“Ouch!”
“Lucian, your fucking phone is ringing. Answer it. It’s probably your mother.”
Groggily, I sat up and reached for my phone. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi!” Her voice was so cheery that it always put a smile on my face, even when my irritated girlfriend was glaring at me.
“What’s up, Mom?”
“Is Laura there?”
“She is.”
“Oh.” Her voice fell.
I stood, walked into the kitchen, and pushed a stack of bills out of the way so I could start a pot of coffee. “What’s going on? You can tell me.”
“I was just gonna see if you wanted to get brunch.”
“Brunch sounds great.” Several seconds of silence passed. I lowered my voice. “I know you don’t like her, Mom, she’s probably going to work. It’ll just be us.”
“It’s not that I don’t like her. I’m a mom, your mom, and I think you deserve the best.”
My mother and father had the ultimate relationship. They had been best friends for thirty-five years until he passed away last year of cancer. After his death, my mother became hyper-focused on my life.
“Mother, I’m jobless, living in a shitty one-bedroom apartment—”
“You’re going to get a job. You have too much talent not to. Things will turn around for you.” She whispered, “Laura doesn’t treat you well, Lucian.”
Laura was always harping on me about getting a regular job, but I had gone to college for graphic and web design. I wasn’t giving up on that. It was a real job, and I’d had one until there were cutbacks where I had been working. It wasn’t my fault at all. I had been unemployed for seven months, living in a fog. I was just going through the motions with Laura, who I had met and started dating in college. She had gone on to med school, and now she was a hotshot surgeon at San Francisco General. I only saw her two days a week, and we usually spent it fighting.
“I’ll meet you for brunch. Where should we go?” I asked my mom.
“Meet me at Sweet Maple. I’m buying.”
I sighed. “Okay. I’ll meet you there in an hour.”
Shuffling back into my room, I heard Laura on the phone, talking to someone about one of her patients. “I’ll be in shortly,” she said.
I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to make up an excuse to leave.
Laura had long, straight blond hair, a narrow chin and nose, and big pink lips. She was six feet tall, only two inches shorter than me, and had a killer body. I used to think she was model-ish and unique; now she reminded me of a Viking warrior. There was no softness to her, mentally or physically.
Inside the room, I slid back into bed while she scrolled through her phone. Without looking over, she said, “I have to go in today. One of my patients is having some post-op issues. You going to brunch with your mom?”
“How’d you know?”
“Because you do that on Saturdays.”
“You work a lot on Saturdays.”
She ignored that. “They’re hiring orderlies at the hospital.”
I laughed through my nose, and then turned on my side to face her. She was still looking at her phone. “I have a master’s in design, Laura. I was making close to what you are when I got laid off.”
“Then get a job.”
I shook my head. “As though I haven’t been trying.”
