"Spite"
Selected for publication in North Idaho College's literary magazine: The Trestle Creek Review
Selected for publication in North Idaho College's literary magazine: The Trestle Creek Review
“Jim, let’s just go. I’ve changed my mind. This was a stupid idea.”
I glare at the house and note, in an offhanded way, that it looks exactly the same as when I saw it the last time. The window in the back porch is still broken. The gutters look like planters, and bare wood peeks out from beneath the tattered asphalt shingles on the roof. The screen in the back door is torn and hangs down over the dusty aluminum like a tongue. The thought that the house is laughing at me is so strong that I almost just turn and flee back to the car.
Jim grabs my hand. “No. We agreed that this was the best thing to do. We can just leave when you’ve said what you’ve got to say.”
The reminder steadies me. I’ll say my peace and go. I think of my mother and all the nasty things she’ll say to me about my job and my husband and my kids and try to convince myself that I won’t care. I imagine that I’ll smile and nod and pat her hand as if she’s complimenting my dress or my hair, and then I’ll walk out of the house, get in the car, and go back to my life.
Jim climbs up the pitted concrete steps before I can stop him, and soon I’m left standing alone on the sidewalk with the heat of the day seeping through the soles of my shoes.
I follow him and for a moment, I’m a teenager sneaking into the house after curfew. Not that I’ve ever figured out how to sneak up on my mother. I read somewhere once that the trick to being quiet is not to try, but I also know that nothing I’ve ever done has surprised my mother. I used to sneak up on her with the radio screaming ACDC and the hairdryer blasting in her ear and she wouldn’t even blink. I got busted once for smoking on campus at school and when I told her, she just shook her head, as if she had a book somewhere predicting all of my shortcomings and was somehow prepared for whatever I did.
When I ease through the splintered front door, I’m struck by the darkness inside the house. The windows are covered with blankets and towels. Unlit candles drip off every surface. There’s a smell in the air, like dried grass in the sun, but underneath it is the pervasive tang of old cigarette smoke. Jim waits for me by the kitchen table. He points through the bedroom door and raises his eyebrows. “Is she sleeping?” he whispers.
I shake my head. The silence in the house weighs on me, heavy with bad memories and the bottled heat of summer. I point back towards the door. I’m leaving. I don’t care what my mother is doing in the bedroom. I wouldn’t care if she was balanced on my grandmother’s antique bureau preparing to hang herself. But Jim snatches at my arm and drags me towards the bedroom.
“Pamela? It’s us. Jim and Renee. We’ve come to say hello. Are you awake?” His voice stirs the air and the smell of grass grows stronger, almost overwhelming.
Jim steps into the room first and stumbles back against me. His eyes are too big in his face. They swallow his eyebrows and gleam in the darkness like an animal’s. His mouth works convulsively, and despite his panic, or maybe because of it, I start to laugh. He shakes his head and points into the room. My laughter fades away just as quickly as it starts and I step into my mother’s bedroom. She is sitting waiting for me wearing her wedding dress. It’s faded and yellowed with age, but the chocolate milk stain I made on the hem one day when I was playing dress-up is still visible.
She is holding out an envelope to me. I can see my name written in her cramped scrawl on the outside. I expect to fight for it when I step forward and take it from her, but the paper slides off her fingers with a dry rasp that reminds me of October corn rustling in the wind.
She’s stuffed her letter inside an old utility bill envelope. The words are scribbled on the back of the unpaid bill, right over the fine print discussing energy usage and ways to save on your heating costs. I read the words over and over and search the envelope for more, but there’s only dust. I turn and hand it to Jim, not taking my eyes off my mother where she sits and stares at me.
“You’re late. I forgive you,” he reads. His voice is high and pinched, as if he’s just swallowed an ice cube. “That’s it? Forgive you for what?” he asks.
I shrug and take the letter back from him. “She knew I’d come. She always knows.” I don’t answer the second question. Jim is trembling as I turn and look at him. His eyes dart from my face to my mother’s.
“Go on. I’ll be out in a minute,” I say. I try not to resent him as he rushes out of the room towards the safety of the summer heat and sunlight. I turn back to my mother.
“He’s scared,” I tell her. “You’re not looking so hot these days.” I imagine her answer: terse and short with some comment about looking in the mirror.
“Yeah, well, I’ve just come to tell you how I felt about everything. I came to let you know that I forgive you for never wanting me and never caring, but well, I guess you beat me to it. So, I guess I’ll just tell you this.” I inch forward and lean down towards her face, breathing in the scent of sweet hay and field dust. Her eyes are clouded and specked with lint that blows away with my breath.
“You’re too late. I don’t want your forgiveness.” I drop the letter on her lap and watch it slide to the floor. I don’t pick it up. I look at her and try to feel pity or sorrow for this dried up husk of a woman sitting before me. But there’s nothing. Her ghost is too strong.
