Just a Typical Day at the Office

California rolls long since devoured, we lingered over tea and fortune cookies, watching the blue sky give way to dusk, neither of us feeling any particular urge to return to the hospital. Consciously reminding myself that this trip was not just an excuse to have dinner with my brother, I take the lead, “Well, we should think about getting back. She’s probably going to wonder where we are.”

“Yep. Head ‘em up.” Alex delivers my father’s famous line. Funny how that happens, the way our language gets shaped by our parents’ tongues. The thought, we both have his nose, flickers across my mind.

Finally, I can’t avoid it any longer. The reality is this is not a dinner date with my brother. Last night mom suffered a stroke.

This wasn’t a warning shot. This is it. She’s lying in a hospital bed and she can’t swallow applesauce without choking and they still don’t know if the bleeding has stopped and I’m eating sushi. What exactly is wrong with this picture?!

“So, how are you with this? I mean…” Focusing on the road ahead, I struggle to find the question I want to ask Alex, hoping his answer will help me make sense of what I am most certainly not feeling right now.

He shrugs, “You know, I’m really not feeling much of anything to tell you the truth. I deal with trauma every single day. You just get used to it after a while. It’s another day at the office for me.”

“But she’s our mother.”

“Yeah, go figure.”

I don’t say anything, focusing on the road ahead, lips pursed.

Alex senses the change in my mood. “So, what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that she may never be able to go home. The problem is that we’re the only local kids and I’m the oldest daughter and she’s going to need help. The problem is that I’m supposed to care. Right? I mean I’m supposed to care a lot more than I do. But I don’t. I can’t find it anywhere in me.”

“Maybe it’s just different with daughters. Or maybe it’s because you’ve always been harder on yourself than I have with this kind of thing. I know it sounds cruel but she’s made her own bed here and we all saw it coming. I’ll do what’s required of me but you can’t feel what you don’t feel. That’s a fool’s errand if you ask me.”

She absolutely did this to herself, he’s right. How many conversations did we have about this very thing? I can just walk away. Let her be a ward of the State. That’s what those programs are for.

I feel my jaw tighten. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I’ll just do what I have to do and that’s it. I’m not going to worry about it.”

And what the hell does that mean, “do what I have to do?” WHAT do I have to do? He makes it look so easy.

So there we were, just the two of us and our one-armed monkey driving into the sunset. Slightly anti-social, more than slightly cynical, self-raised and we just didn’t give a fuck. It isn’t that we were bad kids or bad adults for that matter. In fact, we both devoted ourselves to serving others. Even in our cynicism we knew how to laugh, and we did so heartily and often. We knew how to be loyal and loving but in the end we expected the world to shrug us off.

We knew it wouldn’t be anything personal. That’s just how the world does.

Articles from this blog may not be reprinted without express permission from the author.
If you have arrived here with the story already in progress, please go to the first post and work your way forward.