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on the way.

    “Knock, knock.” I hit lightly on the open door. Mom was sitting at her table, reading the paper. She looked up and smiled.
    “Liam.” Her face lit up and I saw the recognition in her eyes. I sighed. She remembered me. I walked over and kissed her forehead and handed her the flowers.
    “For you.” I sat them down on the bed.
    “Oh, honey. It’s been so long since anyone brought me flowers.” She beamed at me. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was only last week, or that every week she said the same thing to me.
    “How have you been?” I asked, sitting down opposite her.
    “Good. Same old same old around here. I’m not sure where your father is…?” She craned her neck to see out the door, shaking her head, her eyes flashing with annoyance. My heart plummeted. Forgetting that Dad had died over twenty years ago was something Mom did often. Having to remind her he was gone was not fun.
    “Mom,” I began gently, “Dad died back in 1992, remember? Nic and I were only little.” Her face clouded over as the memory of Dad dying came back. I couldn’t imagine how painful it would be having to be reminded of that every single day .
    “What happened?” she asked me tearfully. I explained it to her as I did every week: He’d had cancer of the liver. He’d fought hard for a year, then it had spread so much that treatment wasn’t an option. The last few months we all spent together, creating memories.
    Memories that this disease would end up robbing from my mother.

    I stayed with Mom until after lunch before I did some shopping and then headed back home. With an appointment at five, I had enough time to kick back and relax for a few minutes and then be on my way.
    I threw a frozen dinner in the microwave and put it on high for five minutes. While I was waiting, I grabbed a can of soda and took it over to the sofa. Setting it down on the coffee table, I arrived back in the kitchen just as the microwave finished.
    Yum. Frozen pot roast.
    I stabbed at it with my fork, washing down the flavorless meat with mouthfuls of soda. It wasn’t great, but it still beat my own cooking. I forced the last mouthful down, and threw the container in the trash. Maybe I needed to hire a personal chef.
    I freshened up—by which I mean I washed my face and changed my shirt, then headed out. I drove toward the hotel where my next client was waiting still thinking about Mom. I was so nervous the treatment wasn’t working. Too many days she seemed to be going backward. That had to be a bad sign. The worst thing about it was deep down, if I were completely honest with myself, a small part of me looked forward to the time when I could start the next phase of my life. Quit escorting. Do something else. God I felt so guilty even thinking about it, and maybe that was why I was so invested in doing everything I could to help Mom now. After all she’s done for me, it mortified me that even think about the future, when she was no longer around. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it was my choice to do what I do—nobody was holding a gun to my head. Plenty of other people have problems and deal with them.
    I was definitely not as together as the front I put on.

Chapter Five
    Have you ever had that thought where you find yourself in a moment and wonder how the hell you got there?
    Take right then for example: there I was, my foot resting on the edge of the bath in the penthouse of one of the most expensive hotels in New York with a fucking naked Oscar-winning actress bent over in front of me, taking my cock up her ass. And this was one hell of a bathroom to fuck anyone in; marble and brass everywhere, spotlessly clean (at least it was five minutes ago) and a deep Japanese-style plunge bath I hoped to be soaking in later. That was the one thing I missed in my apartment—a bath.
    For sixty, Melinda Diveno certainly still had a healthy sexual appetite. She was “happily” married to her husband of over twenty years, but what I