Page 3 of If Not for My Baby
“Definitely.”
I don’t mind indulging her. I love hanging out with Mike and his mom. And my mom’s only trying to help. The woman was abandoned by the love of her life at sixteen with nothing to remember him by except a child with his exact likeness. Only to then be haunted by the heartbreak, develop a debilitating, incurable disease, and find herself limping from one inadequate suitor to the next, all while raising said child alone. That’s bound to make anyone determined to see their daughter walk merrily down the aisle.
And Mike’s a great candidate for aisle-walking. I’ve known him my whole life—his mom, Beth, has been like a surrogate mother to my own mom. They’re the only two single parents in our town. So Mike understood my plight from the jump. He watched me go through high school with a mom that was only sixteen years older than me, and significantly hotter. Even now, she’s leggy with a perfect bum, while I’m five three and as flat as a board on all sides. She’s got sleek cat-eyes like a runway model while I have huge doe peepers that made my middle school teachers call me Pixar.
And as far as dating prospects went at the time, Mike was a summer daisy among weeds. He was kind, helpful, and loved dogs and flea markets as much as I did. Senior-year me accepted that he and I were a foregone conclusion that I was the last to figure out. We dated for a year, until he began to bring up marriage, and I’d ended things. It was the most disappointed my mom had ever been in me.
“I heard back from the insurance company,” my mom says.
“Bad news?”
She makes a weighing face, but I can tell. It’s bad news.
I dig deeper into her tight shoulder. “Will they cover any of it?”
“Technically no, but—”
“So ridiculous. We have to get you a new provider. What is the point of clinical trials if they can’ttry iton anyone because it’s so goddamn expensive?”
I can hear myself getting hysterical. Willow looks up from her bone, concerned.
My mom frowns at me, too. Even when she’s frowning, she looks so pretty. And so tired. My poor mom. “Clementine, it’s all right.”
“It’s not, though. I’ll call them tomorrow.”
“I’m really starting to feel a bit better,” she says, scooping into the ice cream with effort.
“Let that thaw a bit more.”
She says she’s feeling better about once a week, and she’s been sick for over a decade. At first they’d misdiagnosed her as anemic. Then they’d thought arthritis, lupus, cancer—thatwas a horrible couple of days—until they’d ruled out enough to assume it was fibromyalgia.
That’s one of the worst parts of an invisible illness like this one. No way to confirm what it is, just what it’s not. Rational problem solvers like myself are kept up at night by the fact that not only is there no definite diagnosis, there’s also no cure. Which means the medicines to manage her symptoms—flares of chronic widespread pain being the worst of it but also terrible fatigue, insomnia, and stiff limbs—are constantly changing and seem to get more prohibitively expensive every year. My mom can’t work much anymore, which means I’m lucky to be employed by an old friend who lets me skip out early when she needs to be taken to appointments.
On the TV, Scully struggles to make sense of something that defies logic. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch my mom mouthing Mulder’s charming retort:Sometimes the only sane answer to an insane world is insanity.She reaches a hand up to mine, eyes still on the will-they-won’t-they couple, and I answer her silent request by giving her a reassuring squeeze. She digs back into her ice cream, and then says wistfully around a mouthful, “David Duchovny was such a cutie. I can’t believe he’s a sex addict.”
Two
After feeding and walking Willow,I come back down to the basement to find my mom fast asleep, empty carton of Phish Food on the floor,The X-Filesmarathon still playing. I tuck a patchwork quilt around her slender frame and turn off the TV. The basement, which was meant to be her pottery studio, has become her second bedroom. An unused pottery wheel still sits behind the couch next to some dust-laden drop cloths. A guy she went on two dates with bought her a kiln, which she keeps her shoes in.“Like Carrie Bradshaw,”she’d said.
Our house is strangely constructed—it’s rickety and angular. It has a basement and an attic—two things you rarely find in Texas homes. It belonged to my grandparents, and the creaking wood stairs and chipped pastel tiles will tell you as much. Because of the weird layout—four floors but very little space in any given room—it can be hard for my mom to make it up to her bedroom during flare-ups. I’ve offered to bring everything down here—Mike and his friends would helpmove her mattress and bed frame in a heartbeat—but she keeps saying she’s feeling better, and to just give it a week.
Only once the kitchen is cleaned, bills are paid, and trash is taken out do I realize it’s ten. Too late for me to make Ladybird Playhouse’s monthly open mic night. Depleted, I crawl into bed to watchWest Side Storyon my laptop. Nowthisis the kind of love story I can get on board with: tragic, honest, gut-wrenching.
And themusic.
On bad days I like to listen to the entire one-hour-and-eighteen-minute-long album in my car and bawl my eyes out. No album on earth beats the original Broadway cast recording.
In fact, I text that exact sentiment to my fellow musical junkie and best friend, Everly.
Everly Pace:Annie Get Your Gun is better.
Clementine:You’re out of your GD mind.
Everly Pace:There’s No Business Like Show Business is the most famous musical song!
Clementine:Not on any planet!
Clementine:You’re just drunk on country music Kool-Aid.
