Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  “Pearl,” I answered, glancing at my aunt. “And her family called her Tweety.”

  My cousin-sister looked up from her phone. “That’s cause she talked too much, huh, Mom?”

  “Yes,” my aunt said.

  I glanced between my aunt and my cousin-sister; that wasn’t the reason as I understood it, but I stayed quiet.

  “And what were some of her roles?” the priest asked. “She was a mother, obviously. A sister. Was she married?”

  “Yes,” I said, but then shook my head. “But he passed away.”

  “What was his name?” he asked.

  I hesitated. I didn’t want Ron to be part of this. “They divorced before he passed away.”

  “Ooookay,” the priest said, slowly. He seemed unwilling to press me, at least. “What was her occupation?”

  My aunt looked at me.

  “She had a couple jobs. She was a waitress when I was a kid. She worked in construction for a little while.” I clasped my hands on the tabletop. “She sold orchids at a road stand.”

  My cousin-sister smiled at me. “She told me that—that she was selling flowers.”

  I tilted my head in her direction and wondered how often she and my mother talked.

  “What were some things she was good at?” he asked.

  I expected my aunt to interject, but she stayed silent, watching me. I frantically searched my memories. My mother was good at coloring—she always colored in close circles, always stayed inside the lines. But that wasn’t what he meant. I remembered my conversations with Dale—that she took care of him when he had cancer. I remembered a letter she had written to one of her cousins about her desire to take care of her father when he was sick. And I remembered her promise to take care of my father after my grandmother was gone. “She was good at taking care of people,” I said.

  The priest glanced at me over the rim of his glasses. “So, she was a caregiver.”

  I thought of how she had neglected her care of my sisters and me, but nodded agreement. “Yes.”

  “What kind of music did she like?” he asked.

  I thought back to the rows of cassette tapes I left in Dale’s house. I remembered the strange glamour shot of the mustachioed man in the cowboy hat. “Country,” I guessed.

  “I was going to say that,” my cousin-sister said.

  “What was your favorite meal that she cooked for you?”

  McDonald’s? Mac and cheese? I thought back to the time I visited her in Florida and the meal she cooked for Ron—the meal I didn’t eat. “Liver and onions,” I said.

  “Wow,” he laughed. “If she could make liver and onions taste good, she must have been an amazing cook.”

  “Our mom used to cook it,” my aunt chimed in.

  The priest tucked his notebook back into his front pocket and shifted the stack of books in front of him. There would be three readings, he explained—one from the Old Testament, and two from the New—one of which would be from the Gospels. He would select the passage from the Gospels.

  We nodded.

  “I recommend Wisdom 4:7–15 for those who pass at a young age,” he said, tilting the book toward him as he read. “The virtuous man, though he die before his time, will find rest. Length of days is not what makes age honorable, nor number of years the true measure of life…”

  My aunt and I glanced at each other across the table. She shook her head. “Another.”

  The priest cleared his throat. “I like this one because it measures success not by age but by what someone accomplished in the years they had on this earth—”

  I shook my head. “Another.”

  The priest began reading a passage from the book of Wisdom. I tried hard to listen. “Their going looked like a disaster,” he droned, “their leaving us, like annihilation.”

  Annihilation. The word caught in my chest. Her leaving had been annihilation—past and present and future, she was gone, and I was defeated. I looked at my aunt and found tears mirrored in our eyes. The words were heavy, overstated, but apt.

  “That one?” my aunt asked, wiping her eyes.

  “That one,” I said.

  The priest moved on to passages from the New Testament, but I stopped being able to focus on the words. The New Testament God carried less weight than the vengeful God of the Old.

  “I’ll make a photocopy of these for you,” the priest offered as he stood. “Whoever reads them should practice a few times before the service.”

  “Thank you, Father,” my aunt said.

  After he left the room, my cousin-sister’s eyes slanted toward us over her phone. “I want to ask him a question,” she said.

  “What?” her mother asked.

  “If God exists,” she giggled.

  Her mother sighed and stood, shaking her head. She followed the priest out of the room to settle the cost of the service, and my cousin-sister and I drifted outside. I turned in circles, surveying the trees that bordered the parking lot until my eye caught the flicker of a wing in a tree nearby. I walked closer for a better look.

  “What is it?” my cousin-sister asked, following me across the parking lot.

  “A nuthatch,” I said, pointing at the silhouette of the bird hopping vertically up and down the trunk of the tree.

  “You really like birds, huh?” she laughed.

  Any hope I had of being the cool older sister rapidly faded, but I shrugged with a smile. “Yeah.”

  “You’re such a dork,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  I STARTED WATCHING birds, a single and solitary hobby, after I moved to Boston—in part, to escape the gray monotony of the city; in part, because my world was too loud. I’d found an old pair of Don’s binoculars in one of my grandmother’s suitcases, which I had packed and brought with me to Boston. I kneeled beside my window and watched the chickadees and nuthatches and sparrows that appeared. One year, a small flock of golden-crowned kinglets chose my backyard as a pit stop on their journey south. I walked cemeteries, which were some of the few green spaces in Boston, and ticked the pine siskin, the common nighthawk, and a few warblers and vireos off my life list.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER WE LEFT the church, we drove down to Gallup to pick up one of my aunties, who had taken a Greyhound into town for my mother’s memorial service. We stopped at a liquor store so they could stock up on booze. My aunt asked me if I wanted anything. I glanced at my cousin-sister and told them I didn’t really drink.