Jim is waiting for me in the car. He’s on his cell phone and his face is as white as his t-shirt. He holds the phone out to me and a sterile voice on the other end asks me how she died.
“Spite,” I say, and hand the phone back to Jim.
County Road
"County Road No. 9"
Won 1st place in 2009 Coeur d'Alene Library Writing Contest
Won 1st place in 2009 Coeur d'Alene Library Writing Contest
The road was as she remembered it, overgrown and choked with chicory and thistle. Under the heavy July sky, it shimmered gold and blue as clouds passed over. The dust lie still, but it would rise up when she drove down it, as thick as flour and smelling of oil and age. At night, she remembered, you could only taste it: a thick, invisible coating on your lips and tongue. It was as intoxicating as brandy, but maybe that was only because of the company and memory.
She turned down it before she could convince herself to turn back. When the car rocked over a rut, she bit her tongue and the cloying taste of blood filled her mouth along with the dust. It reminded her of the windows in her childhood home that tasted just like they smelled: bitter and acrid, as if old glass somehow retained the years in a tangible way.
She stopped at the end of the road, pleased to see it was still littered with discarded beer cans and condom wrappers, like the remains of some illicit carnival. Sometimes everything changed, and sometimes, rarely, nothing at all. She opened her door and stepped out into the dirt-frosted tangle of weeds. She didn’t bother trying to avoid the cockleburs and ignored the sting of the thistles when they snared in the cuffs of her pants. Her eyes were glued to the ground, searching for the marker that they had buried together that last night.
For a few moments, she worried that it was gone, that some teenager had prized it up out of the ground and chucked it into the ditch, but when the sun slid out from behind the clouds, she caught the brief flash of light like sun on glass. She knelt there in the dry grass, knocking aside cans and chip bags, and began to dig. She considered, for a moment, getting the trowel she’d brought with her out of the trunk, and then discarded the idea. Some things were better left to fingers and hands.
She barely noticed when she broke off a nail or when a sliver of glass pierced her finger. Her whole attention was on the rock, which she knew was mostly buried beneath the surface. Like an iceberg, she thought, a glittering promise of depth and presence in a desolate sea. She rocked back on her heels, distracted by the thought. Had the Titanic moved the iceberg that had sunk her at all? The idea that it hadn’t was a crushing testament to man’s inability to affect change, to make a mark in an indifferent world. She let out a sigh of disgust and went back to her digging.
The rock came loose with a ripping sound as she pulled it free from the weed roots and grass. She laid it aside without a second’s thought. She hadn’t come for the rock. In the hole lay a tarnished and dented Altoid’s tin.
The bright rattle when she picked it up was out of place in the languorous summer stillness. She sat there with the tin in her hands, feeling the sweat dripping in big, muddy drops between her breasts. She couldn’t bring herself to open it. They had had a pact. The tin would remain unopened until they were together here once again to open it.
But, he was never coming, and the thought of the little metal container lying unopened beneath its chipped piece of concrete forever was almost unbearable. She thought of the nights she’d lain awake staring at the ceiling of her empty bedroom with its familiar patterns of tree branches and ivy moving across the white paint. Season after season she’d resisted. She’d told herself the tin belonged to a different time, that the promise it contained was inviolate: not to be touched. It would be too painful to return without him.
But, whoever said that time heals all wounds was right. Her husband’s death had faded in her memory until it was something she was sure had happened to another person. Sometimes she fantasized that their time together had been a dream—too joyful by far for real life.
The metal in her hands, warmed by the sun, belied that. It was still here, after twenty years. A little battered, maybe, but it had withstood season after season. It had stood sentry over countless hasty joinings and guilty trysts. It was proof that love could spring from even such humble beginnings as dusty beer cans and sticky rubbers.
She popped the lid off the tin, breaking another nail down to the quick as she did it. She felt the emotions jump across her face: fear, sadness, bitterness, anger, regret, joy, all in the space of a heartbeat. She felt a moment of deep betrayal towards Mark for not being here with her as he’d promised to be, and then it faded. She dumped the contents of the tin into her hand and poked through them with one finger.
She set everything down and stuck the cigarette they’d left in her mouth before realizing she didn’t have a lighter. She laid the yellowed paper and crumbles of leaves back in the tin and pulled out the penny. The year on it was the same as the one they’d met and remarkably, the copper was just as bright and shiny as the day they’d buried it. It seemed wrong to her that it should be so, as if the coin had missed the point of the whole thing. That feeling passed too and she dropped it back in the tin. It made a cheerful clank when it landed and somewhere nearby a bird answered with a startled chirp.
The next item she pulled out was a garish purple spider-ring Mark had slid on her finger on that hot summer day as a joke. She’d dropped it into the tin as he was closing it. She didn’t know why she’d included it and Mark didn’t ask, but she was glad of it now. It was cheerful and silly and young, all the things she was not. She pushed it onto her pinky and let it sit there as she pulled out the next to last item.
