Why are we here?

photo by Patrick Cummings

A benign, golf-ball-sized tumor lingered on the brink of her brain, waiting patiently for the wind to be just right. And Friday afternoon in the parking lot of Home Depot, the breeze picked her up in an ambulance and blew her all the way to Boston. 

Scott prefers we do not talk about his mother whose head is scheduled to be shaved by strangers the following morning but I babble like a brook in the rain forest anyway. "This is so out of the blue. It could be worse, though, it could be cancer, at least it isn't cancer because if it was..."

"hm." He humphs and I apologize for my fumbling bumbling.

"We should go see her." I tell him, but we don't know when or how. Can't we drop everything for two days? For one day? She would. She would abandon boiling black beans on an electric burner for either of us. So why are we here when she is there? We should be waiting in waiting rooms, drinking bad coffee and flipping glossy, crinkled pages of old magazines, but we're not. We're both at work, saying

"fine"

whenever anyone asks, "Hey, howareya?"

At 8p.m., Scott's sister calls me from the hospital.

"The surgery is over. They got about ninety-nine percent of it out. The rest they'll get with radiation later."

"I feel really bad that we're not there."

"You know Mom and Dad, they wanted to be alone. They kept kicking me out." I press the phone hard against my ear to hear every soft word she says.