I smiled it off. I wasn’t disturbed by it at all.

“That’s not too much to ask, that’s why I’m calling you bright and early this morning,” I told her.

“You call ten o’clock in the morning ‘bright and early’?”

I ignored it. “So what’s going on? What’s the latest news?” I asked her.

“Your sister has already started asking me for money. I mean, does she have any decency and self-respect left at all? Who raised this girl? It couldn’t have been me.”

It was a self-indictment.

I answered, “Yeah, I talked to her myself.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said she needed help to make it through the month. So, how much did she ask you for?” I wanted to compare notes.

“Enough.”

I nodded. “We’ll all work it out.”

“Not with my money we won’t. So how much did she ask you for?”

“I don’t believe she wants me to reveal that.”

“What do you think, I’m gonna run right back and tell her?”

Yup, I acknowledged to myself with a chuckle. I said, “I refuse to answer that question.”

I was nearing the airport terminal in my taxi.

“We can talk about this later, Mom. I have a plane to catch back to Atlanta now.”

“Well, where are you?”

I didn’t even want to say it. Chicago was too close to home for me not to stop by and visit, or at least from my mother’s standpoint.

“It doesn’t even matter at this point. I’m pulling up to the airport now.”

“See, now that’s the kind of disrespectful bullshit that both of you put me through after all I’ve done for the both of you. I ask you where you are, and you can’t even give me a simple behind answer.”

The cabdriver looked back to view my response from the earful my mother was giving me and he smiled.

I looked at him and shook my head.

I told my mother, “Chicago,” just to prove what I already knew.

“Chicago? You mean to tell me you couldn’t catch a train ride over here to Indiana to see your mother?”

I was reaching into my wallet to pay my driver his fare.

“This is not a pleasure trip,” I told her.

That only made it worse. “I don’t give a damn if you were in Chicago to see the president, you still could have scheduled time to see your mother. What do you have to return home to anyway? You don’t have a day job. You don’t have a wife and kids. So what stops you from coming over here to spend time with me?”

She had a point—from her perspective, but from mine, I figured, For what? What in the world would we do after the first five minutes of my visit?

Every time I visited home, things just seemed to stand still, and I didn’t particularly like that. Then I would have a household of old neighborhood girlfriends jockeying to see who could tie me down, and they were no longer cute.