There are so many varieties of love—the menu does not have just one flavor—and I see no reason why this can’t be one of them. Love can be anything you choose to wrap around the word, as long as the two people involved agree upon the terms.
He told me he loved me just weeks after we met. I chose to believe him.
Or maybe he’s just a very good actor, after all.
“I have to go pick up my mom from the clinic,” I say.
* * *
—
I drive west into the midday sun, back toward the side of town where my marks usually live. The imaging clinic is in West Hollywood, a low-lying building that clings like a barnacle to the Cedars-Sinai sprawl. As I pull up, I spy my mother sitting on the steps of the clinic, an unlit cigarette poised between her fingers, sundress strap slipping off her shoulder.
I slow my car, squinting through the windshield at her. My mind crawls through the strange elements of this tableau as I pull past the parking lot entrance: That my mother is here, outside, when I am supposed to be meeting her inside the clinic. That she has a cigarette in hand, although she quit smoking three years back. The empty, distant look of her as she blinks in the thin November light.
She raises her head when I pull up in front of her and roll the window down. She offers a wan smile. Her lipstick, too pink, is smudged across the bow of her upper lip.
“Am I late?”
“No,” she says. “I’m done already.”
I glance at the clock on the dashboard; I could have sworn she said to come at noon, and it’s only 11:53. “Why are you out here? I thought I was going to meet you inside.”
She sighs and struggles to right herself, the cords in her wrist straining painfully as she pushes herself to her feet. “I can’t stand it in there. It’s so cold. I had to get out into the sun. Anyway, we finished early.”
She pulls open the door and settles herself gingerly into the cracked leather seat. By some sleight of hand, she has already vanished the cigarette into the purse on her hip. She fluffs her hair with her fingers and stares out the windshield. “Let’s go.”
My mother, my beautiful mother—my God, I worshipped her as a child. The way her hair smelled like coconut and glimmered gold in the sunshine; the moist stickiness of her glossed lips plump against my cheek, leaving behind the marks of her love; the way it felt to be pressed against her chest, as if I might climb into all that soft flesh and hide safely inside her. Her laugh was an ascending scale, airborne, and she laughed at everything: the sour expression on my face when she served me frozen corn dogs for dinner, the way the repo man scratched his enormous rear as he hitched up our car to the tow truck, how we hid in the bathroom when the landlady banged on our door demanding the delinquent rent.
“You just have to laugh,” she’d say, shaking her head as if she was helpless in the face of such mirth.
My mother doesn’t laugh much anymore. And that, more than anything else about what has happened to her, breaks my heart. She stopped laughing the day that the doctor gave us the prognosis: She wasn’t just “tired,” like she protested; she wasn’t losing weight because she had lost her appetite. She had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that was likely treatable but only at great cost, and that also had a pernicious tendency to battle itself back from the brink and recur, ad nauseam.
You couldn’t just laugh at that, though my mom tried. “Oh, honey, it’s OK, I’ll figure it out. It’s all going to be fine in the end,” she said to me after the doctor left the room that first day, gripping my hand as I cried. She was trying to keep her voice light, but I heard the lie in her words.
My mother had always lived her life as if she was on