I’ve learned to order a side for myself, because Mom will only eat a quarter of her main. I nibbled on tortilla chips and guacamole while she attempted her burrito. She couldn’t bite through the thick fold of tortilla, so I tore the whole thing open. She dabbed her finger in the paste of beans.
A young man sat next to us with a collapsible baby buggy. I would have called him a boy were it not for the buggy, the infant straddling his bicep. He ate a taco with one hand and jiggled the baby with the other. Black hair coated the baby’s head. That’s all I could see from my table.
The man sucked at his Coke through a straw. I could tell he was staring at me from the corner of his eye, to assess why I was looking at him, maybe. Yet I didn’t want to look away. And I didn’t want to say something grandmotherly, like, How old is he?
So I turned my tortilla chip in the guacamole until it was green and heavy and lifted it to my mouth.
He had a pack of cigarettes on the table, and I wanted one. The corners of his mouth were smeared with white sauce and I thought about wiping the sauce with my thumb—but that felt grandmotherly too. Then I thought about what I was wearing—my button-down denim skirt and an orange camisole, which I wore under shirts in the winter and as a shirt in the summer. I felt self-conscious. How would I look to him?
It’s not that I wanted sex. He could have been my son—even my grandson. But I wanted him to look at me as a possibility, I guess.
Beside me, Mom pinched the rice with her fingers and spilled it down her chin when she chewed.
I smiled at the man.
He smiled back.
How old is he? I asked.
Six months.
He wore jeans and a white shirt. A tattoo of Jesus filled his right bicep, which I thought was a little on the nose.
I couldn’t bum a cigarette, could I?
He lowered his taco and tossed the pack to me without disturbing the baby, whose cheek pressed against the tattoo.
Are you having one? I asked.
Nah, he said, nodding to the No Smoking sign in the window.
I’d already lit the cigarette and observed it now with some dismay as it burned at the end of my arm. I rubbed Mom’s wrist, indicated I’d be back, and stepped outside onto the sidewalk. The sun beat onto my shoulders. Mom frowned at me through the glass. The man whispered to his baby. I smoked. I remembered how desperate she was for Roy’s attention that summer.
Last year, Joan and I visited Mom for the first Thanksgiving of the millennium. We tried to make it festive, though Luke couldn’t join us. Joan bought a bag of tissue-paper turkeys, the ones you find on bakery counters at Thrifty’s. We planned to stay until Monday, when Joan would return to Vancouver to see her in-laws.
The first morning, I scooped coffee from a tin from the cupboard and two pearled maggots spilled out—clamping and unclamping till they burrowed back in the mound.
I gathered my senses. I tossed the grounds outside and resumed making breakfast. I had planned to surprise Mom and Joan with banana pancakes. When I located the jar where Mom kept her flour, I noticed tracks: a larva-sized tunnel down the side of the glass. I opened the jar and parted the flour with a spoon. I lost count after twenty.
They had infiltrated the oats too. A strange crumb coated the pralines—moth eggs. Six or seven larvae had hatched in the peanut butter. How long had Mom been eating that food? Either without spotting the larvae or too embarrassed to ask for help.
We went out for breakfast that morning. When we returned, Joan and I emptied the cupboards and bleached the shelves. We bought new groceries for Mom and made room for them in the fridge.
For Thanksgiving dinner, I made turkey breasts stuffed with sausage and chestnuts. I didn’t have an appetite—I imagined larvae carving trails in my potatoes. Joan had arranged the crêpe-paper turkeys in a row across the tablecloth. They seemed to watch us, silently tabulating.
I must have been looking at them, because Joan asked if they were bothering me.
No, I said. I guess, do we need so many of them? I feel outnumbered.
She gave me one of those looks like, Are you losing it too?
——
The same evening, Mom’s facial recognition started to go. At least, that was the first time we couldn’t dismiss it. She sat at the kitchen table, folding and unfolding her napkin while we cleared dishes. I was about to lift the gravy boat when she tugged my sleeve.
Honey, she said. When are you going to drive that girl home?
What girl, Mom?
It took a moment before I realized she meant Joan, scraping kale salad into a container.
She can’t take the school bus. It’s nighttime.
That’s Joan, Mom. She’s sleeping here tonight.
Like hell she is.
I asked her GP and the nurse about travel. They thought she could manage if I took precautions. First, they recommended we drive—the Miata would be less stressful for Mom than airports or train stations. I carry a bag of essentials at all times, which includes: medication, health and allergy information, a clean change of clothes, water, snacks and activities. I gave Joan and Luke copies of our itinerary with phone numbers. In the glove compartment, I keep a file with doctors’ names and numbers, a list of medications and dosages, addresses for local police and hospitals, emergency contacts, insurance information. In the back seat: her favourite jigsaw puzzle, a Discman, Anita O’Day and Patsy Cline CDs, beads, fishing line. She loves stringing beads.
We took a week—driving no more than five or six hours each day. We stopped often for peaches, cherries, ice cream. Every afternoon, we found a new motel, each with a green swimming pool and polyester bedspreads. At times, we drove with the top down, singing Patsy Cline. Mom grinned from the sun hat that tied under her chin as if we were on some great escape. At other times, she grew anxious. She wedged her hands under her bum and sat very still. Or she gripped her head to stop the wind from buffeting her ears. Then I would do up the top. I’d put a quiet CD on the Discman for her, or we would stop for a stretch. If she asked where we were, I said we were driving to California. Every time, she nodded as if that made all the sense.
It occurred to me as we drove that both Victoria and San Diego exist on a border, a southernmost tip: one nudging the forty-ninth parallel, the other a twenty-minute cab ride to Tijuana. They are mirror towns—each side resembles the other, but not quite; the images are flipped.