Free The Lost Father by Mona Simpson Page B

long lots of cars with strings of little plastic flags and the curved big freeway on-ramps.
    Finally, the white Mercedes screeched to a stop. She didn’t see me yet. She was all out in one jerk, standing with her hands angry on hips, surveying the world. She looked the same, straight up and down, with sunglasses. I took my time, my jacket looped from the peg hook on a finger behind me.
    F IRST SHE TOOK me on an errand. Something about the car. She left me sitting in an auto shop forty-five minutes while she was outside, standing by the open hood, pointing, talking to the submerged mechanic, riding him it looked like. This was just like my mother. I was used to it in a way. Even though I hadn’t seen her for two years. The couch where I was sitting was greasy and taped. There was nothing to read. One TV Guide with the cover partly ripped off. A girl calendar on the wall. There was time like this, just time.
    “Well say something,” she said later, driving the way she drove, full of gasps and skids and halts. “Ooh, watch out, I didn’t see that.”
    I didn’t say anything. I fingered the window well.
    “I had to do that,” she said.
    “Where are we going?” I said.
    “Well, to the doctor, what did you think?”
    It was a small square building, a kind of feminist women’s practice, a place I was surprised to see my mother, and the doctor looked gay but I guess she wasn’t, she had pictures of a man with kids. And when we went in it wasn’t cancer at all but precancerous cells, she didn’t need chemotherapy or even a hysterectomy, just her cervix scraped the way my friend Mai linn already had, when she was twenty-five.
    We were sitting in the doctor’s office.
    “I thought you said you had to have radiation,” I said to my mother.
    “I didn’t say that.” She shook her head. “Boy, you sure imagine things, brother.”
    She had to go into the hospital the next day. Sunday morning, she could go home. I already didn’t want to be there. I felt tricked. All I could do was count off hours.
    We had brilliant fights, with an arc of night. I kept wanting to go home. “Take a taxi,” she screamed, from the backhouse, where I heard things fall crashing around her, “damnit, damn you!”
    I was sitting out in the little garden, on my mother’s furniture. It seemed flimsy now, all her attempts. There was a ceramic rabbit sitting at the edge of the rose bed, a smaller one just next to it. A reclining concrete cat curled on the table with the umbrella. None of it was hers really. She bought these little ornaments, but she didn’t own anything. Not the land.
    I kept thinking of calling a taxi, but I didn’t want to go inside. My hands lay fallow and useless the way they always did here. Here with her, I was a bomb, always ticking and waiting. I told myself a taxi from where she lived in Beverly Hills to the airport would cost a hundred dollars or even more. We both used money that way, always as the excuse to be stuck together. We couldn’t admit any love.
    The next day she packed her suitcase with all hard steps and jabbing elbows. She got up to do this at five o’clock.
    “Come on, get up, I’ve got things to do.” She shook my shoulder.
    “I don’t, so let me sleep.”
    “Hunh-ah, come on, get going. I want to straighten up here before I leave.” There was metal in her voice.
    So I sat there and watched her and listened to her for four hours.
    Then oddly, at the end, in a strange voice, she said she would take me to the airport. “What are you talking about?” I said. “Well,” she said with a high laugh, “to tell the truth, I don’t really want you to stay here, tonight when I’m not here.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, I know you. You’ll take things. I never say anything, but I notice after you go, certain things are missing. I know you have my father’s ring and other little things. Choice things that are mine.”
    “You don’t trust me to stay in your house?”
    “No, I really don’t,”