It was a lighter, and suddenly she remembered the argument they’d had, kneeling together in the brittle weeds. Mark had argued that it would blow up, buried there in the dirt with the sun beating on it day after day, year after year. She had countered by pointing out that mines were left for years underground and didn’t blow up. She gave a rueful smile as she lit the cigarette and inhaled. She’d also argued that they probably wouldn’t be smoking when they were forty and so wouldn’t have a lighter, and she’d been right.
The tobacco was stale and she threw it in the ditch after stubbing it out in the dirt. She’d lost her taste for smoking as they’d gotten older and had quit without much trouble. It was part of her past, not her future, she’d argued, and Mark had left it at that and quit with her.
The last thing lying on the ground next to the tin was a necklace with a jewel-encrusted heart pendant. The diamonds weren’t real and the whole necklace looked dull with age where the penny hadn’t, but she put it around her neck anyway.
She sat there on the dirty grass and caught herself looking for something else in the tin. She’d read stories where widows found letters from their spouses years after their deaths, but there was nothing left in the tin but a piece of road gravel and dust. Looking back on it now, she couldn’t see why they’d buried the thing in the first place. Had they hoped to regain their glory days by mucking around on an abandoned road where they’d once made love in the backseat of Mark’s car? With the necklace cool against her neck and the penny winking at her in the sun, she felt empty and deflated. She never should have come out here.
She stood to go and stopped. A police car was making its way up the road. It slid to a stop inches from her bumper. The officer gave her a big grin and got out of his car.
“Well, I didn’t expect to find a grown woman out here. Your husband in the backseat with his pants around his ankles?”
She stared at him and burst out laughing. The thought of her husband sitting in the car in the sweltering heat with dust clinging to his bum was painful, but it was funny too.
She shook her head and rattled the tin with its penny and lighter. “No sir,” she said. “I just came out here to get something my husband and I buried a long time ago.”
The police officer looked for a moment like he wished he had a hat to tip back. “You’re Molly Sorenson’s girl, Jess isn’t it?”
She nodded and looked at his nametag. She felt a moment of bemused vertigo. “Charlie Parks.” She bit her lip and shook her head. “I had such a crush on you in high school. It was awful.”
He grinned and wiped away a bead of sweat on his upper lip. “I heard about Mark from your mother. I’m real sorry. I should have sent a card or something. For your mother too.” He trailed off and batted away a horsefly.
“No, it’s alright,” she said. She didn’t know what else to say so she pointed back at her car. “Well, I’m going to go. Unless there was something else?”
“No, no,” he said. “It was good to see you again.”
She got back in her car. The spider ring stared up at her with its beady eyes as Charlie pulled around her and waited for her. She preceded him up the road, wincing at the thwacking noise the weeds made against the undercarriage of the car. She slowed at the entrance to let a car with a teenage boy and a red-faced girl go by.
She laughed and followed them. When Charlie pulled out and turned on his lights, she pulled over to let him by, thinking he was going after the kids, but he pulled up behind her. She waited until he was standing outside the car before rolling down her window.
“Yes?” she asked. “Was I speeding, officer?” She blushed, realizing that she, a forty-year-old woman, was flirting for the first time since Mark’s death. She felt like she’d done it badly, but Charlie blushed too and again tried to push back an imaginary hat.
“No, um…I was wondering if you wanted to go to dinner with me tonight. For old time’s sake,” he added, as if that would be the only reason she’d agree to go out with him.
She stared at the spider ring and her chipped nails. The heart was heavy over her throat and she thought of Mark, of how he’d laughed when she’d admitted her crush on Charlie. He’d laugh now, if he could see her, sweaty and grimed with dirt, a plastic ring on her finger, a cheap K-mart necklace tarnishing her neck, and nodded.
“That’d be wonderful,” she said. Her heart thumped once, hard in her chest, at the words, as if it had stopped beating altogether when Mark had died and now remembered its purpose.
She pulled away and The Burro Whisperer
Won 3rd place in 2009 Coeur d'Alene Library Writing Contest
Won 3rd place in 2009 Coeur d'Alene Library Writing Contest
Andy Ketchum often felt crazy, but he wasn’t. There was an important distinction between feeling and being crazy that most people missed. People lacked perspective. When they walked over a sewer grate and had to stop and come up with a plan for what would happen if they fell in, they thought they were crazy, but it was really just being prepared. And thoughtful.
Andy thought those things all the time. His brain was like a disorganized circus, all rabid monkeys and crazed trapeze artists running willy-nilly from one tent to another. It got so that some days he couldn’t think one, solid thought if he tried. He’d be contemplating a ham sandwich with lettuce, tomato, onions, and cheddar cheese and would get to thinking of all the different places his food had been. When you got right down to it, he told himself, people were eating food that had traveled more than they had. That thought led to others: tomato tourists, camera-toting lettuce heads, onions with maps. It was all very ridiculous, but it certainly wasn’t crazy.
