“It’s strongly recommended that you—”
“I’mgood,” Frances said, a little more curtly.
Amani pressed her lips together in a thin line. “It’s also important for next of kin,” she said. “Your family will need—”
“I know what my family needs.” Irrational anger was surging in her. What Amani was saying made perfect sense, but it would ruin Frances’s life. And the last time she checked, she was still alive and in charge of her destiny. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to go now.”
“Please do call me if you need anything. Anything at all.”
Frances walked to the door. But she hesitated—where had allher manners gone? She glanced back at Amani. “See you in a couple of weeks,” she conceded, and went out.
On the way to the pharmacy, she decided that dying was not as straightforward as one might expect until one was in the throes of it. There were any number of people who were around to put rules on it.
As she waited on her prescriptions to be filled, she called her son.
“Hey, Mom.” Aaron sounded like he was in a cave. “I tried to call you twice last week, but you never pick up. You have to pick up. When you don’t, I worry you’ve fallen again.”
Why did he have to make it sound like she was doddering and ancient? “I never mean to worry you, honey. But you must stop referring to it as a fall. I slipped. I did not fall, at least not in an old person way. Anyway, my phone was off. Too many spam calls.”
“This is what I’m saying, Mom. You can’t have your phone off. What if something happens? I have no way to get hold of you. I can walk you through downloading an app to catch and block spam calls.”
Good God, she was not going to spend her last days on earth trying to follow his instruction over the phone. “I’m sorry, Aaron.” She was reminded of when he was fourteen and began to hang out with friends. She worried endlessly about where he was and how she had no way to get hold of him. How strange to have those roles reversed. “I’ve been seeing friends. Which reminds me, I’m going to be out of pocket for a couple of weeks or so. My friends and I are going to do this fun thing.”
“What fun thing?” He sounded skeptical, like he was preparing himself to disapprove of her plan to skydive or trek across the Arctic Circle.
“We’re going on a genealogy tour!”
“A what?”
“My friend was adopted and recently found out some informationabout her mother. So, we are going on a little tour of the upstate New York where she was born. You know, visiting some cemeteries and local libraries.”
“Sounds like a rager, Mom,” he said, sounding bored. “Have you made your flight reservations for Thanksgiving yet?”
Frances had forgotten all about her promise to come to Omaha. “I’m looking into that today,” she said, and made a mental note to try at least remembering to look at some flights, so the next time he asked, she would have something to say.
“Will you please? Jackie and I want to take you to see some of the senior homes around here, but we need dates to arrange the tours.”
Ah, yes. The tours of God’s waiting rooms. “Give me a couple of weeks. I’ll know when I get back from my trip.”
He sighed wearily. “Fine,” he said, as if he’d asked her to clean her room multiple times and she was still putting him off. It was so weird turning into the child of your child. She didn’t much care for it.
“Aaron?”
“Yeah?”
She could hear him clicking the top of a ballpoint pen. Tip in, tip out. He was impatient. He wanted off this call. Well, that made two of them. But Frances wanted to say … something. Something that he might harken back to and think,I’m so glad she said that.Like, she loved him, that she would never intentionally hurt him. That if everything went south, she was going to be okay, because she’d deliberately chosen this path off the earth.
“Mom? What is it?”
“I love you,” she said. “I love you so much, and I want you to always remember that, no matter what.”
He gave a funny little laugh. “Love you too, Mom. We’ll talk soon. Have fun on your trip to Maine.”
She’d said New York.
Next up was Marjorie.
Frances could not escape a visit to Marjorie after the last coupleof weeks and her near-frantic phone calls. After she picked up her meds and took a round of everything to test them out, she headed to Marjorie’s place.
