her medicine, she would be so sick she would need to be rushed to the ER, and Tabitha would spend endless days at the hospital with her, trying to get her well enough to go home, so they could do it all over again.

“We have to go,” Levi said, coming into the dark kitchen, startling her. “Nancy said we should be there by three.”

Tabitha stopped herself from saying Nancy, Nancy, Nancy in a mean voice, the way Jan had said, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” on The Brady Bunch. All Levi talked about lately was The Family Meal and how Nancy told him how important it was for him to know and use the kids’ first names, how that gave them self-esteem. Wow, maybe Tabitha was just mean overall. Mean to her mother, mean to her son, mean to a woman who was trying to feed the hungry. Just mean. Maybe that’s why Stuart did the things he did. Maybe that’s why he left. But she knew that wasn’t true. As more time went by, she feared she had very little to do with why Stuart disappeared. She worried she didn’t factor very prominently into many of his choices at all.

“Okay, Monkey man,” she said soothingly. “I’m ready.”

She looked around for her purse and her phone, checked that she had her car key.

“Fern!” she called.

There was no response.

“Fern!” she called again.

“Come on!” Levi said. “It’s for my bar mitzvah!” He made it sound like he was leaving to save the world. Tabitha knew it was because Stuart was always so excited about Levi’s bar mitzvah, so into it. If Levi ever uttered the words to Stuart about anything that might someday prepare him for his bar mitzvah, Stuart always gave him his full attention. Tabitha didn’t care as much about the actual bar mitzvah, she never really had. But she was relieved to see Levi caring about something. She sighed and went looking for Fern. She found her in her room, sitting with her back against her bed, one leg bent, and the other one, the bad one, as Tabitha had now come to consider it, stretched out and twisted ever so slightly outward.

“Hi sweetie,” she said, imagining the ghost of her mother finishing her sentence with “pie.” “We have to get going for Levi’s project.”

“Do I have to go?” she asked. “I stayed home that other day. I’m old enough. I just want to stay home.”

“Absolutely not,” Tabitha said. “That was an exception. Plus, you aren’t just coming because I don’t want you to be home alone. You’re coming because you are part of the project. The whole family is supposed to participate.”

“Daddy isn’t participating,” she said.

“That’s true, but he would if he were home,” Tabitha said.

Fern sighed and groaned, then moved in a funny way, putting weight on her good leg and swinging the other one around, then leaning heavily on her bed as she stood up.

“Does it still hurt?” Tabitha asked. It had seemed a little better, less inflamed and less sensitive, so she was just hoping it would go away. But now she wasn’t so sure. She was ready to take Fern to the doctor, had even called and left a message for the triage nurse, but the second it seemed to be getting better and not worse, she let it go. When the nurse called back, she tried her best to describe what was going on with Fern’s leg, but she definitely downplayed it and too easily accepted the nurse’s suggestion that it might be a pulled muscle and to just wait a few days and see. She didn’t know what it was, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t a pulled muscle.

“Not really,” Fern answered sweetly. Okay, Tabitha thought. She’d keep an eye on it and if it wasn’t one hundred percent better by Friday—no, Thursday—she would call and take Fern in before the weekend. She meant it, no matter what Fern said.