He’d mentioned some of these musings to friends and co-workers, but they had looked at him like he was crazy, so he learned to keep his mouth shut. Then, one day during his daily walk after supper, a seagull landed on the wall next to him and without introduction or prompt, began to speak.
“Wonderful night for a stroll,” it said. One beady glared, then the other. “But then again,” it continued, “I’d rather fly than walk. The ground is very dirty, you know.”
It flew off, leaving Andy contemplating the dirtiness of dirt. Was such a thing possible? He thought not, but then he remembered it had been a seagull that told him. Not at all a reliable source, he comforted himself. Now if it had been an owl or a blue-jay that told him the ground was dirty, well then, that would be different. Even this, he argued, was not crazy. Talking to a seagull was much better than imagining you were talking to a seagull, wasn’t it?
When his fridge began to speak to him using the alphabet letters on its door, Andy considered ghosts, but rejected the idea as too far-fetched. And, the fridge really did have a lot to say, didn’t it? They were useful things too, like: “the butter’s gone rancid” or “your cheese is growing more cheese.” These sort of helpful comments really couldn’t be craziness. Craziness was not helpful. It was all screaming and flailing about and wearing your underwear on your head.
When Andy’s girlfriend (he did have one, despite his not craziness), found the notes on his fridge, she thought they were hilarious, especially the one reading: “it’s really quite chilly in here.” Andy thought his fridge’s humor was a bit lacking, but then, it was only an appliance and one really couldn’t expect a motor and some Freon to be that clever.
There were times when Andy’s conversations with his fridge seemed more real to him than his actual life and he began to be worried that maybe his fridge was crazy for talking so much, but then his pillow began to move about on its own. It would be under the bed one day, in the shower the next. Once, he found it outside with the trash, but after a stern talking to, the pillow limited its explorations to the bedroom. Andy entertained some thoughts at first that he was the one moving the pillow about, but he would never have put his pillow out with the trash and so dismissed the idea. Moving one’s pillow about and pretending the pillow did it would certainly qualify as crazy, but he wasn’t, so he put it out of his head.
A few months after the wandering pillow, his girlfriend convinced him to go on a trip with her to the Grand Canyon . He resisted at first, not sure what his fridge would do without anyone to talk to, but eventually agreed.
The trip went well at first, but then he started to get distracted. At every restaurant where they stopped to eat he’d wonder how many people had sat in a booth before him eating grilled cheese and tomato soup with crackers. He was sure someone, probably more than one, had ordered the same thing from the same booth, but there was really no way to know for sure. This bothered him as his other musings hadn’t. It was all very good to wonder where his tomatoes and onions came from: he could look it up on the internet. It was altogether a different story when trying to discover how many individual hands had touched his food, or how many people had enjoyed soup and a sandwich at a particular restaurant in one, particular booth.
His inability to answer these questions was maddening. So maddening in fact, that he started eating in the car, content in the knowledge that it was highly unlikely some employee at Ford Motor Companies had taken his or her lunch break in his specific car. And certainly, he argued, they wouldn’t have had grilled cheese and tomato soup with crackers.
Whey they arrived at the Grand Canyon , a boat-tailed Grackle greeting him with a snooty hello, and then preceded to complain of how stingy the tourists had been lately with their bread crumbs and potato chips.
Talking to a bird while trying to make it look like he was not talking to a bird was very hard. He didn’t want to look like one of those people, so he dumped some trail-mix on the ground and fled.
The canyon itself was quiet; a fact Andy was immensely grateful for. He thought that listening to the Grand Canyon ’s voice might drive him crazy and he wanted no part in it. Then, he started thinking of how many people had stood in the exact same spot as him. The question was so hard to answer, so hard to fathom, that he began dancing around the viewing area in search of a piece of (dirty?) ground that surely hadn’t had so many people on it. His girlfriend trailed behind him, perplexed and laughing. He was about ready to crawl over the guardrail when his girlfriend reminded him of their scheduled burro ride into the canyon.
His burro’s name was Burrito and it stank like stale farts and mud, but it was quiet. His girlfriend’s burro though, was quite chatty. It went on and on about the superiority of burros to horses and was very proud of the fact that it had made 220 successful trips in and out of the canyon, even with very large people on its back.
Andy was left trying to figure out how a burro learned to count and feeling very sorry for burros in general who were forced to carry America
By time they got back to the hotel that night, he was exhausted. It felt like he’d been the one ridden. His girlfriend was very angry with him. He’d caused a scene at the end of their ride by exclaiming quite loudly to an overweight man from Wisconsin
“Really, Andy. I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately. You’ve been so distracted,” his girlfriend said.
