Not Perfect(43)

“Listen, I didn’t want to ask Fern about it, but when you said she wasn’t able to participate, did she not even go on one slide?”

“She went on one, the one that ends and drops you, like, twenty feet into the pool. She was in so much pain after she hit that I thought I’d have to call you. But she asked me not to, really, she begged me not to. We ended up renting one of those silly cabanas, and she and Hugo sat and read most of the day—and ate.”

“Oh,” Tabitha said.

“But hey, that’s not why I called now, obviously,” Kaye said, clearly trying to turn the mood around. “Sarina has this crazy idea. She wants to do something nice for Fern, since she hasn’t been feeling well, and since yesterday wasn’t as much fun as she had hoped. We were thinking a pizza party—maybe even tonight? Sarina wants to invite you guys, and of course Levi can come, plus the six girls—Meghan, Lucy, Sophie, Eliana, Phoebe, and Grace. I know it is totally last minute, but I have a feeling everyone can make it if you can—and we could surprise Fern if you want to—just for fun. I’d leave that detail up to you. I know it’s a school night, but who cares, right? Hugo has to work late tonight, so I would love the company. What do you think?”

“Fern would love that!” Tabitha said, wondering if Kaye somehow knew. Could she? “And yes, let’s surprise her. Why not? I’ll just tell her we have to stop by your place to pick up a jacket, or something like that. What can we bring? What time should we come?”

“I was thinking around six? And let me send an email right now to the girls’ mothers. This will be fun! Maybe we can surprise everyone.”

“I love that idea,” Tabitha said. “You didn’t say what we can bring.”

“It’s going to be enough work to get Fern here,” she said. “Please, just bring yourselves.”





CHAPTER ELEVEN

The next morning, Tabitha started a new list. This one was about her mother’s last days, possibly other stuff, too, and she wrote at the top: The Worst Things.

Number one: The Hug.

When she had hugged her mother a few days before she died, not knowing she was going to die as soon as she did but knowing she probably wasn’t going to live too much longer, she realized she hadn’t hugged her in weeks. If she were being really honest, it had been longer than that. She added a letter A on the next line, like she was writing an outline, and added: Response. When she hugged her that day, her mother had clung to her.

Number two: The Morphine.

At number two she stopped. She had intended to list the doses, and the times of the doses, and try to figure out where things went wrong, if they went wrong, but she realized now that she wasn’t ready.

Number three:—she wrote—and underlined it three times. Then she starred it. The Sidewalk Sale.

She stopped again. When was that? About three months before her mother died? Or was it four months? They had cleaned out the apartment. Well, Tabitha had, after she had completely lost patience. For months her mother had said okay, she was finally ready to go through everything and throw things away. She was ready to “lighten her load.” But time and time again, they would spend hours going through clothes or books or jewelry—making piles to either keep, give away, or throw out. They would come to the end, and Tabitha would be ready to actually do something with the piles—throw the appropriate pile in the trash, put the “keep” pile back where it belonged, and take the third pile to give away—whatever that might mean. Each time, though, her mother had said no, let’s just put it all back where we found it and do it another time. All that work wasted, afternoons and afternoons of expending so much energy with no progress made.

By the time Tabitha held the sidewalk sale, her mother was much easier to trick. She had always been so sharp, but that had changed over the previous few years. So she set her mother up in her bedroom watching a movie, and she slowly took all the things she could remember from the various “trash” and “give away” piles down to the sidewalk where she displayed them all neatly on a folding table and waited to sell them. Of course, she felt bad about twenty minutes into it, so she brought her mother out, expecting her to be livid and demand they bring every single item back inside. Tabitha had already sold a few things—some books, an old frame, a beautiful basket holding Mardi Gras beads. But she assumed her mother wouldn’t know what was already missing.

Her mother approached the sale like she had no idea that these were her things on display. She walked around the table Tabitha had set up and looked at the items one by one.

“Oh my,” she had said, holding up an elaborately decorated cigar box, full of miniature soaps collected from all over the world. “I had no idea other people did this! And look, they went to Paris and Mexico, too!”

Tabitha had been stunned.

“And look at this Bundt pan with the mermaids! I have one just like it upstairs. I use it to make my famous raspberry Jell-O mold every Christmas. Let’s buy it. Then I could make two at a time!”

“Come on, Mom,” Tabitha had said. “If you have all this stuff already, you don’t need duplicates.”

Her mother had nodded and gone back inside to finish the movie. Tabitha knew she should have just taken it all back in: most of it was still there in front of her. What would happen if her mother lived long enough to want to make that Jell-O mold again? But she was so mad! And she was so, so tired of it all. And she knew she was going to be stuck going through it, again. She thought about the soap collection. That would be easy to take back to the apartment and place under the bathroom sink where she had found it. But she didn’t. She sold a bunch of items for a dollar each, her mother’s beloved beach towels, her soup ladle, her cake plate, her Jell-O mold. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she walked armfuls to various garbage cans in her mother’s neighborhood, telling herself hopefully that a homeless person might come across it and be able to use it. The thing was, there were very few homeless people in her mother’s neighborhood. There probably weren’t any.