M is for Mansion

Very bored and not-so-secretly riddled with anxiety about the future and all its ambiguous promise we play the girlhood game of MASH on the long trip home from the beach.
She chooses first for me four boys-- past and present lives mixed together, ignoring geography, forgotten numbers, lost time & opportunities, lining them up on paper in a way they never lined themselves up on my front porch. How many kids? 12, 7, 4, or 1? Where do you want to live? We record our options with real concentration; she means it when offers up Spain, New Jersey, Montana, Orlando as possible places to raise my rough & tumble crew. Will you drive a station wagon, a dumptruck or pick your husband up from his job as a pet groomer on the back of a Vespa, a relic from your Italian honeymoon (beating out an African safari) all those years ago? Not wanting to be outdone, I fill in her page with fantastical options-- some horrifying and others worth pinning a bit of hope on. After the final counting and crossing off, we settle the score and unlock mystery doors for each other. She is married to a playwright -- the illustrious Mr. Y (the best option on the page) and resides in a mansion in Yuma Arizona with a white PT Cruiser Convertible and a bakery of her very own, the walls painted blue and purple, the front case filled with scones. At night, when she calls, one of my 12 children will pick up the phone hanging on the kitchen wall in our shack in New Jersey. Is your mother there? she will ask Harry, my eldest son. No, he will say. She is probably standing in front of Waffle House now that her shift is over, waiting for dad to finish his speech on the Senate floor, so that he can whisk her off in the old truck to a second honeymoon in Las Vegas.