Page 99 of Sinner (Priest 2)
And then it’s time to go back to Mom.
They gave her a whiteboard and a marker while I was at lunch; she’s allowed to take the mask off for very brief intervals, but it seems whenever she does that her oxygen levels careen dangerously down, so they’re restricting mask-off time to the occasional swab of water for her drying mouth. She’s written the words mountain dew on the board no less than five times already; each and every time the nurse explains that the bowel obstruction still hasn’t resolved, that she can only have fluids via IV, that if her mouth is dry they can swab it again with water.
So thirsty, she writes. Please.
They give her a mouth swab, cluck and chuckle at her when she asks for a mouth swab of Mountain Dew instead of water. I don’t think she’s joking, but when I mention it to the nurse, the nurse scolds me.
“It’ll be bad for her. Don’t you want her to get well?”
That shuts me up.
After the hustling of changing sheets and brushing her teeth is over, Mom and I are alone again. When I sit down, she narrows her eyes at me.
Crying? she writes on the board.
Ah fuck. My eyes are still red from crying over Zenny in the cafeteria. “I’m okay, promise.”
A frown. B/c of me?
I rub my hands over my face and give a weak laugh. I’ve been crying so much lately that it all gets kind of mixed together. “Well, yes because you’re in here,” I say, and then I’m not planning on saying anything more, honestly I’m not, but the thing about heartbreak is it becomes the only thing you want to think about and talk about. In a twisted way, the only thing you want to feel. So I blurt, “Actually…well, there was a girl.”
This piques her interest immediately. Girl???? She underlines the word several times in case I don’t appreciate her eagerness.
“Yeah. But I messed it up, Mom. I’m pretty sure she hates my guts now.”
…
She actually writes an ellipsis on the board, gesturing for me to elaborate.
“Are you sure you want to hear this? It’s not a very mom-appropriate story and also I think I might be the bad guy in it.”
She writes, tell me. it’s a tiny house rerun anyway.
And so weirdly, embarrassingly, I do. I tell her how Zenny and I met at the gala, and while she looks surprised that the girl is Zenny, she also looks thoughtful, as if she’s already imagining the two of us together in her head. I try to dance around the fact that we had sex, but she rolls her eyes whenever I get cagey about it.
How do you think you got here? she writes at one point.
“Ew, Mom, ew.”
I tell her how after only one night with Zenny, I knew I was fucked with wanting her, and how the want became love, and at the same time, I found myself being quietly rearranged into a man I barely knew. A man who didn’t care about money. A man who worked in a shelter for the first time and began to see the real, endless need in the world around him. A man who cared about injustice.
A man who was willing to look God in the face, if God would only look back.
I tell her about how I ruined it all last night, and when I get to that part, my words sort of shudder out into silence, like a stalled car, and Mom reaches over to take my hand.
“And the hell of it is,” I mumble, “we started this by me caring for her the way I care for people—with control. And that’s exactly the thing that drove her away in the end.”
Love is hard, Mom writes.
“Yeah.”
Do you love her enough to give up control? To let her go?
“Of course.”
Then maybe there’s a way.
But what that way might be is never revealed because a nurse comes in with a bright smile and announces it’s time for another X-ray and I am summarily shooed from the room.