  But that night, while we prepared for the meal ahead, my aunties and I sat around the kitchen table and drank cheap vodka and smoked weed off a can of Bud Light. I could feel the smoke between my shoulder blades and in the tips of my fingers. My hands were clumsy and slow.

  “Look at you,” my auntie laughed, slapping my shoulder. “All buzzed.”

  I peeled carrots until my palms were orange. I picked a mountain of shells off the hard-boiled eggs. My mother’s memorial service felt far away, as if there were no coming day—only each second, erased by the second after that. There was only the radio buzzing in the corner of my grandmother’s kitchen. But as the smoke cleared, time as I had come to understand it collapsed, and I woke to the sound of my aunties crying and screaming at one another.

  They’re having completely different arguments, I thought. No one can hear what anyone else is trying to say. I left the kitchen table and walked down the hall and crawled into bed next to my cousin, who had long since fallen asleep.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, I woke to my aunt banging on our bedroom door. “I need help,” she yelled.

  I walked into the chaos of the kitchen, filled with mixing bowls and pots and pans, and walked out again. “I need a shower,” I said, excusing myself. I ducked into the bathroom and stepped under the hot water and
stared at the orange palms of my hands.

  When I walked back into the kitchen, my aunt sent me across the street to beg folding chairs off Shorty. It had snowed overnight, and as I crossed the street, I admired the contrast between the white snow and red clay as I stained clean patches of snow with the mud on my shoes. Even the mud on the reservation was beautiful.

  I returned with only a couple folding chairs. My cousin-sister sat at the table and mixed potato salad while my aunt complained about the roast—we had cooked it too long the night before, and it was too dry. Then she started complaining about the mud I tracked in on the floors.

  I mopped both the living room and the kitchen, and when that was done, she made me practice reading my passage from the Old Testament while she diced another batch of hard-boiled eggs. She told me to look at the audience; to speak louder; to talk slower. I read and reread the passage until she was satisfied.

  We walked into the church only a few minutes late.

  The women in the front rows stood to greet us, and one by one, they embraced my aunt and whispered soft words into her hair. I hung back with my cousin-sister until my aunt pulled me forward. “This is Tweety’s daughter,” she announced.

  They wrapped me in their arms and introduced themselves. I’m your grandma, your auntie, your cousin. I’m so sorry about your mom, they said.

  The men—grandpas and uncles and cousins—remained seated and quiet.

  The priest paced at the front of the church, hands clasped over his stomach, and asked if we were ready to begin. My aunt nodded, and he took his place behind the pulpit. “She was a sister, a mother, a grandmother,” he recited. “A caregiver,” he added from his notes.

  He praised the gifts she had given to her family and friends in life—her love, her kindness, her generosity. He lamented the struggles she had surmounted, clichéd obstacles he rattled off the top of his head—nothing about life on the reservation, or alcohol, or abuse. He swiveled on his feet and left the pulpit, walking toward me. “I’m sure you thought you were an angel,” he said, leaning down to thrust his smug face in mine.

  I pulled away from him in surprise. He was trying to include me in her list of tribulations; in his grand narrative, I was an ungrateful, unruly child who offered little in exchange for my mother’s love.

  “You weren’t an angel,” he concluded, with conviction.

  My lips parted, though I wasn’t sure what I might say. My cousin-sister started giggling and then whispered something into her mother’s ear.

  “Stop it,” my aunt scolded her, but my aunt was giggling, too.

  I avoided looking at the priest again; I tried not to feed my growing anger. When I was called to the pulpit to read my passage, I could not find my voice. Despite all my aunt’s coaching, I stumbled over each word.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE FINAL morning I spent in my mother’s hospital room, her pastor turned up at her door. “I came as soon as I heard,” he said, assuming a position across from me at her bedside.

  He was a short, mustachioed man who looked a little too clean, a little too put together, to be one of my mother’s boyfriends. He wore his sunglasses around his neck on a black nylon strap. I didn’t recognize him, and it was clear he didn’t recognize me.

  “I’m her daughter,” I said. “Danielle.”

  “I’m so glad I came this morning,” he exclaimed. “I’m so happy to meet you!” He looked like he might leap across the bed to give me a high five, but instead he folded his hands over his heart. “I’ve known your mother for a very long time. She’s been coming to my church every Sunday for years. But you’ve never been?”

  “I live in Boston,” I said, shaking my head.

  He nodded slowly, as if weighing his approach. “How is your mother doing?”

  “She’s dying,” I said.

  He looked into my eyes and said, with all sincerity, “I know if the Lord wanted to, he could raise Lee up out of this bed right now.”

