One of the advantages of not having a lot of family or other loved ones is that you don’t have too many people to worry about losing to death, unlike people with large, close-knit families. I loved Miss Odessa. I loved my parents dearly despite their peculiarities. And, as ghoulish as it was, I often wondered how I was going to react to their passing. I had added Jesse Ray and Jeanette and Nita to that list because I loved them all dearly, too. I wasn’t particularly crazy about Adele and her clan, or Harvey and the Chinese woman he lived with, Flossie Ming Lee, but I had come to adore Miss Rosetta. She was as much a loving mother to me as she was to Jesse Ray and his two siblings. One of the first thoughts that had shot through my head after Jeanette’s call was the fact that I had cooked up that lie to feed to Miss Rosetta about me not having babies for her to fuss over. I felt worse than shit, and I wasn’t too far from it. Because right after I got off the telephone with Jeanette, I ran into the bathroom and I threw up from both ends.
Jesse Ray and I immediately cancelled the rest of our vacation and booked a reservation on the first available plane back to California. Neither one of us ate or drank anything during the five-hour flight. We must have looked like pallbearers, sitting there, with our long faces and tear-stained eyes. It seemed like I was taking it harder than Jesse Ray. I couldn’t stop crying. By the time the plane landed, I looked like a Panda bear, the dark circles around my eyes were so profound.
“She don’t know nobody. She can’t even speak or move,” Harvey told us in the car on the way from the airport. There was so much traffic that the freeway looked like a parking lot. I had so many knots in my stomach, and the inside of my nose was so dry, I had to breathe through my mouth. Even though I knew that Miss Rosetta would not know if I was there or not, I didn’t want to be in the same room with her until I could get a grip on myself.
“What does the doctor say?” Jesse Ray asked in a weak and tired voice, looking straight ahead. He was in the front passenger seat of the new Altima that he’d cosigned for Harvey to get last year.
I was huddled in a corner in the backseat, directly behind Jesse Ray. I knew that it was not the time and place, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about the fact that Harvey had defaulted on his loan after the first two payments. When the bank didn’t receive the third payment three weeks after its due date, they promptly called Jesse Ray. When Jesse Ray confronted Harvey about the past-due payment, Harvey offered up some sob story about losing his wallet and trying to borrow the money. He eventually did find somebody fool enough to lend him enough money to make the delinquent car payment, plus pay the late charges: Jesse Ray. Six months and six payments into the loan, Jesse Ray was still the one making the payments.
“Mama ain’t never going to be the same,” Harvey said in a shaky voice. For a brief moment, I thought he was going to burst into tears. And, from the way he looked, I guessed that he’d already shed quite a few tears. His eyes were red and swollen. But that was nothing new. His heavy drinking and the late hours that he and Flossie Ming Lee kept hanging out in the casinos in Reno were usually responsible for his haggard appearance. “The doctor done already told us that she’ll probably need round-the-clock attention from now on. She won’t be able to live on her own no more,” Harvey reported, his voice cracking.
I loved my mother-in-law, and I knew that I was going to jump in and do whatever I had to do to make the rest of her days comfortable. And, when Harvey announced that she would no longer be able to live on her own, my first thought was that he would jump at the chance to move himself and Flossie in with her so they could live rent free. They had attempted to move in with Miss Rosetta before, but she had vigorously opposed it. Harvey didn’t waste any time removing that idea from my mind.
“Me, I can’t see myself moving up in there with Mama to take care of her. Not with my bad back and high blood pressure. Flossie Ming’s mama is over there in San Francisco, driving everybody in Chinatown up and down the wall. She’s been flat on her back for six years. I hope I don’t live long enough to be that kind of a burden to nobody,” Harvey said, with a heavy sigh.
“Well, we’ve got to come up with some kind of a plan,” I offered, wringing my hands. “Baby, what about a live-in nurse?” I suggested, gently tapping Jesse Ray on the shoulder.
“I’ll look into that right away. But in the meantime, we all got to do what we have to do,” Jesse Ray said. He turned around and gave me a pleading look.
“Christine, you are the only one home all day, doing nothing. All the rest of us got jobs,” Harvey stated. I didn’t know where this conversation was going, and at the time I didn’t care. My main concern was my beloved mother-in-law. “I hope you don’t mind keeping an eye on Mama until we come up with a better plan. She’s crazy about you, and I know she’d appreciate you doing that for her. And, God’ll bless you for it, too. I tell my brother all the time what a good woman he married.” Harvey paused and glanced at me through the rearview mirror. There was a pleading look on his face, which would have been more than enough to back me into a corner of submission. But it wasn’t even necessary.
“I’ll do whatever I can to help out,” I stated. I didn’t know what else to say. The last thing I wanted to do was make Jesse Ray feel even worse by saying something stupid or something that sounded selfish and uncaring. But in the back of my mind, I had to ask myself, Girl, what are you getting yourself into now?