“Do you, though?” she poses.
“Yeah.” I shrug, taking another piece off the board. “Plus, this way I get to spend time with you.” She makes ahmmsound in response.
“And I feel like I’m just in the way at home right now,” I add. “I’m giving them space.”
“Well, that’s stupid.”
“Mom,” I scoff out a laugh.
She shrugs at this, the way she always did growing up when she was blunt. My mother has never been an abrasive person. Just honest. Painfully, relentlessly honest. Never watching her words if it meant withholding information. I always admired that. But now, not so much.
“I’m just saying,” she says, “you’ve lost your memory, not your marriage. Why hide here? Why not go back and fight for it?”
“I’m not hiding here,” I argue, but she rolls her eyes.
“The son I raised would be racing back to his wife. He’d fight for his memories, his marriage, the life he built.”
A sharp laugh shoots out of me. “That’s dramatic. I’m just giving them some space. It’s all a lot. And you need me here.”
“Am I on my deathbed?” she deadpans.
“Well, clearly not.”
“Then you don’t need to be here.”
“Ugh.” I mock a stabbing motion into my chest. “Right where it hurts.”
“And I’m not being dramatic, son.”
She abandons the checkers as she pushes her reading glasses to the top of her head, her white curls now sticking up all around them. “I’m being honest. And what you’re doing is wrong. You shouldn’t be here, chumming it up with your sick mother.”
“Mom.” I gape. “You’re not—”
“Oh, please. I’m not stupid. I know something’s wrong. You don’t think I figured it out when I started waking up to a note with the date and your father’s phone number on my nightstand? Or I don’t see it when your sisters trail me to the bathroom like a litter of kittens? I know I’m losing my mind, Steven. But don’t let me lose my dignity too. Speak to me like the mother you know. The woman who can take it.”
I press my lips into a line, weighing my words. But her gray eyes stay pinned on me, steady and expectant. She knows I’ll do what she says.
“Alright,” I say quietly, gesturing for her to go on.
She steeples her hands under her chin, studying me so intently it feels like she can see straight down to my bones.
“You need to go home, Steven,” she finally says. “Be with your wife, your kids.”
I open my mouth to argue, ready to give some poor excuse about space or timing or how this is what works forus,as if I really know that. But Mom lifts a hand, silencing me before I let my arrogance win.
“Listen to me.” Her tone softens and she lowers her hand. “We don’t have as much time as we think we do. These moments, these memories…they are fleeting. They come and go. Some might never return.” She laughs at herself, at the sheer reality that some of hers are gone forever. “But the moments we have right now? The ones right in front of us? I could wallow away every day because I don’t remember your father’s favorite color, or the day we met, or I could soak up the momentsnowwhen he wears blue or when he smiles at the sun. These moments are happening now, and they don’t wait for anyone. Not for convenience or fear. Not for a man hiding at his parents’ house because he’s afraid of what he might find in his own home.”
“That’s not—” I start.
“It is.” She nods. “You don’t think I understand? What if everything comes back to me, and I remember all the hard things, all the sad things? All the things that make me someone I don’t want to be?”
Her words are fragile, breakable, as she speaks, but she lifts her chin and keeps going.
“I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, what I’ll remember, or what I won’t. But you could. Youwill.And you can do that with the girl you are madly in love with by your side.”
I swallow hard. I blink hard, like that might ease the pressure building behind my eyes.
She leans forward, resting her frail, weathered hands atop mine. “Go home to your wife. Soak up every moment you still can.Fightlike I know you can. And fight because Emma needs a man to fight for her.”
