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The first time Cassie meets Vivian Whitaker she wants to grab her by the collar and shake her, didn’t you see? How did you miss it? Why did you let that happen to him? But when Cassie does come face-to-face with her, at the graduation party Santos throws for him, she is met with a woman of her exact height, although a little rounder at the hips and jaw where Cassie is jagged, with a bright smile just like Whitakers’. Vivian throws her arms around her and says, “Thank you for taking care of my boy.”
Cassie staggers back, her arms coming up to hug her reflexively. Vivian releases her after a moment, and looks her straight in the eye. “You got him set up with the housing office. For next year, and all that.”
It isn’t an accusation, but Cassie feels some flash of guilt anyways. She’s still not sure if his parents know about the months he spent adrift, and she’s not going to be the one revealing any secrets.
She stays silent and nods. She is out of her element here– the party is mostly other med students and interns, except Abbot and Whitaker’s family. She’s stuck in the odd student-peer-mentor role, and with Harrison running around with one of the Whitaker cousins, she’s a mother, here, too.
Vivian still hasn’t looked away from her. She’s wearing a nice pastel pink knee-length dress, the program from the graduation ceremony sticking out of her purse, her hair tied back in a simple ponytail. This is not the kind of mother that likes Cassie, or sees her as anything but a failure. This is the kind of mother who sneers at her in the school pickup line, who sternly refuses her offers to help on the field trip. But in the last year Cassie has become familiar with Dennis’s brand of kind, honest Christianity, and he must have learned it from somewhere. So she gives Vivian the benefit of the doubt.
“Dennis is so special, and we’re excited to welcome him to the team next month. It was my pleasure to help him,” she says, and Vivian smiles at her. “I already knew that. Tell me about yourself, Dr. McKay.”
“Cassie,” she says, her hands up, placating, “Please. I don’t know that there’s much to say. I’m from outside Pittsburgh– Sewickley. I’m a resident at PTMC. That’s my son Harrison, over there.”
I am a formerly homeless recovering addict who saw right through your son. He cried on my shoulder. He hid from you, when he was hurting the most.
Vivian turns towards Harrison, playing on the swingset of the public park they’re at. He sees her look over and waves. Cassie smiles and waves back. God, he’s a good kid, well-natured and ebullient. Cassie never was– always had that lick of anger in her.
“Bless this child, entrusted to our care,” Vivian says, almost murmuring. She sighs out, “Dennis was so sensitive when he was that age. We had a birth go wrong that year, and the calf was stillborn. He stayed after the vet left, tried to bring it back to life until the sun came up.”
This is the kind of folksy wisdom story Dennis will often tell, to patients or errant coworkers, stories about working on the farm and the particular kind of gruesome associated with it.
Cassie swallows hard, thinks about his rotation in the ED, codes running until the attending called it. “He’s still the same way.”
“It makes him a good doctor?”
“Yeah, it makes him the best kind of doctor. He fights for his patients.”
Vivian smiles at her, and pats her arm gently, “I need to go find Captain Abbot now. Good luck with your little one, Dr. McKay.”
Cassie follows her awkwardly back to the picnic table of food, where Vivian makes a beeline for Abbot where he’s standing sipping a beer and talking to one of the brothers, the one in the Army. Cassie grabs a paper plate and loads it up with loose grapes and crackers and lumpia, and calls Harrison over. “How many cupcakes have you had?” she asks him, and he holds up two fingers. “Eat these grapes and you can have another.”
“Okay, mom,” he says, a little exasperated. Every time she looks at him she sees the little, screaming raisin that came out of her body, red and angry and she wonders at how he became this detached human thing, separate from her. She gives in to the old ache of her heart and ruffles his hair, and he bats away her hand, groaning.
“You’ll only have to put up with her for another seven years,” Dennis creeps up to her side, and Harrison grins and shoves the plate back at Cassie, throwing himself into a hug. Since he joined the street team Dennis has become a frequent, and favorite, babysitter. “That’s not true, he’ll always have to put up with me,” Cassie defends herself. “Of course,” Dennis says over Harrison’s head, smiling at her.
