by Holly Brown
“How dare you patronize me!”
I look toward the building that houses my degenerating mother, the one who barely remembers me on a good day. “Good luck to you.” As she continues to sputter, I disconnect the call.
The hell with her. With all of them.
As a fireball hurtles upward through my body, I make my last call. It’s to the one reservation that’s come in since Dawn posted her review, and I’m ready for what he’s about to say. In fact, some small part of me relishes it.
“My wife told me not to book with you. That you’d say there’s a green stain on the couch in the shape of an antelope, and you’ll need to keep the whole deposit.”
“Yes,” I say. “That sounds just like me.”
“I’ll be sure to note that response in my review.”
I feel an unexpected freedom. There are no more reviews. No more hospitality. Nothing some stranger can take away from me. I’m not submitting myself for anyone’s approval anymore. “You do that,” I say, and click.
19
Dawn
Hi, Professor Myerson. I just sent you a LinkedIn request. Could you please approve me ASAP? I can use all the contacts I can get. Thanks!
Dawn
“Dawnie,” my mother says. She throws her arms around my neck, and I can feel her small body wrack with sobs.
I reach to hug her back, because it’s the only human thing to do, but I’m reeling. I haven’t seen my mother since my wedding day, and we’ve spoken only once in that time. How did she even find me?
The only thing I can think of is that my address was on my wedding invitation. Rob and I have lived here for our entire relationship. It’s a depressing thought, actually. But my mother wouldn’t actually save the invitation in its envelope with my return address, would she? She’s neither sentimental nor organized enough for that.
These are not the right thoughts, I know. I should be asking her what’s wrong, what I can do to help, but I just want her off me. I learned better than to throw my arms around her when I’ve been distraught. She’d crumble whether it was my heartache or hers; my heartache would become hers, but not in any way that could help me. She’d subsume my pain.
I realized early on that she could handle nothing. She’d wane at the slightest criticism. If I confronted her on a parenting failure (and really, she was a disaster as a mother), she would dissolve into tears and self-recrimination. “You’re right, you’re right, I’m the worst,” she’d weep. I would have had to be a sadist to keep on with it. So I’d wind up taking care of her, telling her it wasn’t really that bad, but it was. She was messy, distracted, self-involved, ignorant of things that mattered, forgetful in ways both public and private (I can’t even count how many times I sat outside buildings waiting for her to drive up in the clunker of the moment). Her affection was absentminded, like she was petting a dog because she liked the feel of fur, not because she loved the dog.
It’s inaccurate to say that she was self-absorbed. She was other-absorbed, and that other was her husband and never her child. They got together when she was a child herself, and she had me at fifteen. My father was seven years older, which was actionable in California, but her parents were eager to foist her on him. I guess she’d been a wild child, and they were too old to deal with it since she was an accidental change-of-life baby. So they signed her away and I was born in wedlock, just barely. They were in love. Well, she was utterly, irrevocably, unrelentingly, destructively in love with him.
He must be dead. That’s the only reason she would be here, clinging to me.
I release her and look into her ravaged face. She’s short like me, but sickly-skinny underneath a very faded denim jacket that might actually be from the eighties. She’s got my blue eyes, and her hair is shoulder-length and crunchy-dry, a sort of sandy/wheaty color with darker streaks, a dye job gone wrong or gone too long. Her skin is ruddy, with pockmarks from acne, plus deeply grooved wrinkles.
I thought I’d never see her again, and I was good with that.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” I say. She nods and then bursts into a fresh round of tears. I think she’s going to grab me again and I involuntarily step back.
Rob steps forward, into the breach, and she hurls herself at him. Her crying takes on an even more hysterical, performative quality, though I know her grief is real. No one could be more bereft, more lost, than my mother without my father.
Ironically, he was just about the least dependable person around. His work ethic was nonexistent. He was fired from job after job as a laborer for being late or lazy or both. After a while, all he could get was temporary assignments from Manpower, and even those were few and far between. He often didn’t come home, and it was pretty obvious he was screwing around. When he was there, he was emotionally absent, staring at the TV, barely talking to either of us. But Mom said constantly, “He’s my rock.” She meant it as a compliment, not in a can’t-get-blood-from-a-stone sort of way.
I’m not thinking any of this consciously, but it’s all there when I look at her. Rob’s face is suffused with compassion, and I should be grateful. She’s helpless in the best of circumstances, and someone has to be there for her.
If she’d called to tell me the news, I would have jumped in the car and gone to her; then all of this emotional upheaval would be confined to Eureka. But she has no right to cross my threshold in her hour of need after being MIA for the past three years. She’s assuming we’ll take her in, put her up, as if she’s the child and I’m the mother, just like always.
She mismanaged her entire life, and now she’s alone, with no means of support. While I pity her, I can’t just forget that her choices cost me my childhood. When she saw my father wasn’t holding jobs, she should have gotten one herself, but instead, she chose to believe he would pull it together soon. Her delusion meant we were constantly broke, sometimes hungry, and often evicted. She looked to me for reassurance: that not only was I okay, but she would be okay, too. Practically every year, I was the new girl in a poor school. She has no idea what that’s like; she was too fragile to be told. Besides, I don’t know how many times she asked, “How was your day?” and then rambled over my answer.
