I say it gravely, so Sweet Caroline will understand how serious the situation is.
“What does that have to do with our dinner?” Sweet Caroline says.
“We’re not getting any dinner. We have an absentee mother. I’m trying to explain the situation to you.”
“She gave you a twenty, didn’t she?” Sweet Caroline says.
She knows how Mom works. Instead of taking care of us, she gives us the means to take care of ourselves. It’s like the United Nations food program.
“We can go to Whole Foods,” Sweet Caroline says.
“With twenty dollars? So much for dessert. Besides, if we go to Whole Foods, we’ll run into people from the neighborhood, which means we’ll run into people from school, which means we’ll have to do a lot of lying about Mom. So let’s just make something here.”
“Fine,” Sweet Caroline says. She snatches the twenty out of my hands. “I’ll take it as payment. You’re good for this week. But Monday is coming up fast.”
“Mom is in love, and you’re worried about blackmailing me.”
“Mom’s always in love,” she says.
Sweet Caroline has a point.
Mom falls in love with things all the time. She fell in love with hot yoga, then elastic band yoga, then, briefly, nude yoga. Nude yoga was rough on me. I couldn’t use the bathroom in our house for three months. Mom would be in there nude and sweaty, the hot water running on full, steam pouring out the crack at the bottom of the door. By the time that trend passed, the floorboards outside the bathroom door were warped.
Mom fell in love with poetry for five minutes when she took a class at UCLA. The house was filled with notebooks, scraps of paper, even parchment when she thought writing on parchment with a feather would make her more creative.
She fell in love with a particular juice at a local health food store. But it was too expensive, so she started juicing at home. For six months, I was woken up at 4:30 every morning by the growl of a juicing machine engine revving in our kitchen. We all had to drink it, to the point where our toilet bowl turned green from all the chlorophyll.
Mom falls in love with many things, all of them briefly but intensely.
Maybe that’s what love is. You lose yourself. You go insane. But it’s temporary insanity.
So why does this time feel different to me?
“Did Mom tell you she’s in love?” Sweet Caroline says.
“No. But I can tell.”
“Who’s the guy?”
“He’s weird.”
“The last one was weird. They’re all weird.”
The last one was a middle-aged, out-of-work actor who served juice samples at Erewhon, the natural food market near The Grove. I blame him for bringing wheat grass into our lives.
“This one is an Indian guru,” I say.
“That’s a racist thing to say.”
Sweet Caroline’s class did a unit on racism last month, and now she sees it everywhere she looks.
“I’m not racist,” I say.
“If you hate Indians, you’re racist.”
“I don’t hate Indians. I hate gurus.”
“Then you’re prejudiced.”
I think about that for a second. Do I hate the guru because he’s a guru? Because he hasn’t cut his hair in ten years? Or do I hate him because Mom likes him?
“He came all the way from India to visit Mom,” I say.
“That is weird,” Sweet Caroline says, thinking it over.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’ve got a bad feeling.”
“You worry too much,” Sweet Caroline says.
“You don’t worry enough.”
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Mom will be a freak for a couple weeks, then she’ll go back to being our mom.”
The doorbell rings.
I look through the peephole. It’s a man with a giant gift basket. I open the door and take it from him.
I look at the card.
GET WELL SOON,
FROM YOUR FRIENDS
AT THE BRENTWOOD JEWISH ACADEMY
I bring it into the kitchen.
“What’s that?” Sweet Caroline says.
“Our dinner is here,” I say.
I put the basket down and pull off the plastic wrap. The basket is overflowing with fruit and chocolate. I take the card and rip it into little pieces so it’s unreadable. Then I start to separate out the chocolate.
“Is this because of Mom’s accident?” Sweet Caroline says.
“Yes. And it won’t be the last time we get one. We need a plan.”
“You need a plan. I don’t need anything.”
“You’re not getting twenty dollars a week to watch me do all the work.”
“Okay, we can pretend I have a rich boyfriend.”
I think of the love letter I found in Sweet Caroline’s room. Levi. I want to ask her who he is, but I don’t.
“You’re too young to have a boyfriend,” I say.
“I am not,” she says. “Anyway, Mom is different about dating. She’s not like those other mothers.”
“Which mothers?”
“The ones who care about things like that.”
“I care,” I say, because the idea of my kid sister dating at twelve seems wrong. “I don’t think you should be dating.”
“You’re not my parent,” she says.
“I know that.”
“So stop trying.”
“My pleasure,” I say.
She says, “If we say I have a boyfriend, it explains the gift baskets coming in.”
I think about that for a second.
“Admit it. It’s a good idea,” she says.
“It’s okay.”
It’s actually a brilliant idea, but I won’t give her the satisfaction of telling her.
Sweet Caroline picks through the basket, sniffing at a few things. She settles on a mini-bar of Toblerone. She takes it into her bedroom, even though we’re not allowed to have food in our rooms.
I look through the basket, coming up with an expensive chocolate-and-caramel thing. I bite into it, and it’s so good I have to sit down. I’ve spent my childhood eating Mom’s equivalent of candy—chunky globs of carob sweetened with fruit juice. Compared to that, a real piece of candy is like heaven.
I think about Mom eating dinner at A Votre Sante right now.
Maybe Sweet Caroline is right, and I’m worried about Mom and the guru for nothing.
But something in my gut tells me that this is different, and I should be worried. Even more worried than I already am.
I decide I’ll talk to Mom about it when she gets back from dinner. More than just talk. I’ll sit her down and ask her point-blank what’s going on.
I go to my room and wait for her. I study for a while so I don’t fall behind from missing school.
Eight o’clock becomes nine, nine becomes ten.
Mom doesn’t get back.
I finally get into bed after eleven.
I can’t sleep. I toss and turn, thinking about Mom at dinner for all these hours. She doesn’t eat enough to spend four hours at a restaurant. So what is she doing for so long?
I think about God. In the Old Testament if you were having a crisis, you could pray to him and he might show himself.
Other times he would pop up completely unexpectedly, appearing in front of people to tell them what to do. Sometimes he told them they were in trouble, struck them down, or messed with their life in some way. That’s not a God you want to have around on a regular basis, but at least you knew where you stood with him.
Now he never shows up. He doesn’t appear, he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t punish or reward.
He does nothing. We’re supposed to believe in him, have faith that he exists when there’s no evidence at all.
I drift off to sleep wishing God would just show up and tell me what to do.