“You met my mom?” Dennis asks, once Harrison has been extricated from the hug and given another cupcake. Cassie nods, “She cares a lot about you. But I already knew that.”
Dennis gives her a look, the one Cassie privately thinks of his proselytizing face, “She gave you a prayer, didn’t she?”
Cassie nods, and shrugs. He’d explained to her once what the church was like in Broken Bow. How it eclipsed the meaning of community in a small town. How much of a culture shock Pittsburgh was, where telling someone he’d pray for them was met with anger instead of gratitude.
She’s done the twelve step program, a couple times actually, and while sobriety had stuck, God was not the tether keeping her on the wagon. She had friends and mentors who swore by it, though. Him.
Cassie, for her part, had gone to four years of all-girls Catholic school, and had enough of that. And as for the teetotaling: the screaming raisin kept her sober, if not sane. “I’m sorry about that,” Dennis says, rote, like he’s used to apologizing for his mother.
“It’s okay, I know she means well. Besides, who else is praying for him,” she gestures at Harrison, running off again with the cupcake frosting smeared on his face.
“I just wanted to say thank you, again, for helping me this year. I couldn’t have done this without you,” Dennis holds her gaze, and she’s struck again by his honesty, his vulnerability.
“You would have made it. I did. But I’m glad I could make it a little easier,” she nudges him with her elbow, and he reaches around her to pull her into a hug. He’s taller than she is, but she still ruffles his hair, and wonders how mothers ever let their sons leave home. How she’ll let Harrison leave.
Abbot finds them, sitting on the picnic table and talking about what Dennis is going to do with his month in Broken Bow. “Your mother is terrifying,” he tells Dennis, “She keeps calling me captain and thanking me.”
Dennis laughs, “At least she hasn’t prayed for your immortal soul, yet.”
“She prayed for you, instead. You worry her, you know,” Abbot grins, “It’s a blessing to be worried about so fiercely, my mother always told us.”
Cassie knows this firsthand– the wrinkle lines around her mother’s mouth, the pinched look her father takes on whenever he thinks she’s not looking. She was worried into changing, into becoming a better mother, friend, caretaker. Cassie suspects the fierce love Vivian has for her sons might be cut from the same cloth.
Dennis sighs, “Bless this child, entrusted to our care. She says that every time we do something stupid.”
“Well, between five brothers I bet there was a lot of stupid going around,” Abbot says, a twinkle in his eye. Dennis gives him a smile, bright, and says, apropos of nothing, “I told Hudson and Will about last year. I think they told my mom.”
His obscure reference to his months unhoused paints Vivian in a new light. Here, celebrating her youngest son's graduation, she learned he has already grown up.
“I’ve been avoiding her,” Dennis says, and pushes himself to standing, hands on his knees. He looks weighed down.
***
Abbot and Cassie watch Dennis and his mother hug. Dennis looks– broke open, his face like a runny egg yolk. Vivian just looks stalwart, cast iron. Cassie wonders how her own mother’s face looked, when she was checked into rehab for the first time.
Dennis turns and waves at them, and Cassie waves back. He has a hand around Vivian’s shoulders, nearly a foot taller than her, and they walk together out of the park, towards his apartment. Abbot, next to her, stands up, “Looks like my ride is leaving.” He juts his chin in the direction of Robby’s ancient pickup, backing out of a parking space, “Do you and Harrison need a ride?”
Cassie nods, and while Abbot starts cleaning up from the party she goes over to the playground and calls her son over. He jumps off the play structure, her heart beating double-time, and runs over to her. She walks him over to Robby’s car nestled under her arm, the scruff of his neck warm where she rests her elbow.
She thinks it must have just been yesterday he only came up to her hip. Her son is growing, in fits and starts. Soon, he will eclipse her.