Lisa Scottoline - Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog - The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman

“Huh?”

“Forget it.” I gave her a hug, and she felt little and soft in my arms, like an octogenarian Elmo.

The guy from the airlines shrugged in his maroon jacket. “I told her I had the wheelchair for her, but she walked right past me. I guess she didn’t hear.”

I took mother’s arm. “Ma, you wearing your hearing aid?”

“What?” she asked, but I saw that it was nestled like a plastic comma behind her ear.

“I didn’t hear,” she said.

The reason she’s here is that she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I told her-a visit from her. So she was guilted into coming, which I’m not above. We had my favorite birthday dinner of take-out hardshell crabs, and by the time the birthday cake was lit up with candles, I asked myself The Question.

Let me explain.

Every birthday I secretly ask myself this question: what lesson have I learned this year? This is my version of my the birthday wish, because my birthday wish never comes true. For example, for many years, my go-to birthday wish was not to get older.

See what I mean?

So instead, I try to figure out what I learned this year, because if I have to get older, at least I’ll get wiser. I make lots of mistakes every year, so I try to pick the biggest one and learn a lesson. My biggest lessons, of course, came from Thing One and Thing Two. And though someday I might make the mistake of Thing Three, I’m pretty sure that with my new system in place, I’ll stop before Thing Nine.

Usually the lessons I’ve learned are Oprahesque. For example, last birthday, I learned to Ask for What You Want. The birthday before that was Take More Risks. And before that was, Don’t Say You’re About to Ask a Dumb Question before You Ask a Dumb Question, Because They’ll Find Out Soon Enough.

But this year, my birthday lesson was simpler:

Margaritas are Fun.

That’s one you can take to the bank.

It might even be BREAKING NEWS…

I learned it at my birthday dinner, when daughter Francesca showed off her college education by making us the most superb margaritas ever, and three generations of Scottoline women got sloshed en famille. We played Frank Sinatra on the iPod while my mother told stories from her first job, in Woolworth’s toy department, when she was seventeen. She still remembered the toys she sold, and it turns out that Kewpie dolls and windup cars were big at Christmas, 1940.

And Francesca remembered that when she was six, she threw a stuffed animal at my mother, but was lucky enough to miss. And I watched them laugh in the candlelight, with Sinatra singing in the background, and I was thinking about how lucky I was to have them, and wondering if Margaritas Are Fun was my only lesson this year.

Because by the end of visit, I had learned a better lesson.

As Long As You Can Walk By Yourself, Do.

Francesca looked up from her magazine, open on the kitchen island. “Mom, it says here you’re supposed to change your razor every three uses. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“How often do you change your razor?”

I thought a minute. “Every three uses.”

She waited a minute.

“Okay, every month.”

Her eyes flared an incredulous blue. “That means you’re scraping a rusty blade along your skin.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So that’s gross.”

“It’s an armpit. It’s born gross. Why, how often do you change your razor?”

“I use it four times, then I throw it away.”

“Good. I raised you right.”

An hour later, I was driving Mother Mary to the airport to go back to Miami when she told me she was still angry about her colander that had broken, a month ago.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I drained the spaghetti and all of a sudden, the leg snapped off. You believe that? I loved that colander. You remember that colander?”

I watched rain dot the windshield, thinking a minute. “If it’s a colander I remember, it must be kind of old.”

“Nah.” Mother waved me off with an arthritic hand. “It was about fifty.”

“The colander was fifty years old?” I looked over, astounded. “I’m fifty years old!”

“Wrong. You’re fifty-three.”

I let it go. “So the colander was fifty, and you’re angry that it broke?”

“Yeah.”

“Fifty years is a long time, Ma.”

“So what? I paid good money for it, and I had to throw it out.”

I tried to process it. “But how much could you have paid, back then? A dollar?”

“How do I know? You think I remember? Fifty years is a long time.”

My point exactly, but I let that go, too. You know the question I really wanted to ask. “Ma, how often do you change your razor?”

“What razor?”

“You know, the razor you shave with in the shower.”

She blinked behind her bifocals. “I don’t shave.”

I didn’t understand. “How can you not shave, like your armpits or your legs?”

“I don’t have hair anymore.”

I tried to hold the car steady. Luckily we were almost at the airport. “What happened your hair?”

“It went away.”

“What? It disappeared?”

“Yeah. It’s gone.”

I felt appalled. I had no idea. Was I going to lose all my leg hair, too? Nobody told me, which is why I’m telling you. I needed more information, for both of us. “When did it go?”

She shrugged.

“Was it recently?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

We both fell quiet a minute, and the only sound was the thumpa thumpa of the windshield wipers. I worried that I’d made her self-conscious.

“Well, was it before the colander broke or after?” I asked, and we both laughed.

We reached the airport, where I parked and walked her to the gate, having successfully convinced the ticket agent that she gets confused in airports and needed to be escorted. We stopped by the gift shop, where she got two puzzle books and a bottle of water. They sold only the large bottles, which she struggled to hold in her gnarled fingers. We made our way to the gate and took our seats, her with her bottle and books on her lap, waiting for the plane and watching the babies go by. We thought every one was cute, but none cuter than Francesca when she was little. This is a conversation I never tire of, and the only person I can have it with is my mother, who was the first one at the child’s bassinet twenty-odd years ago.

I gave her a nudge. “Ma, you know, Francesca throws her razor away every four uses.”

Mother frowned. “Why?”

“The magazine says you’re supposed to, now. After three times.”

“Throw away a perfectly good razor?”

“Yes. It gets dull.”

“What magazine says that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do. A crazy magazine.”

I thought about that a minute. About being old enough that all your hair has fallen out and you can barely hold the water bottle and you need help just to find the plane because all the announcements are incomprehensible in both English and Spanish, and the airlines love to play musical gates. About the fact that she had lived through a Depression, a world war, and the death of each and every one of her eighteen brothers and sisters, which is not a misprint. She was the youngest of nineteen children, three of whom died of the flu during their childhood, right here in America. Leaving only her, the youngest.