“Youthink?” I roll my head against the headrest to face her. “What the hell kind of excuse is that?” In no universe can someone so smart be so stupid.
She picks mindlessly at her fingernails then spins a turquoise ring around her middle finger. “It felt like an answer, I was sure of it ...” Her voice trails off and it’s almost like she’s as confused by her actions as I am. It’s infuriating.
“Well it sure as shit wasn’t an answer,” I shoot back. “This—” I blow out a breath. “Is a disaster.”
Before she can respond, my phone dings with a calendar reminder.MOM DOC APPT @4:30.
“I’ll take you to your appointment.” I pass her my phone. “Can you call and check on Bennie?” I ask, turning the key and shifting into drive. “Ask him to take her to his house and I’ll come by and get her after?”
“Him . . .” she repeats.
“Funny.” I cut my eyes to her as I turn out of the police department parking lot. “Forgetting my fiancé in an effort to soften the blow of the money won’t work.”
She scrolls through the contacts, going right past Jonathan’s name.
Maybe it’s the exhaustion—the weight of what just happened and the road straight up a mountainside we have ahead of us—but something is off.
“Mom.” I raise my eyebrows in her silence. “Jonathan?”
“I know who Jonathan is.” She scowls and dials his number. “Why didn’t you just say so?”
Jonathan answers and she says all the right things and gives all the right information, looking at me the whole time like I’m being overbearing. Like I’m the one giving away bank account numbers like I wasn’t married to a man who preached guarding personal information like your life depended on it.
Alarm bells ring but I can’t pinpoint their origin. Like smelling smoke but not seeing the fire. Something is wrong—more wrong than Andre taking off with our money.
Then a thought hits me that I can’t shake as I replay the conversations of our day ... the last weeks. The names. The purchases I can’t wrap my brain around.
It’s a miracle I don’t vomit.
Not the blurry three miles it takes to get to her appointment.
Not as Mom tries to stop me from going in with her to talk to the doctor.
Not as the doctor shares the secret Mom’s been keeping, making life as I know it completely implode.
Three
“Atumor.”
I don’t really know who I’m talking to. Not the doctor; he’s the one who told me. Not my mother; she won’t look at me. I just say it, dazed, trying to make it all make sense. Trying to wrap my own brain around the fact she’s kept this hidden from me for years.
“It is benign,” Dr. Mott offers, sliding a stack of information across the desk as he begins filling me in on everything I didn’t know I didn’t know. Including the fact they’ve known about it for a decade.
The headaches and random moments of memory loss aren’t her quirks or need for more water, they’re from a slow-growing benign brain tumor called a meningioma that’s gotten large enough—nearly four centimeters—to become symptomatic. Large enough the doctor—and neurologist, because she has one of those too—are recommending surgery.Brainsurgery. That my mother is resisting.
Because Iris Conway doesn’t come for so many visits to the doctor because she has the hots for him, she has a brain tumor.
She was right when she said I don’t know everything about her. I don’t know jack shit.
My mom may have come out of the crash with my dad a decade ago with only a single scratch on her forehead, but they did a CT scan just to be sure she didn’t have a concussion. She didn’t; she had a small brain tumor. She was symptomless for years—simply monitoring its slow growth—until the recent headaches and memory loss started.
“Personality changes—impulsivity and poor judgment, especially—memory loss, headaches, even seizures and vision issues are all common,” Dr. Mott explains. “Iris is already quite a woman—” He smiles warmly at her, choosing his next words carefully. “Any eccentric behaviors that were there before could make it a little more confusing for someone on the outside. Harder to tell where her personality ends and neurological symptoms begin.” He shrugs slightly. “Her exaggerated, if you will.”
I flip through the images of my mother’s brain like I have a clue what I’m doing, trying to digest it all.
“Seizures?” The fact the tumor likely contributed to her inviting a stranger into our bank account is one thing, but the thought of my mother convulsing on the floor is a punch to the gut.
“A possibility.”
