The Last Time We Say Goodbye
Page 61

Clearly we’ve got to do the VIP tour. We’ve come all this way.
It is seventy dollars.
Per person.
That’s more than the hotel for the entire trip.
“Wow,” Mom breathes as we stare up in horror at the board with the different packages on it. “That is pricey.”
“Don’t worry, Mom,” I say quickly, whipping out my wallet. “I got it.”
“With your MIT fund? I don’t think so.” She produces a gold credit card I’ve never seen before and ignores my raised eyebrows. I’ve never known my mother to buy anything on credit.
“The VIP tour, please,” she says to the woman behind the counter, and slides the gold card across the marble. “We want to see it all.”
Graceland is what I expected it would be: a lot of sixties and seventies glitz, bright colors, shag carpet, gold-plated handles in the bathroom of the Priscilla—Elvis’s private jet. Mom and I stand in front of a fake backdrop of the famous front gates and have our picture taken. We wander from room to room, Mom oohing and aahing over Elvis’s jumpsuit collection, and chuckling over the one room with the zebra-striped walls and red velvet couches, and standing soberly in front of his grave, staring at his death date, which is also her birth date, where it’s written in stone.
She’s having a good time, I think, which was the point of this little adventure. I wanted to show her that it’s possible to have a good time.
We haven’t thought about Ty for the entire day.
“I needed this,” she says later. We’ve just finished dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Memphis, and Mom is slurping down a giant margarita. I’m obviously going to have to drive us back to the hotel. “I really needed this.”
“Me too,” I say.
“Can we just . . . not go home?” she says with a sigh. “We could stay here. Visit Elvis every day.”
I smile. I know she doesn’t mean it. But this is my cue to tell her about my so-crazy-it-might-actually-work plan.
“You remember what Gayle said, about selling the house?”
Mom stirs her drink. “Gayle always has her strong opinions, doesn’t she?”
“I think it’s a great idea.”
She stops. “You think we should move.”
“I think you should move,” I elaborate. “To Massachusetts. With me.”
“You want me to move to MIT?” she says with a laugh. She thinks I’m joking. “I don’t think I’d fit in your twin bed.”
“Not my dorm room. An apartment or a little house or something. Freshmen are required to live on campus, but they make an exception if you’re going to live with your parents.” I reach into my backpack and pull out a sheaf of papers, which I set down on the table in front of her. “There are all kinds of places. This one is like a ten-minute walk to campus, two-bedroom, washer-and-dryer hookups, hardwood floors. Nice, see? And it’s not unaffordable. Not when you factor in that I would have been paying around four hundred a month for student housing.”
She stares down at the paper. “You’ve been giving this some thought, I see. And what would I do in Massachusetts?”
I rifle through the pages until I land on one with a large red brick building framed by leafy green trees. “This is Mount Auburn Hospital. It’s listed as one of the best places in New England for medical professionals to work, in terms of both pay and environment. It’s attached to Harvard Medical School.” I sit back and let her look at the “About Us” page I printed. “It’s less than two miles from MIT, approximately a nine-minute drive. There are currently sixteen job openings for registered nurses, one in the surgical wing like you’re doing now, but that one’s a night shift.”
Mom hates night shifts.
“But”—I keep going before she can shoot me down—“you could always start nights and move to days once you’re established. Or . . .” I bite my lip, then just come out and say it: “There are two positions open in the maternity ward. One in labor and delivery, and one in the nursery.”
“I could work with the babies,” Mom says.
“You love babies.”
“I do love babies,” she agrees, covering her mouth with her hand in a way that suggests she’s considering it.
“So maybe Gayle is right, just this one time,” I conclude.
“No.” Mom shakes her head.
“No?”
“The babies would be worse, Lexie.”
“How would babies be worse? Everyone’s so happy around babies. It’s the happiest part of the hospital.”
“Babies die, too. Most of the time, yes, it would be wonderful to work in maternity. But every once in a while, more often than you might think, I’d have to watch some mother lose her baby. I don’t think I could live with that.” She picks up her drink, licks a piece of salt off the side of her glass. “Besides, those nurses in the nursery don’t need to use their nursing skills. They change diapers and feed babies bottles and give baths all day. I want to do more than that. I want to learn. I want to be an excellent nurse. Not a babysitter.”
“Okay, well, there are thirteen other RN positions open at Mount Auburn. I’m sure you could be an excellent nurse in one of those.”
She finishes off her margarita, then sets the glass down and looks at me.
I can tell by her face that she’s going to say no.