“Yes, yes. I know. It’s just that everything has so much to say. It’s hard to keep things straight.”
His girlfriend continued dressing for dinner while Andy watched the pillow on the bed begin a slow creep towards the balcony.
“I don’t know what you mean,” his girlfriend said.
Andy flopped back on the bed, pinning the rebellious pillow to the coverlet. “I hear things. I can’t stop thinking about things.”
Even as he said it, he began to wonder how many people had slept in this bed before him. The number his mental circus threw at him was high enough to be alarming. He stood.
“You hear things? Like what?” she asked.
Andrew tossed his hands over head. “Seagulls, refrigerators, burros. It seems that everything’s got something to say these days. But, I don’t blame the burros. They should have a union.”
His girlfriend stopped what she was doing. “Andy, that’s crazy.”
He shook his head. “Really? Did you see the size of that man—oh, you’re talking about hearing things. No, it’s not. Scientists have shown that whales and dolphins have their own language. Why not refrigerators and birds? Don’t look at me like that. That’s why I haven’t said anything.”
The next week he went to see a psychiatrist. The man was dumpy and bald enough that Andy thought it might be lucky to rub the man’s head. He resisted.
“So, Mr…” the man looked at his notes. “Ketchum. What seems to be the problem?”
Andrew thought about it for a moment. “My girlfriend thinks I’m crazy.”
“And are you?” the psychiatrist asked.
Andy felt like he was on a game show and then wondered if anyone else had felt that way sitting on this chair in this office. He hesitated. “Well, I don’t think so, but you’re the doctor.”
The man was obviously pleased with that response, as any man would be that had three framed degrees casting reflections off his head behind him.
They went through a list of questions, but when the psychiatrist began to ask how many times a day he used the facilities, Andy was distracted by a paperweight on the desk.
There was a butterfly trapped in the clear glass. Its voice was tinny, but audible: “Really, now. Listen to the man. He has an unnatural fascination with his patients’ bowel movements. He himself goes four to five times in a day. What he should be asking is if you can hear anything in his office. Really. Such a silly man.”
Andy interrupted the doctor to repeat the butterfly’s proposed question. The man hesitated and then nodded. “Well?” he asked. “Do you hear anything?”
Andy grinned and pointed at the paperweight. “Your butterfly there tells me you go to the bathroom for a number 2 four to five times in a day.”
The doctor was startled, or at least Andy thought he was.
“Yes, well. That will be all for today. I’ll refer you to Dr. Billingsley. He should be able to help.” The man wrote a prescription down and handed it to him. “That should fix the problem in the meantime.”
Andy threw the slip of paper away before he left the building. The trashcan thanked him for his deposit. He went home, relieved, but a little disappointed that he wasn’t crazy. For a while, it had sounded interesting and he’d always wanted to run around in public with his underwear on his head.
He contented himself with thinking how much money he could make as a pillow wrangler, or fridge repairman. Or, maybe he could be a burro whisperer. He went to bed that night after retrieving his pillow from his underwear drawer, and thought about how easy it was, not to be crazy.
“My Place is Here”
She knew when the phone rang that it was her mother and something bad had happened. Not bad like there wasn’t enough money for the heating bill that month or food stamps had been cut by another five dollars. No, this was something serious, something real and terrible.
Fern answered the phone, not with a greeting but with: “What’s wrong?”
Out of the corner of her eye she could see Payton, her fiancé, mouthing a question. When she put down the phone she was calm.
“I need plane tickets. It’s my mother,” she said.
Payton came forward, confused and underneath the confusion, irritated. He always got this look when she got off the phone with her mother. She felt a brief moment of satisfaction that this time her mother’s call had been serious, but the euphoria was short-lived and macabre.
“My mother’s dying,” she said. The guilt on his face stabbed at her and she managed a thin smile.
“Why? How?” he corrected, realizing his first question was absurd.
Fern shook her head, not wanting to say it aloud. She tried to come up with an alternative illness, something believable, but all she could come up with was sinusitis. The thought forced out a bray of hysteric laughter, brassy and loud in the oppressive silence. Death by stuffy nose. How awful.
Payton looked around and then back at her. She shook her head again and waved away his question. The tears were starting now, not the leaky tears inspired by laughter but the real tears. The explanation spilled out of her.
“She doesn’t know what’s wrong. The doctors don’t know, but she’s convinced she’s dying. She’s never been wrong. Not about stuff like this. She wants me to come home.”
Payton nodded, starting to agree, but then stopped. “Wait. The doctors haven’t been able to find anything? Do they say she’s dying?”
Fern started up the stairs, meaning to go online and get tickets, but Payton stopped her with a hand on her arm. “You’re flying across the country because your mom’s got a feeling?”