  My mother’s pastor was trying to instill false hope in me; he was trying to prolong my pain, not end it. Someone else might have latched on to his words, but I had little patience for and no trust in religious men. Silent, I stared at him until he finally looked down and away.

  “Will you pray with me?” he asked, more humbly than I imagined he felt.

  I ground my molars against the exposed gum at the back of my mouth, where my wisdom teeth should have been. I enjoyed the pinching feeling, like gravel against bare feet. “Sure,” I said.

  He placed his hand on my mother’s forehead, which was beaded with condensation. He tried to balance himself on the bedrail with his right hand, but his stance was awkward, and the rail trembled under his weight as he spoke. “Dear Lord Jesus,” he began, “if it is your will, please raise Lee out of this bed so that she might see her daughter here, with us on this day. And if it is not your will, if it is Lee’s time, please take her into your hands.” He paused and looked into my eyes. “We are all sinners,” he said. “Even I, Lord, sin every day.”

  I refused to hold his gaze and instead focused on my mother’s closed, swollen eyelids.

  “If we accept you in our hearts, Lord, and ask forgiveness, we are forgiven, and we will be led into the gates of Heaven.”

  The longer he talked, the more angry I became. He convinced himself he was helping people like my mother—that he had shepherded them toward Heaven. But if all is forgiven by showing up to church every Sunday and muttering a few prayers, consequences become inconsequential. It didn’t matter that my mother drank. It didn’t matter that she had abandoned her children. She was forgiven; her sins were erased.*

  I remained silent.

  He cleared his throat. “We can do a memorial service for her, if you like. Will you be in town long?”

  I shook my head and glanced at the clock on the far wall. “I’m leaving today.”

  “I see,” he said. He wrote his name down in a notebook he carried, then tore out the page and passed it to me. He told me he would hold the service regardless and offered to record it for me. He could send the video and the few pictures he had of her if I liked.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He took a few backward steps toward the door. “I’ll let you have some alone time with your mom before you leave,” he said, “but I really am glad to have met you, Darlene.”

  I smiled for the first time that morning. He hadn’t even bothered to learn my name.

  After my mother’s pastor left her room, I stood there berating myself for agreeing to let him pray. If I were more like Eileen, I could channel my rage and do some real damage. I would be better equipped to stand up to men like him. But the longer I stood there, the more I realized I wasn’t really angry at myself. I wasn’t even angry at my mother. I was angry at things outside our control. I was angry at the broken communities we were born into, and the godly men who perpetuated the cycles of abuse. Who told us to seek happiness in ignorance and faith in a God who seemed indifferent to our suffering. Who taught us to forgive too readily, and that forgiveness restored power, when in my experience, forgiveness had only taken my power away.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THE SERVICE, our family returned to my grandmother’s place. My grandmother’s sisters—who I began to call my grandmothers, as everyone did—took their places in the kitchen—kneading flour and shortening into dough, which they worked with their light hands. They pulled the dough into round tortillas, and when the first tortilla came out of the cast-iron pan, my aunt nudged me toward the living room. “Help your sister start serving,” she said.

  We filled the plates with pot roast and potatoes and carrots and corn, egg salad and fruit salad and tortilla wedges. We carried the plates, one by one, to those seated around the folding tables in the living room.

  I fixed myself one of the last plates and
ate standing in the kitchen.

  One of my grandmothers touched me lightly on the arm. “Your grandfather is going to say a few things,” she said.

  I followed her into the doorway. One of my grandfathers, tall and skinny as a cowboy, wearing boots and jeans and a worn button-down shirt, stood in the middle of the room. He bowed his head and stared at the floor. He spoke in Navajo, and no one translated his words. I closed my eyes and lowered my head and let the unfamiliar sounds wash over me. At one point, my grandmother rested her hand on my shoulder and whispered, “He’s talking about you.”

  Then she passed a glass of water to my aunt, who carried it to my grandfather, who spoke a few more words and took a sip.

  My grandmother nudged me forward. “Go.”

  My aunt took a sip from the same glass of water, then touched her fingers to her lips and her forehead.

  When she passed the glass to me, I mimicked her performance, though its significance was lost. I passed the glass to one of my waiting grandmothers and fled to the corner of the room, too embarrassed to ask what had happened, or what was said, or what I was expected to do.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER MY GRANDFATHER finished speaking and the family returned to their food, I retreated into the kitchen and began washing dishes. Another of my grandfathers walked into the kitchen and passed me a folded twenty-dollar bill. “For you,” he said.

  I thanked him and smiled, but neither of us knew what to say to the other next.

  Before they left, my grandmothers gave me their email addresses and asked me to stay in touch. When they asked after my sister, I gave them the address for YCP and her inmate number; I told them she would love a letter and that I hoped they would write.

  * * *

  —

  I VENTURED INTO my aunt’s small backyard, ringed in by a chain-link fence, before the sun rose fully the next morning. The snow from the day before had already melted, and the red clay was dry and dusty again. As the sky shifted toward yellow and blue, I sat atop the weathered picnic table under the tall old tree and silently ate a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. My aunt’s dog, Toro, settled on the bench by my side.