Purple Hearts(25)

My phone buzzed. Toby, again. I ignored it.

And how would I tell my hook-up partner that I was married? Scratch that. Did I have to tell Toby anything about this, for that matter? I supposed not. And why was Toby calling me in the middle of the day? Was he trying to up the fuck portion of the fuck-buddy equation to include quickies in the afternoon? Was he trying to up the buddy and remove the fuck? I had no idea, and I didn’t want to find out. I had enough on my plate.

“Cassie,” Mom said. “Hello. Are you losing it?”

I looked up. I realized I had been scrubbing one spot on the sink for several minutes. “Whoops.”

She stood next to me in the kitchen, looking out the window above the sink to the Floriens’ sprawling backyard. A cast-iron table and chairs stood under the shade of a Texas ash. Beyond that, a large swimming pool.

“How’s your blood sugar?” Mom asked. She snapped on a pair of blue latex gloves.

“I checked it this morning, like I do every morning,” I replied. It was starting to become like second nature, this organized thing amid the chaos. Check blood sugar. Prepare healthy meal. Set phone timer to make sure I had an afternoon snack. Walk at least thirty minutes a day. Not that my mother trusted me to be on top of it.

“Have you cracked open the LSAT prep books?”

“I’ve been busy.” I picked at a piece of lint on my sponge.

“With what?”

Marriage. “Music,” I said.

There’d be more forms to fill out. IRS forms, direct-deposit forms, and Luke had called today about more army paperwork. There was the wedding, and that was it. There were no winks across rooms or fake briefcases or secret handshakes. Unless our “honeymoon trip” to Chili’s this evening was actually going to be a North by Northwest case of mistaken identity, this whole thing was unsettlingly easy.

Mom picked up a bottle of Windex and headed to the breakfast nook. “If you’re going to stand there, at least polish the silverware.”

I picked up a fork from the pile near the sink. “We’re probably going to play again at the Skylark.”

Mom sighed as she stepped on a bench to reach the high windows. “When I was your age I was doing the same thing, going to the bars with my face painted, different places every night, going on dates, trying to find another daddy for you. And look how that worked.”

I rubbed a butter knife, tense. “It’s not the same.”

“Nights in bars. Looking for something that isn’t there.”

“It is there,” I called. “You heard it. And it’s something I’m passionate about.”

Mom shook her head, laughing to herself as she made small circles on a pane. “What do you mean, passion?”

“Doing anything else besides it sounds like hell. That’s passion.”

She stepped off the bench, scooted it to the left, and stepped up again. “Life is hell, Cassie. We do what we can to make it manageable, and we wake up and do it again.”

“That’s terrible.”

“I know. That’s why you can’t just say ‘I want, I want, I want’ and hope something happens to you. You don’t waste time following. You get into a position where you don’t have to follow anything.”

“Aren’t you ‘following’?” I asked. “I mean, is this what you want?” I picked up my polishing rag from the counter, shaking it at her.

She scratched her flushed cheek with the back of her wrist, and resumed scrubbing. “I want to earn my pay, go home and put my feet up, read books, and tell jokes with MiMi.”

“Is that it?” I pressed. If Mom and her sister lived a reasonable distance from each other, they would be inseparable. Now they just purchase wireless plans for the pleasure of chatting about Rosario Ferré novels, their gardens, and the various ways the weather has failed my mother.

She stepped down from the bench. “It will be hard to ask myself that question until I know my only daughter has a safety net.”

Deep down, I had known this all along. Mom couldn’t do so much as think about looking for a different job, going back to school, moving back to San Juan, until she was no longer the person who would catch me if I failed. If I was broke, if I was sick, I still relied on her. But not anymore. Luke and I were married now. Sham or not, I had his extra income and health insurance. And maybe that was something she needed to hear.

“Don’t freak out,” I said, as quiet as a little girl. “But I might have one now. A safety net.”

“Like what?”

I swallowed, and lifted my hands. “I got married.”

“What?”

I found myself stepping away, scared, though the top of her poufy black hair came only up to my chin. Her cheeks flared red. “To who?”

I stammered quickly, “His name’s Luke Morrow. He’s a private in the army. We’re not in love, we did it for the benefits.”

Her mouth dropped open. “Are you serious? How long have you been planning this?”

I extended the time period, though it hardly made it seem more reasonable. “A week.”

“A week.” She stood frozen for a moment, staring at the floor. Then she started peeling off her latex gloves.

“It’s one thousand dollars extra a month and free health care! You saw the hospital bill after all that diabetes testing.”