He was trying, she could give him that. She could sense his reluctance to get into this, to say anything, but she could see on his face what he was thinking. They’d just caught up. It was alright for him to think that. It wasn’t his mother. It wasn’t alright for her to think it and she felt a flush of shame. If she left to go home for more than a few weeks they’d be behind again. They’d be right back to living pay check by pay check. She may even lose her job.
“She wouldn’t call if she didn’t think she was right. You know how much she hates bothering us.” Another flush of shame at the idea that her mother was a bother.
“Has she even been to the doctor?” Payton asked. His tone was creeping towards anger. They’d been through this before with her hypochondriac father. False alarms, unfounded worry, the stress of what if, only to find out he actually was sick but there wasn’t anything they could do about it because the money just wasn’t there. She didn’t think she could stand another round of recrimination and reproach. Fern laid her hand on his.
“I’m sorry, sweety, but I’ve got to go. I can’t tell her that I won’t be there. I’d never forgive myself if something happened.” She continued up the stairs, feeling the nascent argument she’d left behind like the onset of a migraine.
She was out of the house and on her way to the airport before he could stop her. There wasn’t anything left to say anyway, at least not now.
The plane trip was routine and boring. The elderly woman who sat next to her smelled of baby powder and clove cigarettes. It was a soothing scent, one that reminded her of her own grandmother, even though that prickly woman had never smoked a day in her life. She closed her eyes halfway through the trip, letting the steady drone of the engines lull her into sleep.
Fern dreamed of walking through a forest of twisted trees on a carpet of wet pine needles and broken branches. It was the forest from The Wizard of Oz: dark and grim, devoid of light or warmth. A crude sign with handwritten letters in a childish script waited on the path ahead. The one word burned into the wood lifted the hair on the back of her neck.
Mother.
She followed the path, anxious now, her eyes scanning left and right with growing fear. She walked for hours before stopping. An owl waited in the branches of a lightening-struck pine, its great eyes sparking yellow in the darkness. She stared up at it.
“Do you know where my mother is?” she asked.
“Who?” the owl parroted back.
“My mother.”
“Who?” The owl’s talons scraped against the branch and the dream began to fade.
She awoke to the sound of the engines cycling down for landing. Her skin was sheened with sweat and when she looked down at her hands she saw that her nails had dug bloody crescents into the palms of her hands.
“You should put something on those when we land, dear. It’s going to hurt.” The older woman was gathering her things, stuffing lip-stick stained Kleenex back into her purse along with a package of unopened airplane peanuts and a sample bottle of vodka.
Fern nodded and was saved from answering by the chirp of rubber on asphalt. She hurried off the plane and through the terminal, not liking the sterile friendliness of the flight attendants and pilots between flights or the vacant stares of travelers who’d just crusaded their way through security. She was in the rental car and winding her way through traffic before she really knew what she was doing. She was a hundred miles from home.
Fern held the phone a few inches from her ear, disgusted at the way her sweat slimed the plastic. The windows were open, spilling warm, muggy air into the stuffy room. The sheet covering the ratty couch was sticky with humidity.
“I don’t know when I’m going to be able to come home,” she said. She’d been here for a month. A month of hot dogs and macaroni with the occasional vegetable thrown in for nutrition. She’d gained five pounds and then sweated it all back out again when the temperature soared and the house heated up like the Sahara . There was no air conditioning.
There was silence on the other end. She pictured Payton folded on the couch, his feet up on the coffee table. One hand would be wrapped around the controller. She could tell he was watching television from the strange pauses between his sentences and how long it took him to answer her questions.
“Are you listening to me?” she asked.
She squeezed her eyes close at his answer. “I just don’t know. Yes. She is sick. The doctors can’t figure it out. One of them actually had the audacity to tell me she was manifesting systems…what? It means she’s so convinced she’s sick that she’s actually making herself sick…No. That’s just stupid. Look, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
Fern said goodbye and let the phone clatter on to the end table. Her mother was sleeping. She didn’t have her teeth in and her mouth was collapsed in on itself. Seeing her mother like that, laying there with her face all mushed up and slack, made Fern feel like she was trespassing. This was not the face her mother showed the world. It was a face she’d hidden even from her own daughter because you couldn’t look at it and not think old.
She fled the room, retreating upstairs. Her bed was a foot too short, but in the heat, it didn’t matter. The room felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. She’d never gotten over the feeling that all her things had shrunk in the time she’d been away. Standing in front of the bookcase now, she felt like a giant, like she’d stumbled into Lilliput. The books were still the same, but they were smaller too. The stories weren’t big enough to capture her, even though she read constantly now. She devoured books, but all of them left her feeling empty.
She sat down on the bed and let her head drop into her hands. She wanted this to be over. She wanted to go home and not have to worry about whether or not her mother’s old sedan would start in the morning when she tried to go get groceries. She didn’t want to lean over her mother’s face again in the dark hours of the night to check if she was still breathing.
When she woke up in the morning her mother was out of bed and cooking breakfast. Her face was set in grim, determined lines.
