My father’s birthday. I meet my mother at Ikea and we eat chocolate doughnuts while we walk around, picking the final details of the kitchen she would never have been permitted in his lifetime. We talk talk talk all the way around and through the morning, and into lunch, when we go back to the last place the three of us had eaten together.
His favourite eaterie was usually Frankie & Benny’s, something I saw with leaden disdain as yet further proof of the interplanetary distance between us, but that day he’d wanted moules marinière, another optimistic chase of his fleeing appetite. I stayed for lunch. We were together that day because of another hospital appointment, another meeting where another doctor had spoken to my father’s brick wall face, and my father had left the meeting feeling upbeat, prepared to insist on further chemo. More time, he said, cancer ticking away in his liver, his bowel, his kidney; I just want another ten, twenty years. Other people have done it.
I was shaking with rage by the time we got to our table. His stubbornness. His deafness. No, he didn’t want a party, he didn’t want his friends over, he didn’t want family visiting from far shores - he would beat this thing first, then he’d think about all that stuff. My vision was blossoming with all sorts of deep purples and reds. I ordered the lobster, the most expensive thing on the menu, and sat in a furious silence that made me feel young again. His appetite wasn’t up to the mussels after all, and the kitchen put them in a discarded lidless plastic box for him to take them home. In case things changed.
This time, my mother and I both order the lobster. I also have oysters. I’ve been craving them since halfway through my last pregnancy. Because it’s just us now, because she is a widow, because she is alone, I permit my mother a single solitary oyster from my outsized plate of iced shells. I finish the oysters, and we finish our lobsters, wiping the frites around the mayo on our plates, planning holidays she might take, the yoga she’s meaning to take up again.
That night, and the night after, I chase away the overwhelming horror of death by sitting in warm rooms with funny women, and we talk about books and our skin, travel plans and marriage, bullying and food, comedy and ambition. I think about making lobster bisque with the shells I took home in a lidless plastic box.