“You never know what you’re going to do, until you’re confronted with the situation.”

How many times has Del heard this? Why do so many people say it? In Del’s case, and in that of some others, it just isn’t true.

She sputters. She hears her own wheeze and coughs. She decides for the thousandth time to focus when she smokes weed, to do nothing other than smoke it, and try to reduce the bad effects and get the good ones.

She returns to her contemplation of things said by most and not meant by her. Like how everyone keeps thanking military personnel, for their service. Del has known many young folk, from her own cohort and the succeeding generations, who have enlisted because they couldn’t find other employment, or were at loose ends about what was next in their life, or they just liked the benefits. As far as she can tell, the disinterested soldier who wants to serve is as rare as the doctor who lives to heal or the scientist who burns for the truth. Del was born in 1950; the American military hasn’t been impressive in her lifetime.

Or what about teachers? Del knows everyone is supposed to act like school instructors are selfless and overworked. In her experience, those conditions are not true. She thinks that teachers may have impressive before her time, back when the only other options for working women were nursing, secretarial, or retail work. That was when smart women taught classes. She raised two kids and put them through excellent public schools, and with one exception (the high school Latin teacher), she kept encountering instructors of middling intelligence, poor grammar, and hackneyed approaches.

As far as never knowing what you’re going to do, Del thinks she does, and she thinks people who are clueless about their own potential are just that: clueless. Deficient in imagination. For that matter, she thinks bigotry and racism are the result of defective imaginations. Sure people have to generalize in order to maintain their own safety among strangers and strange conditions, she says, but that doesn’t mean imagination gets disabled when there’s no threat. But that’s another subject.

The fact is, Del knows herself well. She can predict what she’ll do in any situation she can imagine, even though some of the predictions are not flattering to her. She is on the brave end of the coward/hero spectrum, but she has seen herself retreat from potentially embarrassing or inconvenient interventions…there have been occasions when she acted deaf and blind to ambiguous signals, when she didn’t step up until it became obvious to her that she had to because no one else would. After a hesitation help, she’d chastise herself for not reacting more quickly. She’d wish she had been more dashing. But she understood her own characteristics, and (at least in her opinion), she doesn’t exaggerate or mistake herself.

Three times in her life she has made a firm, trauma-induced decision. She has reported the decisions to sundry members of her family and cohort, now and then. She has been universally disbelieved (“Oh you say that now, but you’ll sing a different tune if and when…”). But she meant what she said. She still does.

The first decision was made when she was five and a half. The precipitating event was a tonsillectomy. The injury to Del was the adult decision to keep her in ignorance of the procedure she was about to undergo. Her parents surrendered her to hospital employees and didn’t come back for her until the next morning. Del the child had to assess and evaluate the pre-op injections and affronts to modesty, the ether, and the post-op nausea and sleepless night in the crib-sided bed. To make an interminable story short, she took control of herself before she left that hospital. She decided then and there that grownups don’t necessarily know what’s best. She determined that she would be in charge of herself from then on. And she proceeded to develop the most willful personality she has ever encountered. Yes Del is bright. Sure she has an excellent memory. But her chief characteristic is her absolute inability to surrender or compromise her own judgment.

The second big choice was made when she was just a few months short of her twenty-first birthday. It was an October evening and she was visiting her parents across the bay from Cal. She thought her father really wanted the answer when he asked her if she was still a virgin. She was unprepared for the vehement reaction from her mother. She was called a slut (in Yiddish). Her father said he didn’t want to hold economic reins over her head, but he/they could no longer support her if she persisted in a lifestyle of which they didn’t approve (fancy words, but rent was due the next week). Del spent a sleepless night in her parents’ house before returning to her college apartment and roommate and begging a loan of $200 from her roommate’s father (she stretched that to her January birthday, when she acquired the $2,000 account her grandfather had set up, and she used those funds to finish college). During that lonely, tobacco-filled night, Del resolved never to need money from her parents again. For two decades after that event, when the subject of parental mortality and inheritance came up, she asserted that she would disclaim any monetary legacy from her folks.

