doubt that’s ever coming back.”
“You fell down the stairs?”
“I’m fine. Point is, I could use some help. Not forever.”
“A year at the most,” I repeated.
“Exactly!” she said, like we were getting somewhere. “While I adjust. There’s a therapy you can do to help speed things along. Learn to use the one eye like a pro. But it takes a while.”
“A year?”
“Nine months to a year. Then we’re done.”
You had to admire the optimism.
I pushed the empathy back. I was not going to feel sorry for her. People suffered worse things all the time. We’d just picked up a guy last week who’d severed his hand cutting boards to make a playhouse for his kids.
But my mind was on alert now. This was happening. She was really asking. A year. That was a lifetime. I didn’t have a year to give away. “Can’t you hire a caregiver?”
She burst out with a laugh, like I had to be joking. “Sweetheart, I’m an artist!” Then, like it went without saying, “I am dead broke.”
“Can’t Ted help you?”
“Why on earth would he even consider doing that?”
She had a point there.
I tried again. “But you have health insurance, right?”
“It’s terrible. It’s worse than not having insurance at all.”
“Don’t you have friends?” I asked.
“Of course I have friends!” She sounded insulted. “But they have their own families to look after.”
“But I live in Texas!” I said, feeling my argument weaken.
“It’s just a two-day drive,” she said, like, Easy. “You can stay with me. For free! I have a spare room in the attic with white curtains with pom-pom trim and a window that overlooks the harbor.”
She waited, like pom-pom curtains might do the trick.
Then she added, “Think of all the money you could save on rent! Just for a year. Maybe less.”
I shook my head. “I have a life here. Friends.”
“A boyfriend?” she asked.
“No boyfriend.”
“Someone you’re sleeping with, then?” Then, like she was making air quotes, she added, “A sex buddy?”
“Mom!” I shrieked, forgetting I didn’t call her that anymore. “That is not the term.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m too busy for that, anyway,” I added.
“Too busy for what?”
“Too busy for dating. I don’t have time.”
There was a pause, and then she said, “I don’t understand.”
“Look, I just don’t do love,” I said. How had we landed on this subject?
I could hear the frown in her voice. “You don’t do love?”
No way out but through. “It’s not my thing.”
“You don’t do any kind of love? At all?”
“I don’t do romantic love,” I specified. “The dumb kind.”
She paused a second, and I could tell she was deciding whether to take that topic on. “Great, then, I guess,” she said at last, letting it go. “One less thing to hold you back.”
This was the most substance we’d worked into a conversation in years.
“I do love my job, though,” I said, to get us back on track. This might have been a good moment to tell her that I had just received an award for valor. But I didn’t.
“We’ve got firemen up here, you know,” she said, as if that made any sense.
“Firefighters,” I corrected.
“And we’ve got plenty of fires,” she said, sounding almost proud. “Tons of them. This whole part of the country’s a smoldering tinderbox just waiting to go up in flames.”
What was her point?
“There are fire stations on just about every corner,” she went on. “Maybe you could do some kind of exchange.”
“That’s not how it works, Diana. I’d have to give up my job.”
“Just for a year.”
“I’m not a foreign exchange student,” I said. “They don’t hold your place.”
She let that one pass. Then, with new determination, she said, “When have I ever asked you for anything?”
I sighed.
“Never,” she answered for me. “I have never asked you for anything.”
True enough. She had once asked me to forgive her, in a letter—one I hadn’t even replied to. But that wasn’t something we talked about.
“Just this once,” she said. “I promise I will never, ever ask you for help again.”
It was too much. My head was spinning. I just needed to shut this day down. I thought about tonight, and the guys, and the way they chanted my name at the banquet. Then I thought about what it would feel like to leave them, and I said something so true it was mean.
“I’d really like to help you, Diana,” I said. “But I just can’t leave my family.”
* * *
NOT TEN MINUTES after I hung up, as I finished rinsing off my plaque in the sink, my phone rang again. I