“It’s passed,” her mother said. She said it like a military commander would announce a long and bloody victory.
Fern stared at her, not sure what to say. The smell of bacon filled the room, thick and cloying. They ate breakfast together and when they were finished, her mother grabbed her hand.
“I want you to go on home now,” she said.
Fern shook her head. “I can’t. Your feeling…what if I go and you then you…?”
Her mother shrugged. “So what if I do?”
That hushed her. Fern didn’t know how to respond. Her mother could die just as well with her sitting right there as she could with her seven states away. Her presence made no difference. Not in this battle. She let her eyes fall to the table. It was the same one she’d grown up with, pitted and marred here and there with old cigarette burns and coffee rings that had been cleaned and replaced so many times they had become part of the table’s finish.
“Come live with us,” Fern said. She jumped a little as she spoke, realizing the enormity of what she’d suggested, but it was the only thing she could say. She couldn’t leave her mother in this moldering house all by herself. Her aunts, her mother’s sisters, visited only enough to make sure her mother had what she needed to survive. She didn’t blame them, but her mother deserved better. Fern’s brother lived only ten miles away, but had washed his hands of the whole situation when he’d realized just how hard it was to take care of a semi-disabled woman who lived in a decrepit farmhouse by herself.
Payton, Fern thought. Payton wouldn’t like this. She stood, her face set. If she’d looked in a mirror she would have seen the ghost of her mother’s own expression on her face. She would have known what she would look like in thirty years. She didn’t look in a mirror. She picked up the phone.
When she was done, she was almost in tears. Her mother watched, eyes still ringed with black circles, and shook her head.
“He doesn’t want me,” her mother said. She said it matter of fact, without surprise.
Fern laughed. “No. He does want you. That’s why I’m crying. He thinks you’ll die soon anyway and this way I’ll be able to start work again.”
Her mother stood and went to refill her coffee cup. “But, I won’t die soon. I’ll last long enough to see you married and my first grandchild born. Your man won’t want me underfoot for all that. I’m fine here. You go on home.”
“Mom, you’re sick. I can’t just leave.”
Her mother pulled herself straight and plucked at the stained nightgown she wore. “Maybe I just wanted some company. I was—what’d that doctor say—malingering. So, you just go on home and get back to your life. You’re not living here, Fern. You’re more dead than I am.”
The guilt and the shame that rolled up at those words nearly swamped Fern. She didn’t think her mother could see it, but she’d been wrong.
“It’s just, you don’t have any money for real food. I can’t cook anything for you here and there’s no air-conditioning or soft water, and the toilet backs up sometimes and I have to use a bucket to get it to flush, and my room. My room just isn’t right anymore. It feels resentful, like it doesn’t like the new, grown-up me.” Fern felt petty for complaining, ungrateful. It made her want to throw up.
Her mother threw back her head and laughed, a fresh, vibrant laugh. It was not the laugh of a sick woman. “Oh, I know. Do you think I don’t know? I’ve lived here for thirty years. It’s all right for an old woman. This house and me, we know each other. Go home, Fern. Now, I’m going back to bed to watch a movie.”
Her mother shuffled back into the living room to her hospitable bed. The springs creaked when she settled. From outside, Fern could hear the startling racket of a flock of sparrows as they scratched and scrabbled for the seed her mother threw out every day. For a moment, sitting there at the table, Fern felt an overwhelming surge of love for her mother. She rarely felt this anymore, as if by growing up she’d somehow put a cap on those emotions. They had there own place and that place was not her life anymore. Now those big emotions were for Payton and she treasured them because it proved that she could really feel.
She went into the living room and pulled the sheet up to her mother’s chest. “I love you, mom. I just wanted you to know that, whatever happens. You were the best mother a kid could have had.”
Her mother waved her hand. “Oh, don’t give me that nonsense. We were poor. You deserved a healthy, well-off mother.”
Fern shook her head. “No, that doesn’t matter now. I’ll be that woman and it doesn’t matter. I love you. You call me if you want to come live with us. It’ll be fine.”
Her mother fixed her eyes on the television and shook her head. “My place is here, but thank you. I love you too,” she said, just as Fern knew she would.
Fern called the airlines that afternoon and booked a ticket for the next week. Then she called her aunts and asked if any of them would agree to be power of attorney. The oldest agreed. Later, Fern called and cashed in her life insurance policy that her mother had been paying ten dollars a month on for thirty years. The cash in value was almost four thousand dollars. She didn’t know why she did these things, or at least she didn’t want to admit to herself that she knew why. If Payton had been there and asked, she would have told him she had a feeling of something, she just didn’t know what.
The next day she awoke, planning to head into town and get the groceries to make a special dinner. The house was quiet, but restless. There was no breeze and the humidity was so thick she thought she could see it hanging in the air out of the corner of her eye. It was oppressive and made it hard to breath. Her bare feet made sucking sounds as she walked down the worn wooden stairs.
