Odd Mom Out

“My friend from St. Pius.” I start the truck and back out slowly, the phone wedged between my neck and collarbone. “The one who’s the model.”

“Her husband died in Afghanistan.”

“No, her husband is still alive. Shey’s husband’s a photographer.”

“So who died in Afghanistan?” Mom’s voice quavers.

“Tiana’s husband.”

“They’re both photographers?”

I merge with traffic and head down Bellevue Way. “No. Tiana’s husband was a journalist. He worked for CNN. He died just a few months after their wedding. You went to their wedding. It was in Carmel, at the mission. Remember?”

Mom sighs, her tone increasingly cross. “I can never keep them straight.”

“The point is we’re home now, Mom, and you’re coming for dinner tonight. We’re having you over for a barbecue.”

“You’re not coming here?”

“No, Mom, you and Dad are coming here.”

As I jump onto the 520 to take a shortcut home, I think there are days when Mom sounds like herself and we talk about normal things and then there are days like today, when we talk and I feel like a parent with a very young child. God knows how Dad deals with it. He was never very patient, not while I was growing up, but somehow he has found an extraordinary gentleness, as though Mom’s illness has made him not just an officer but a gentleman. I picture Richard Gere lifting Debra Winger and swinging her in his arms, carrying her away from her factory job.

“I get tired,” Mom says. “I’m tired right now.”

“I know, Mom, which is why we’re going to eat early.”

“I don’t like being out late. I don’t like your father driving late.”

“Mom, it won’t be late, and Dad can drive just fine.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have dinner. Maybe it’s not a good night.”

I wish for more of my father’s patience. I’ve never been strong on patience. “Eva’s looking forward to seeing you, Mom. She’s even making a cake for you.”

My mother, who once had impeccable manners, the sort of manners that ensnared a southern boy, snaps irritably, “All right. But I want to be home early.”

Five-thirty on the dot and the doorbell rings. Dad and Mom are here, and Eva rushes to the door to let them in.

Dad, who never, ever used to enter a room before Mother, steps forward first, and Mom trails after him obediently. This is how they go places now. Dad leads. Mom follows. And if Dad doesn’t walk, Mom doesn’t move.

I watch Eva hug her grandparents, noting that she’s up to my mother’s shoulders now. Eva’s going to be tall, probably as tall as me.

Mom actually looks good today, more like the mom I grew up with. Despite her disease, she’s still slim, and she’s wearing her favorite pink dress with the starched polo collar and the fabric belt tied at the waist. In her pink poplin dress, she looks like my mother with the trim ankle, the high-arched, narrow instep, the mother who loved shoes even more than she loved clothes. But as Eva moves away from my mom, Mom just stands there. No motion, no movement, just still. Lost.

I have a thousand stories I could share about my mom, and in not one is she lost.

To cover my unease, I go forward quickly, hug my father, kiss his cheek, and then go to my mother. She stands semialoof in my arms, as though enduring my hug and kiss. Then, just as I’m about to pull away, she pats my back, once, twice, so absently that I wonder if she even knows who I am.

Despite my wild, rebel ways, I’ve always loved my mom—well, maybe not so much when she tried to turn me into a debutante, but that was years ago, and I eventually escaped to New York, the half dozen cotillion classes ostensibly forgotten. And now I’m back, and I’ve brought Eva with me. I thought it only fair that Eva should have a chance to know her only grandmother before her only grandmother won’t know her.

As we separate, my mom takes my hand, her fingers thin around mine. She smiles distractedly. “Marta.”

“Hi, Mom.” I dread the day she will not know me. Mother is young for Alzheimer’s. Since she was diagnosed, even before we moved back to Washington, I read everything I could on the disease, ordering every book I could from Amazon, researching endless nights on the Internet, even going to a clinic on Long Island that treated Alzheimer’s patients.

The cause of Alzheimer’s might not be known, but the outcome is always the same.

“Come sit down,” I encourage, taking my mother’s arm and walking her slowly toward the patio, which blooms red and purple and orange with late summer roses, zinnias, and dahlias.

I point out the State Fair zinnias and roses to my mother, who smiles kindly, blankly, as though she were asked the time by a stranger.

“Those were your favorite combination,” I remind her as Eva emerges from the house with my father. “The dahlias and roses are constants, but every year you had to plant your zinnias as seedlings. One year you were furious when Molbaks didn’t order State Fair but another zinnia. You said you’d never go back to them again.”

Mom, Dad, and Eva all look at me, listening to the story, but Eva can’t believe that’s all there is to it. “Did Grandma ever go back?”

Mom blinks, and her lips lift. “Yes,” she says triumphantly, “I did. But I made them wait a week.”

We all laugh, and no one looks happier or more relieved than Mom, whose blue eyes crinkle mischievously, her elegant gray hair with the thick white strip at the brow—all natural—dancing.

Dad has made sure she still gets her hair done once a week, and she’s just been, on Saturday.

I never understood my father growing up, didn’t like him very much when I was a kid, and his relationship with my mom was equally perplexing. Yet I have nothing but respect for both of them now. Life isn’t for the faint of heart, and Dad embraces the aging future the same way he approached Korea and, later, Vietnam.

Cool, calm, courage, conviction.

I disappear into the kitchen to retrieve the pitcher of strawberry lemonade that Eva and I made earlier while the cake was cooling. We used fresh lemons and nearly the entire basket of organic strawberries I picked up at the store earlier.

Dinner goes well, and the night’s a success, at least until dessert time, when Eva proudly carries in the cake she baked by herself.

This afternoon, I stepped in to help her only when one of the round la

yers broke coming out of the still warm pan and I showed her how to press the pieces together and then glue it all with frosting. No one will know, I told Eva as she heaped more frosting over the broken layer. Once a cake is frosted, it’s impossible to see the cracks and flaws.

Kind of like us women and our makeup.

Now Eva slides the glass cake stand onto the table, placing the cake in front of Mom.

“Eva, where’s your watch?” Dad asks, leaning over to tap her bare left arm.

Eva casts a reproachful glance my way. “I lost it.”

“Lost it?” he booms, suddenly the military man.

I can’t help sighing. “It’s not lost, Dad. It’s at a friend’s.”

My dad crosses his arms, puffs out his cheeks. “It’s an expensive watch.”

“We know where it is, Dad. It’s at the Youngs’ house, and we’ll get it back tomorrow.”

But Dad ignores me. “Why did you take it off in the first place, Eva? If you don’t take it off, you can’t lose it.”

Eva hangs her head. “I was just showing my friends.”

“Showing off, were you?”

“Dad.”

“That was your grandma’s and my present to you.”

“Dad . . .” I rise, put out a hand to Eva. “She understands.”

But he can’t seem to shift gears. “Kids nowadays don’t respect anybody or anything—”

“Go inside, Eva.” I give her a push toward the house, wait for her to close the door before I turn on my father. “What are you doing? Why are you talking to her like that?”

“It was a two-hundred-dollar watch, Marta.”

“I don’t care if it was a two-thousand-dollar watch, Dad. You don’t talk to my daughter like that.” Even as my temper flares, I realize that for my dad, this isn’t about Eva or the watch. It’s about me.

He still doesn’t approve of me. He doesn’t approve of how I dress, what I drive, what I do. He doesn’t approve of how I parent Eva, either. “If you have a problem with me, Dad, then talk to me. But don’t humiliate Eva—”

“This isn’t about you—”

“Yes, it is. You don’t think I’m raising her properly. You even said so last year. You said, quote, Eva would have been better off in a normal family. But Eva and I are a normal family. We’re our family—”