Say You'll Remember Me(21)

Introduce me. To my own mom.

I blew out a breath. “Okay.”

“We can do this later,” she said. “You can unpack, get situated—”

“No. I want to do it now.”

We didn’t move to get out.

“Are you going to tell me about the escape room?” she asked, eyeing the Rush Veterinary Hospital hoodie I was wearing.

“What’s to tell?” I mumbled.

“You got locked in a UFO with a hot veterinarian. You have nothing to say about this?”

I put my head in my hand. I had a lot to say about it.

“I liked him,” I said. “It was a really good date.”

I’d lived in Minnesota for four years and I hadn’t met one guy who even remotely touched Xavier and in the wee hours before I leave…

You know what? No. I wasn’t falling down this rabbit hole. I was allowing myself some grace to focus on what I actually needed to focus on, which was Mom and my new old life and mustard. I didn’t have time to dwell on a guy.

I was going to manifest.

Mom was going to remember me. I was going to walk into that living room, her face was going to light up, and she was going to say, “Samantha! I’m so happy you’re home!”

And then I was going to find all the jewelry. After that I’d forget Xavier existed and I’d laugh like a Disney villain every time it was negative thirty in Minnesota and it was seventy-two here. I didn’t want to be in the Midwest with the hot guy I was into. I didn’t belong in a state that required grit to make it through the winters. I wasn’t a grit kind of girl. I’d live in my sunny paradise where it never dipped below fifty and it didn’t rain because my hair would hate that anyway and I’d make sexy yellow condiment content and live happily ever after.

I got out of the car.

Jeneva watched me grab my cat from the back. Then I marched up the steps to the porch and carefully, gently, like I was going to startle a roost of pigeons, I opened the front door.

Mom was sitting in the living room on the green chair watching TV with Grandma. Mom looked over at me, her face flat.

Jeneva pushed past me. “Mom? Samantha is here to see you.”

Mom stared at me blankly. No recognition. No suspicion, no surprise, no reaction at all.

Jeneva said they’d had to put her on some medications and that they sedated her. But nothing could have prepared me for this.

She wasn’t there. Like a light had been turned off.

I swallowed and came in. “Hi, Mom. I’m home.”

Pooter mewed from her carrying case and Mom looked down at that, like she was trying to make sense of the noise.

She’d aged. I just saw her at Christmas and now she looked ten years older. Her hair was gray, her makeup wasn’t on.

Mom was always so put together. She liked fashion and getting her nails done and dressing up. She never went anywhere without her face.

She looked so tired now, like she was blurring along with her memory. Smearing and fading and wasting away.

“Mom?” I said, sitting gingerly on the ottoman in front of her. “It’s me, Samantha.”

Her eyes came back up to mine and I watched the wheels turning and hope fired up inside my heart. Maybe she was making the connection, she was recognizing me. Then she spoke.

“Who are you?”





11





XAVIER


SHE LEFT?” MIKE said, looking at me over his dumbbell.

“Yeah. Two weeks ago.” I was sitting on a weight bench across from him, Chris, and Jesse. We’d just rowed for half an hour and now Mike had us doing arms. Mike was a personal trainer and he trained us for free. The same way I’d take care of their pets for free and Jesse would give us financial advice for free and Chris would pick up the phone to answer medication questions any hour of the night.

These were my closest friends. They were the nearest thing I had to family.

And I’d purposely avoided seeing them for the last two weeks because I hadn’t been ready to talk to them about Samantha. I still wasn’t.

The spaceship had altered my DNA. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

I thought giving it some distance and time would make it better, but it hadn’t.

I’d been crabby since she left. Maggie and Tina kept asking how the date went and I kept brushing them off because I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about it with the guys either. What was there to even say? I had the best date of my life and then she took off forever? I didn’t want their opinions about it or their pity either, and they’d probably try to give me both.

“Have you talked to her?” Jesse asked.

“I texted her,” I said. “The day after our date. Asked her if she got in okay and if the cat’s been having normal bowel movements.”

Mike put his weight down with a clank. “You asked her if her cat took a shit…” he deadpanned.

“Travel can be stressful on medically fragile animals—”

“Yeah, dude, I get the whole veterinarian thing—” He shook his head at me. “Did you try talking to her? Like an actual conversation that isn’t about her kitten’s asshole?”

Chris snorted.

“She told me to forget her—”