“I can’t.”
I stared at my phone like my mother could somehow feel me staring through it.
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
There was a pause on the line, one of those pauses that tells you the person on the other end is choosing their words carefully, which my mother almost never did.
Then she said, “I can’t stop charging you.”
I actually laughed. Not because it was funny. Because I had spent the last two months trying and failing to understand why my sixty six year old mother had suddenly, inexplicably, turned babysitting her own grandson into a cash only business, and now here she was confirming that yes, this was really happening, and no, she was not going to explain it.
“Mom, that makes no sense,” I said. “None. Do you hear yourself?”
“I know.”
“No, seriously. You used to get offended if we so much as mentioned hiring someone else.”
“I remember.”
“You used to answer the phone and before I could even ask, you’d say, bring me my grandson.”
“I remember saying that too,” she said quietly.
“And now it’s forty dollars. Cash. Every single time he walks through your front door.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
Then she said, so softly I almost missed it, “I need you to trust me a little longer, Nora.”
That did not help. That helped nothing at all.
“Trust you with what, Mom? You’re not giving me anything to trust. You’re just taking my money and telling me to trust you.”
She sighed, and I could picture exactly what she looked like doing it, standing in her kitchen with her free hand pressed to her forehead. “I can’t explain it yet. I just, I can’t. Not yet.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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