Mom: Can you believe it?? YELLED.
Mom: No one here will take precautions. We are all going to get the plague.
Mom: Are you sleeping?
Mom: Call me when you’re up!
Mom: If you want to.
Mom: Love you!-Mom
I putter to the kitchen to make tea. I call her back while I’m waiting for it to steep.
“Hellooooo!” she sings on the first ring. She always answers the phone like she just drank six Red Bulls.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Have you heard the news?”
“I just got up.”
“At noon?”
She gets up every morning at six to work out on her twenty-year-old elliptical and is on to her work emails by seven, including on the weekends. She found the lackadaisical schedule of a creative professional horrifying even before Covid. Now that I have nothing pressing to do, she thinks I’m basically in a coma.
“It’s barely nine a.m. here,” I say. “Relax.”
“You’re sleeping your life away!”
“I have nothing to get up for!”
“Go for a walk! Maybe you’ll meet a husband.”
She’s still harassing me to find love. Like she thinks I purposely avoid it. Like she didn’t do exactly that for nearly two decades.
“Don’t make me hang up on you,” I say.
“Anyway, have you heard the news?” she asks.
“You just asked me that.”
“Seth Rubenstein was left at the altar,” she stage-whispers. “I heard from Jan Kemp at the store that—”
“Seth was not left at the altar,” I interrupt, rubbing my eyes. “His fiancée broke up with him.”
“Jan says he’s heartbroken!”
“How would Jan know?”
“She’s best friends with Bonny O’Dell,” my mother says triumphantly.
Bonny O’Dell is Seth’s parents’ next-door neighbor.
I know that I should sidestep this conversation, but I have not had caffeine and my wits are not yet fully about me.
“I heard it was amicable,” I say.
“Heard from who?” she asks suspiciously.
“Uh … Seth.”
There is a long silence.
“Seth Rubenstein?” she asks.
“Um, yes, Mother. The Seth that we’re talking about.”
“Why were you talking to Seth Rubenstein?”
“We’re friendly. He emailed me about something else, to ask a favor, and it came up.”
“Baloney.”
I can’t help it. I burst out laughing.
“What are you talking about, baloney?”
“A man doesn’t just email asking for some favor the day he’s left at the altar.”
