comes my way.
Grinning, I take it from him and waste no time in peeling it open. “Thanks.” I offer him some, but he refuses to take it, probably because he knows just how much I love my chocolate.
“I’m going to apply for other jobs in the meantime,” I tell him, taking a bite of the chocolate bar.
“Me too. I can do better than where I’m at.”
“We can both do better. At least you have a roof over your head.”
“You can stay with me for as long as you want, Mari.”
He’s a good guy. A good friend. Someone I can depend on, unlike the douchebag who was my boyfriend. “You’re too kind, but it’s not ideal.”
“Seriously, you can stay as long as you want.”
I ditched Dale, of course. I don’t need someone like him in my life, but I wish I’d learned my lesson the first time round. I deserve better. Jamie always says I’m too nice, too forgiving, that I always see the best in people, and that’s my downfall. My mom always used to say that, too—back when she was my mom, before the dementia hit and slowly made her forget who I was.
A few days after that? My landlord told me to leave after I couldn’t pay the rent for my apartment for the third month running. The well paid job? I’d used most of my savings to pay for my mom’s hospital bills because in the last year she’d had a few falls, and there was always something wrong. We had lots of tests done over the course of the last year and then I had to pay for my mom’s move into a nursing home.
She lived with me in my small apartment, but during the last year I noticed that she would get upset when she forgot something, because it started to happen a lot. I didn’t think anything of it at first. Then one day she got lost when coming home from grocery shopping.
That’s when I took notice. Over the next few months, she would become irrational, and get upset easily. She thought she was seeing people walking around in the house, or outside. I was starting to find it difficult.
Then she fell down and broke her arm and while in the hospital, she was diagnosed with stage four dementia. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t keep an eye on what Dale was up to. I’d stay at his place a lot, but the more ill my mom got, the less I saw him. There was no possibility of him coming to stay at my place. It was tiny as it was. With my mom being there it was hard.
Still, she was my priority and I nursed her back, but it wasn’t easy, what with her new forgetfulness and mood swings. It was when she left the stove on all day, that I decided she would be better off in a nursing home.
So I tried to explain to her, and she understood it. She flits in and out of being ‘my mom’ and being a stranger. The trick, and the gift, the beauty, is to have her for as long as possible, being my mom. And this week, this week out of hell, I was told that she has stage five dementia.
It’s good that she’s in a nursing home, having someone keep an eye on her all the time, but I still worry. She’s only been there a few months, and I’ve been paying to keep her there, thinking that the promotion I was going to get was going to come through. My boss had told me it was. And then the crook himself messed things up for us all.
I’d been paying a third of my rent for the past few months, needing to get my mom settled but my landlord got impatient and threw me out.
“Why so quiet?”
“My life is a shit show.”
“It’s not. This, right now, your life and everything that’s happened, this is what’s meant to happen. This is where you’re meant to be. Hopefully you’ll learn this time.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Learn what?” I scoff. “Being broke, discovering my mom’s dementia is worse than I thought? Losing my job? Having a cheating boyfriend?”
“That you are too nice, too forgiving, too …” He pauses, then presses his lips together, as if he doesn’t want to say.
“Say it.”
“You’re too reckless, especially when it comes to guys. You can do better. Dale is a jerk. He was a jerk the first time he