Chapter 8

I shifted in my seat, trying to return the blood flow to my legs, as the flight attendant intoned, “Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome you to Providence, where the local time is...”

In the back of my mind, I heard my high-school friend Jeff: “But they lie! You’re in Warwick!”

There was a coffee commercial that used to be shown a lot around Christmas when I was growing up, where the son comes home from college, sneaks in the house, and wakes his parents up by making them coffee.

I had often wondered if something like that was actually practical. I was about to find out. It was the weekend of my mother’s birthday, and I had secretly flown into town to surprise her.

I grabbed my suitcase, signed all the requisite paperwork for my rental car, and soon I was on I-95 heading toward South County. Fifteen minutes later, I pulled up in front of my mother’s apartment building and walked up to the front door. I rang the apartment next to hers, summoning my mother’s neighbor, who had agreed to help me with the one detail requiring outside help: how to get into the secured building without alerting the birthday girl.

“Hello?”

“Yes, hi, Mrs. Carlotta, this is John Mazur. Can you let me in?”

A few moments later, the front door opened, and out popped a near-stereotypical Italian grandmother. She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek. “Welcome! Oh, what a good son you are. This will be such a surprise to her. Come in, come in!”

I showed her how to take a video using my phone and knocked on the door. My mom opened it, saw me, and visibly stumbled backward. “Oh my God,” she whispered.

She paused again, putting a hand to her forehead. “Oh my God,” she said again, a little louder.

Then she pressed her hand to her mouth and wailed, “Oh, my Gooood” as the tears started flowing.

Mission accomplished.

Once she settled down, I sat at her dining-room table as she fixed a cup of tea for both of us. I took stock, not having seen her for several months. For a Stage IV cancer patient, she looked pretty good. Actually, just for a 70-year-old woman, she looked pretty good.

We talked about her current health status. She wasn’t getting better, but she wasn’t getting worse, which was pretty much the best that could be hoped for at that point. The only real drawback was that the radiation treatment had destroyed her sense of taste and smell, and they weren’t sure if it would come back.

“So...” my mother asked. “What’s new with you? Any races coming up?”

“Well ... I just did one last month. I picked up a workout buddy, and that was her first race ever. Even I beat her, but she did really well. I was proud of her.”

“That’s the one I saw in the picture with you on Facebook, right?”

“Yep.”

“So, what’s the story there?”

In other words, was a relationship developing. “No story. Just friends. I mean, I’m agreeable to more, but she doesn’t seem to want to go there.”

“Oh,” my mother replied. And it wasn’t an “oh” of finality. I had been hearing it for my entire life and I knew better. “Cause I gotta tell you, kiddo, I didn’t see ‘just friends’ in her body language in that picture. I mean, I could be wrong, but if you’re thinking about more, maybe you ought to see what’s there?”

Mentally, I sighed. I had no interest in the direction this conversation was taking. I hadn’t even been in her apartment for fifteen minutes and she was already trying to fix things in my life that I didn’t deem to be broken. Not only that, but ironically enough, for a woman determined to see her son get married and live happily ever after, she had dedicated a lot of time and energy to trash-talking my previous girlfriends.

Outwardly, I shrugged and noncommittally said, “We’ll see. Oh, hey, did you get those flowers for your birthday?” The change of subject, thankfully, helped me escape further discussion of my personal life.

I slept soundly in my mother’s guest bedroom that night, and the following morning dawned sunny, but a bit chilly. My mother was still asleep – the fatigue was a side effect of her treatment – so I quietly slipped out and headed over to see my father.

My parents separated a few years ago, although they are still legally married and really, they still get along pretty well. It’s not unlike part of a stand-up routine I heard many years ago: “My Sunday school teacher told me God likes kids like me. Now, I had heard that God loves me, but never that God likes me ... I mean, there are plenty of people I love who I don’t necessarily like.” And then in response to the crowd’s laughter, he said, “What? You know who popped into your head! You’ll cry at their funeral, but you don’t wanna go on vacation with them!” My parents will always love each other, but I had long ago concluded that they like each other much better with a little distance between them.

I met Dad at a small family-run diner near his condo for breakfast. My father has always been one of those people who knows all the things everyone else needs to do in order to live their best life, and if you doubt that, just ask him. For instance, over the traditional bacon-and-eggs-and-coffee diner breakfast, he shared his thought that my optimal career move might be to agree to move to Phoenix, make the company pay for the move, and ask for a raise to offset them not having to pay my travel expenses. First, though, I should stop renting and buy a house in North Carolina that I could build some equity with.