I can’t help but snigger, for that’s such a great expression. Soft lad. Jim’s mom’s voice is melodic, filled with warm gravel. I can imagine her with a rolling pin tight in her grip, using it to threaten her son.
‘Mam, I’m coming over.’
‘Why?’
‘Yes, why? Don’t we need to get to London?
‘I need to make sure you’ve taken your tablets, that’s all.’
‘Ethel’s here, son. You know, Ethel Barton?’
‘Yeah. Of course, I know Ethel Barton.’
‘Her daughter Yvonne’s here, too.’
‘Quite the party.’
‘What was that?’
‘I said, it sounds like quite the party.’
‘No, the party is tonight. Yvonne’s sixtieth. You coming with me?’
‘No. I’m busy … Look, have you taken your pills, all the blue ones?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the white? The big tablet ones?’
‘Four already.’
‘Good.’
‘Ethel knows, she’s here.’
‘Yeah. You said. Well, don’t forget. And make sure Ethel doesn’t forget either.’
‘I won’t. Love you.’
‘Love you, too.’
Jim hangs up and turns the radio on. I’m a bit disappointed. I’d been quite enjoying listening into that conversation. It was so real. I’ve honestly never spoken to my mom like that before, or my papa for that matter, never finished with, ‘Love you, too.’ And Jim is so concerned, so focused on making sure his mother is okay. I’ve been stuck with him for five, almost six hours and I have to admit, it’s nice to see this side of him.
‘Hey,’ I shout over, from two rows back. ‘Is your mom okay?’
He catches me briefly in the rear-view mirror.
‘Chronic irregular heartbeat,’ he says, his diction strong on each syllable.
I don’t want to shout, though, I want to talk. Why was I so hasty to move here, to the back of the minibus? All Jim had done was call me a princess. And as far as insults go, I could be given a lot worse.
My mom was young when I came along and seriously messed up her plans. On a good day she affectionately called me ‘her little mistake,’ and on a bad day I was ‘an inconvenience.’ Then she became a new mom for the second time around.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to her, before attempting any sort of salutation. I was fourteen, freshly expelled from boarding school, and just landed at Boston Logan where my mom had had to drive four hours with a three-month-old baby to come and collect me.
‘Let’s just get to the car,’ my mom said. ‘I need to feed Paige.’
‘I feel awful, Mom. I didn’t do anything wrong. I promise.’
‘Well, if you didn’t do anything wrong, why do you keep saying sorry?’
I sat up front of my mom’s car in the airport parking lot while my mom nursed Paige in the back. I listened as my mom cooed and sang ‘You Are My Sunshine’, softly, a little out of tune, so clearly enjoying motherhood now that she was ready to embrace it.
Unlike the first time.
She was April Abbot, a young flight attendant stationed in New York City for only six months when she fell pregnant to a charming salesman for an international oil and gas company. Samir Khoury’s dark, handsome features and French Arabic accent were simply too irresistible for a small-town girl from the coast of Maine. They married quickly, quietly, and I was born in the Big Apple.
‘I wanted to see the world,’ my mom had told me, often. ‘It didn’t seem fair that your papa got to live his life to the max, but I had to stay home. I didn’t want to become my mother. Or her mother.’
So to make up for that unfairness, my papa hired a nanny.
And my mom got exactly what she wanted.
She returned to flying and got to accompany her husband on certain business trips. But his job was demanding and we had to move to Hong Kong when I was two. Another nanny was hired, followed by another when the first quit due to me biting her. Obviously I don’t remember doing that. Then we moved on to Singapore, on to Dubai, and as the number of nannies increased, so did the number of hobbies my mom took up. Tennis, pottery, yoga, volunteer work, all to fill some sort of gaping hole in her life.
‘I see the way you look at other men,’ my papa would say, as I hid in the bathroom, listening to their arguments each time they came home late from dinners, from galas, from those many occasions where my mom looked so enchanting, like a movie star