Her life was chaos, and she made that mine, and then she sought absolution. I gave it to her, again and again, because I felt sorry for her. Because I thought she was my father’s unwitting victim. Because she didn’t know any other way. Because she was the one parent who seemed to love me. Always because. But during those three years of no contact, I realized that it hadn’t been real love at all. I’d been used, and it’s not going to happen again.
“Was it sudden?” I ask my mom. What I mean is, Did you have time to make arrangements? Was there life insurance? Are you about to get kicked out of your apartment?
“Very sudden,” she says. “A massive heart attack. He was barely fifty.” She just keeps clutching Rob, a man to hold her aloft, the story of her life.
It occurs to me that I’ve just learned my father is dead. I should have some sort of emotional reaction to this news.
Is this what shock feels like? Or is it possible that I truly don’t care? If the shoe was on the other foot—if my father had gotten the news of my death—I don’t think he would have given two shits. One, maybe, but definitely not two.
That recognition makes me a little sad. So I guess that’s something.
Finally, the embrace between Rob and my mother comes to an end, and we all gravitate toward the couch. It’s the same couch we’ve had since I moved in, a white Jennifer Convertible that we bought new. The springs have become uncomfortable with time, but it does turn into a bed, and I know that my mother will be sleeping on it for one night at least. It’s too late to send her back to Eureka.
“He was gone before the ambulance arrived,” she says, closing her eyes, tears leaking out and down her cheeks. “I pounded on his chest and I blew into his mouth. I don’t know if I did it right. I just tried to do what I saw on TV.”
“I’m sure yo
u did all you could,” Rob says.
Her eyes are still closed. “I never thought it would happen like this, that I’d have to leave him.”
“He left you, Mom.” That’s what dying is.
“No, I mean, I had to leave his . . . body.”
“You left his body in Eureka without making arrangements?”
“I can’t afford to have him buried. Isn’t that awful?” Now she looks right at me. “He’ll be a ward of the state.”
“A ward of the state is an orphan,” I say. “He’s a fifty-two-year-old man.” Who died without a penny to his name. Who surely doesn’t have life insurance, or a wife who’s capable of handling his remains.
I last saw them three years ago, when they were an hour and a half late to my wedding. They missed the ceremony and got tipsy at the reception. My father tried to feel up a bridesmaid, and my mother cried in the bathroom.
They never called to apologize for the scene. They never called at all, in fact. The next Mother’s Day, Rob encouraged me to reach out and bury the hatchet. “They don’t know there even is a hatchet,” I told him. “They think that’s normal behavior.” He said I should be the bigger person. It seemed like a low bar, but okay.
So I called. My mother asked a generic question like “How’s marriage treating you?” half listening to the answer before she went on about her usual struggles with rent and bills and my father. I endured fifteen minutes of this and then she came up for air, saying, “Well, I’ll let you go.” She already had, years before. After that phone call, I let her go. There was no point in saying that I wouldn’t be calling again. It seemed like a safe assumption that if I didn’t reach out, then I would never talk to them again. I didn’t figure on a moment like this.
“We’ll deal with all of it tomorrow,” Rob says. “You don’t need to worry. We’ll figure out what needs to be done.”
I hope he’s just being comforting, that he’s not actually considering footing the bill. A life of irresponsibility, so much so that they can’t even afford a funeral, should not be rewarded with a bailout. But I can’t say that in front of my mother. I don’t want to kick her when she’s down; I just don’t feel like it’s my job to pick her back up. Not anymore.
“We’ll make up the couch for you,” he tells her. “Have you eaten?”
I watch my sweet husband make her a plate of our leftover pasta, the pasta that I’d put into a container for his lunch tomorrow, and I’m thinking she doesn’t deserve it. She hasn’t earned the food out of our mouths.
I don’t want to tell Rob I feel this way. He’s displaying the characteristics of a good father, but I’m not feeling like I’d be much of a mother. I haven’t seen it done, and I don’t want to practice now, not like this.
20
Miranda
Thad, is everything okay?
Just text that one word, “okay.” Even “OK” is okay.
Eva is due soon, but I can’t help myself. I’m cleaning madly—not just my usual pre-cleaning/straightening, but a full scrubbing of the quartz countertops. My phone is lying close by, and I check often, in case the incoming text fails to ping. Ping, Thad, ping.
I haven’t been worrying whether he’s alive. I haven’t even been checking his social media. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I didn’t need to. I had genuine contact with my son. How indescribably sweet it’s been.
But now I have a much more familiar feeling.
For the past few years, money has been my leverage. Thad might ignore me much of the month, but not in that last week, not just before rent’s due. I’ve often feared that if I turned off the green faucet, he’d have no reason to ever communicate with me. And I needed that scant amount of communication, that paltry recognition that I’m his mother, not just a follower of his Twitter feed.
This last week, though, I’ve been a different kind of junkie, craving just one more hit, one more text. I want him to tell me about his art, the show that he’s working toward, the all-nighter he’s just pulled. I lap up his pipe-dreamy nonsense. Just keep talking—well, texting. Stay live, and real.