She has softened on that subject since. Del’s father died eleven years ago and her mother is in her mid-nineties, comfortably situated and unlikely to outlive her money. Del is now willing to inherit when her mother dies. But she has never asked her folks for money as an adult. Except for the summer between her post-college European travels and her marriage to Hank, she has never spent a night in her parents’ home since that premarital sex scandal.

Del made her third unbreakable vow when she was forty. That’s when she divorced her second husband. She and Carl had been together nearly seven years, six of them married. They’d each brought two children into the relationship. Del’s daughter and son were with them most days (Hank’s idea of a weekend was Saturday afternoon till Sunday mid-day); Carl’s joined them every other Friday afternoon to Monday morning, every Wednesday evening, and half of all holidays. Del’s kids knew who their father was, but they pretty much lived with Carl, and they were expected to show him father-like respect and obedience.

By the time that second marriage was over, Del understood the damage done to her children. She assessed their confusion about Hank’s unreadiness to be with them more often, his single-minded devotion to whatever/whomever was in his immediate environment (his second wife and her offspring) and his unwillingness to make plans. She saw how their attempts to be friendly to Carl had been swept up in his stiff-necked awkwardness as a parent, and she vowed never to put them in a subordinate position to a father-like figure again.

Aggie and Max were thirteen and seven then. Del met a few guys that decade and did a little fooling around, but her escapades were either away from home on those rare occasions when Hank took the kids, or around home but with a fellow who was a buddy more than a boyfriend. A nice enough individual, but no one to whom her children needed to pay any special respect.

By the time the kids were launched, Del was accustomed to singledom. That was seventeen years ago. It appears that this third vow, too, was made to be kept.

Maybe Del doesn’t know what she will do, regarding new foods, or solo travel, or even where she will live next. But she’s certain she will always be willful. She doesn’t know how to compromise her judgment or stifle her aims. She’s sure she will forever distrust the medical establishment and will stay as far away as she can from prescription drugs and test protocols. And while she will accept a share of the maternal estate, assuming she survives her mother, she isn’t counting on the money, has no plans for how to spend it, and will get along fine without it.

She talks to her mother every day. Her younger brothers don’t, but they’re not expected to. They’re not daughters. She doesn’t enjoy the chats but she’ll keep doing them. She loves her mother and she meant it when she promised her dying father she’d care for his widow. The conversations are never interesting (minutiae about how her mother spent her day, including the report about her morning walk and the regular disappointing dinner food, mixed in with repeated network news headlines and weather forecasts). Del’s mother builds conversational mountains out of molehills.

Lately her mom is focused on making Del’s youngest brother a co-trustee. “You never know, Adele,” her mother says at least every other night. “Something could happen to me any time. And if so, your brother should have the ability to pay bills and settle affairs.”

This delegation of responsibility makes no sense. Del is the one with the number know-how and the experience establishing and running businesses. Her brothers are nice guys who turned their finances over to their wives. The older of the brothers married a skinflint who rarely spends money (but can craft a budget). The younger one has a spendthrift spouse who has mystified Del by never accumulating assets (no one in the family can figure out what that childless couple spend their money on, but they have no nest egg).

Without a doubt, Del is the heir most able to understand and allocate the money. She’s also scrupulously honest (her brothers are not dishonest or unfair, but they do share a certain carelessness, as well as symptoms of the sort of passive/aggressive attitudes that sometimes result in a little grabbiness). But she wasn’t given the job. Instead, Del (who is notorious in the family for letting her dog live past the ideal time for euthanasia) has been given the Advanced Health Care Directive for her mother, and the one heir who has bounced checks in his time has the financial job. Of course the delegation reveals Mom’s sexism, but that’s no surprise to Del or her brothers.

The first several times her mother talked about the trustee job, Del experienced a little pique. By the sixth time she started grinning. She laughed out loud when that telephone call ended. Her brother will do well enough. She doesn’t want the job. She’ll probably get her fair share. She really doesn’t care if there’s some other result.

She laughs again as she thinks about her mother. The laugh makes her cough. She’d unwittingly relit the joint while cogitating. She considers her bronchiae for a moment. She wonders if maybe she should go for the chest x-ray her doctor advised when she saw him eight months ago. She knows she’s done damage. Then again, Del is pretty sure she wouldn’t be willing to undergo any medical interventions if a problem were to be found. All in all, she feels fine.