Magnolia pressed a hand to her lower back. "If you give me a hand, I'm sure it will be all right."
"And you can tell me where you need to go?"
She nodded. "Yeah. For sure. But you don't—"
"You really think I'd leave you here with Mom while she roots through the frying pans for her phone? Not a chance. We're feeding her some weed gummies and getting you to the hospital before anything else happens."
"What about Jasper? You need to talk to her."
I brought an arm around Magnolia's shoulders and led her out of the bathroom. "I'll talk to her later. Or tomorrow. I know she'll understand this."
We entered the kitchen to find Mom with her arm elbow deep in a bag of flour.
"We are not baking right now, Grandma," Magnolia said. "It's baby time. My husband is a four-hour train ride away and I had five more days to prepare and I didn't get the lemon chicken and orzo like I really wanted but it is baby time. Remove yourself from the flour."
"I thought I might've dropped my phone," she replied. "The last time I had it, I was thinking about baking some chocolate chip cookies but I don't think it's in here."
"Probably not," I said. Scatterbrained. So scatterbrained.
"Please do me a favor and get your special candies so you can calm the fuck down. I am going to give birth to two babies in the next few hours, preferably with my husband by my side, and I need you to turn all of this"—Magnolia waved both hands at my mother—"way down."
"Right, yes, okay." My mother dusted her arm off as she walked in another circle around the kitchen until she stopped at a cookie jar in the shape of a fat monk and plucked a small zip-top bag with a dozen purple jellies from inside. "Time to go, then!"
I grabbed the bag Magnolia pointed out near the door plus my mother's keys and phone, which were exactly where she'd left them after coming in from the market not long ago. "Yep. Time to go."
29
Jasper
I stareddown at my phone for a long moment before tapping the icon beside my mother's number. Since leaving the NCVC offices—a former electronics store in a semi-abandoned strip mall—this evening, I'd fought off the nagging urge to call my mom. I never felt this way. I couldn't remember a single moment in the past twenty years when I'dneededmy mother but I knew, for reasons that made no sense, I needed her right now.
I stared out at the tarmac and the workers in reflective gear that flashed back at me as the call rang. I hated taking red-eye flights. I hated half sleeping and half waking in a different time zone, and then pretending I was a functional human. Ihatedit but I hated my overwhelmingly beige hotel room more. I didn't want to stay in Sacramento another night.
"Hello? Jasper?"
"Mom," I said, tears immediately burning my eyes for no good reason. "I hope it's not too late to call."
"No, it's only a bit after ten and anyway, it's never too late," she said. "Are you flying in or out tonight?"
My mother knew airport noises the way I knew congressional districts. Another two minutes of her listening to the noises behind me and she'd be able to name the airport right down to the terminal and concourse. "Out. Heading back to Boston. I'm in Sacramento. There was an interview."
That felt like an appropriate description of the events.There was an interview.I was not interviewed. I was systematically backed into corners with questions that reached a little too far into confidential territories and repeatedly chided into sharing specific details about my work on previous campaigns. But hey, I blabbed about my former boss's bathroom habits on cable news. As far as they were concerned, nothing was sacred with me.
"Oh! I wish you'd told me! I could've flown down and taken you out to dinner."
Only my mother would think a flight from Seattle to Sacramento was a reasonable commute for dinner. "No, it's okay. I was tied up most of the day."
"Another time, then," she said, and it was obvious she didn't know what to do with me now.
She'd never really known but she'd tried and I gave her credit for that. She'd tried so hard even when everything was stacked against her. Even when her options were impossible. She'd tried and she did the best she could with the loss and devastation life handed her.
"I'm trying my best," I said, a wave of tears threatening to streak down my cheeks. God, I didn't want to cry in the middle of this airport. I just wanted to hold it together a bit longer. Just a bit. "I'm trying to do the right thing but nothing is working."
"It's going to work, honey. I'm sure of it. You've always tried so very hard, even when you were too young for anyone to expect that of you." She paused but I didn't respond because all the tears would fall and I'd sob and I didn't want that. I didn't want to be the person who cried on the phone in the middle of the airport. I didn't want to be the person who fell apart all the fucking time. "Why don't you come up to Seattle tonight? I'll make a call and change your itinerary, and we can have a day together."
I shook my head when I heard her typing. "Do you remember Halloween? That last one we spent on base?"
The typing stopped but there was a moment before she spoke. "I'll never forget it."