Last night, he signed off that he loves me. And today . . . radio silence.
The more I think about it, the more out of character (and ominous) it all seems. Was that him saying good-bye? Has all this correspondence been a prelude to his final act?
I toss my sponge in the sink and grab my phone, checking Twitter and Instagram. Nothing since yesterday.
Thad, please answer.
I’m getting worried.
Thad wouldn’t kill himself. That’s not who he is. He’s overdosed before, but they’ve always been accidental.
Haven’t they?
Yesterday afternoon, he seemed nearly jubilant. High on life, that’s what I decided to think. He was so sure that his ship was coming in, that his new work was the best he’d ever done. He said a gallery owner was interested.
He could have been just plain high. Once he crashed . . .
Thad wouldn’t commit suicide. He’s not the type. As Larry once said, Thad’s always had “curiously high self-regard for someone who’s accomplished so little.” But that’s when Thad was much younger. What if it’s finally caught up with him, the sense of failure?
I grab my phone and begin to text madly, a flurry of support:
I love you.
I’m so proud of all the new work you’re doing.
I’m sure it’s wonderful.
He hasn’t Instagrammed it, or sent me pictures. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been doing art. That doesn’t mean he’s been on something.
It’s my fault. I should have asked him to send me a picture. Generally, I’m relieved not to see it. Because what I’ve seen makes no sense to me at all. It looks like graffiti, what you’d see on a wall and think that the neighborhood’s gone to hell. Strange, thuggish cartoon figures, and oversized letters spelling out words like “ghettology.” He says he’s “subverting the dominant paradigm.” How am I supposed to respond to that?
He used to hate when I said I didn’t quite get his art, that I’m not the target audience. He hated when I said I was sure it was good, if you like that sort of thing.
I shouldn’t have sent that last text, the I’m sure it’s wonderful. I can’t afford any missteps. The truth is, as much as I’ve loved hearing from him these past days, it’s been terrifying, too. I’ve been texting on eggshells. If all I do is read his tweets, then I can’t inflame him. I can’t lose what I don’t have.
He must be using again. He might have overdosed, accidentally or on purpose. I need to do something, I can’t just sit here texting all day.
I hear Eva deactivating the alarm system from the foyer. When I appear in the living room, she looks up, surprised. I’m rarely home when she arrives. It makes me uncomfortable to be present while someone cleans my house; I feel lazy and critical all at once.
“I’m just leaving, Eva,” I say, shoving the cell phone into my purse and passing her on my way to the front door.
“Have a great day!” she calls after me.
Once in the car, I know just where to go.
As I drive, I tell myself that Thad will be okay, he always is. How many times have I made myself crazy, imagining him lying dead in some filthy drug lair, and then he Instagrams a picture of himself at a Burger King? This will be just like that.
I still don’t know what I’m going to do after the final two rentals are done. I suppose I could go to management companies and see if they could get me a steady supply of thirty-day renters, though I despise the idea of them walking through my parents’ house, with their beady appraising eyes. After they take their cut, what would be left for Thad?
Larry makes more than enough money to subsidize Thad. He could take care of ten grown children, if he wanted to, easily. But there’s no way he would, and if lump sums began disappearing from our joint account, he would notice sooner or later. He’d follow the trail, and I’d be sunk. Our marriage would be over.
Mi
randa and Larry, engraved, embroidered, emblazoned, written in the sky (he did that for our twenty-fifth anniversary)—what would I be, solo? An aged divorcée, a castoff. I’d be wealthy, since there was no prenup, but it wouldn’t matter, or rather, it would only matter to the lowest of the low, the bottom-feeders, the young men living off their cougars. You see them everywhere in this town, and the women often look proud, and I’m embarrassed for them. They have no idea how the world views them. But then, to be that blind—maybe they’re the lucky ones. If I had to start dating, it would be on my own merits, fair market value, and I shudder to think what that would be.
Besides, I love Larry. He’s tender toward me, and I toward him. We still snuggle on the couch and eat popcorn while we watch movies. We might not go into tedious detail about our days, but the curiosity is there. The concern is there. It’s never left.
Can I convince Larry that I never knew about the ordinance? Would I be able to lie right to his face? I don’t trust my acting abilities, while I trust his discernment.
I push open my car door and stride up the steps to the police station. It’s a small building, quaint, almost like a one-room schoolhouse. I tell myself they’re going to be friendly inside.
At first, that’s how it is. I sit across the desk from a pleasant uniformed officer in his early thirties. “Slow news day,” I say with a smile, casting my eye around the room. He laughs generously. The acoustics of the room are somewhat intimidating, seeing as there are five desks nearby occupied by other officers, none of them with witnesses, or whatever it is I am.
“How can I help you, Mrs. Feldt?” Officer Llewellyn says. He’s almost handsome, in an army regulation sort of way, but with a long, slightly crooked nose. I see by the picture on his desk that he’s a family man, with a sunny wife and three kids. He makes good eye contact, seems sincere and interested and sympathetic. This is going well already.