She looked in the living room and left. Her mother was sleeping. The grocery trip went quickly. She’d get her mother to put her teeth back in and then they’d have grilled salmon and asparagus with cheesecake for desert. She hauled the groceries into the house, expecting her mother to come see what she’d bought, but there was nothing. The television wasn’t on, and neither were any of the fans.
Fern stood there at the counter and listened to her heartbeat in her chest. It was a lonely sound. Pale sunshine spilled across the living room floor when it should have been dark. Her mother always blocked off the windows during the day in the summertime. It helped hold in the cooler night air. Standing there, too afraid to move lest she broke the stillness that had settled around her, she remembered a friend referring to the house as a bat cave in the summertime. They had laughed together, but now, staring at that rebel ray of light, it wasn’t funny. Fern walked into the living room and looked at her mother. She was in the same position she’d been when Fern left that morning.
She didn’t have to go over and lay her ear against her mother’s mouth to see if she was still breathing. Death had a presence all its own. It felt sticky and heavy like the humidity. Fern stood there for a few moments and then picked up the phone. She held it for a few minutes and then went and got the phone book. She tried searching for “death,” but all she came up with was day spas and decals.
She didn’t know if she was supposed to call the police or an ambulance or a hearse. She sat there, thinking it through, and finally just called Payton.
“I’ve got a question. It’s kind of weird. Huh? Yeah, well, listen to my question. Who do you call when someone just dies? You call the police if there’s a murder, but what if someone dies in their sleep?” She listened for a few moments, letting Payton’s hushed murmur slide in one ear and out the other. She had other concerns. She would allow herself to be comforted later. “Well? Who do I call? I’ve never heard anyone talk about this before.”
She hung up after a few minutes and sat there some more. Payton had told her to call a mortician and do what he or she said. Fern didn’t want to do this. She felt like she was in school again and this was a test. With her mother’s body behind her and the expectant hush that had fallen over the house, she felt an immense pressure to do the right thing.
Finally, she just called her oldest aunt and let her deal with it. Then she made her dinner. When the people came to take her mother away, she was sitting down to her meal alone. She imagined her mother’s compliments on the food, imagined how she would wave them away. They didn’t really count from a woman who’d eaten hotdogs, hamburger helper, and mac and cheese for most of her adult life. She would tell her mother she lacked perspective, but in a nice way, a way that would make her mother laugh.
When Payton called later that night to tell her he was at the airport, she let herself cry a little. The grief was there, buried in her chest like a lump of granite, but it was a manageable thing. She’d spent most of her grief for her mother while she was still living and now, after her death, there just wasn’t much left. There was love, but no grief, and she supposed that was a good thing.
The trip home was just as regular as the trip there had been, but this time she sat next to a man that wore too much cologne and tried to peek down her blouse every few minutes. She pulled her carry-on into her lap as protection and began rifling through it. When she emerged a few moments later holding a letter with her name written in her mother’s familiar script on the front, she forgot all about the peeping tom next to her. The paper held her mother’s scent in its folds: moldy house and bubblegum Fixident. It made her smile. She broke the letter’s seal with steady hands and read:
Dear Fern,
I’ve read about letters like this in your old books. (Did you know I read them all? Just to know what was so damned interesting about them). Letters that begin with “if you’re reading this I’m dead.” Well, I’m dead, and I’m glad. It gets so that a person starts to hate feeling like a burden. I was always asking someone for something and then I asked you to come home for awhile and you did, just like I knew you would. I know your man didn’t want you to come, that he took no stock in my special feeling, but you came anyway, and that’s all that matters. And I’m writing to tell you that this is the end of that. You’ve got no reason to feel guilty. It’s not right for a daughter to be worried about how she was going to support her mother. You’ve got your own life and I had my life and now it’s done.
You’re sleeping upstairs right now in that bed that’s two sizes too small in your room that doesn’t feel right anymore. I wanted to explain about that. You know that your room didn’t get smaller. You’ve been to college. You’re probably fixing my grammar right now even as you read this. That’s alright too. What I mean is that your room didn’t smaller, you got bigger. Again, I know you know that as well, but I want you to really think about it. We like to think as children that it’s impossible to outgrow our parents. We can’t even imagine thinking thoughts like that, but it’s true. You outgrew me, Fern, and you’re bigger and more grown up than I ever was. I’m not ashamed of that. Not at all. I’m proud, and I want you to be proud to. Not of me, that would be silly, but of yourself. Now you can go to sleep at night and know that I’m safe, and that’s just fine with me.
Mom
Fern put the letter back in her bag and did as her mother asked. She really thought about being bigger, about being grown-up. She thought of how blasphemous it felt knowing she’d outgrown her own mother. And then? She didn’t think at all. The important thoughts had already been thought, and that was alright with her.
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