Still Life with Tornado(10)

She sits back down. “I always felt bad for that. I should have made sure you were covered up.”

“It healed,” I say, thinking of my thick skin.

“Still.”

“That’s when we lost Bruce,” I say.

“We didn’t lose Bruce.”

“I mean, that’s when he left. After that.”

“Was it?” she asks. I want to call her out on playing stupid. How does a mother forget the last time she saw her own son? Maybe he’s an amputated ghost limb that still itches—but it’s not like a person forgets the day they lost the limb. “Why the sudden fascination with Bruce?”

“Dunno,” I say. I’m good at playing stupid, too.

“He’s fine,” she says. She takes a slurp of her coffee and puts the cup down too loudly.

“He doesn’t call.”

“He doesn’t need to call. He’s a grown man.”

“But he’s still my brother,” I say. “He doesn’t even call on my birthday.”

“We can’t do anything about it,” she says, and she does that thing with her eyelids where they flutter in condescension. Adults: quick to flutter their eyelids, slow to do anything about it.

“I want to call him.”

“Good luck finding his number,” she says.

“You seem mad,” I say.

She sighs. “I don’t want to wake up to another message from the school. I don’t want you to be expelled. There’s only three and a half weeks left.”

She’s talking about school. I’m talking about bigger things. Lost brothers that itch even though they’ve been gone for six years. “I’m sorry.”

“Can’t you just go back to school and make up the work?” she asks.

“I can’t.”

“You’re sixteen,” she says. “You were doing so well. Something happened and you won’t tell me.”

“Nothing happened.”

This is when I realize how much I lie. Real artists don’t lie this much.





HELEN’S NOT BULLSHITTING



The most common cause of amputation isn’t trauma—IEDs in wars or car wrecks—despite what you’d think from movies or other bullshit. It’s diabetes, peripheral arterial disease—the vascular shit—that lands feet in medical waste bags on the pathologist’s desk with a little slip attached. We don’t amputate in the ER, but I’ve seen enough ruined, ulcerated feet to know what’ll happen when we send some poor old grandmother who can’t afford her insulin upstairs for a surgical consultation. They usually arrive three weeks late from the nursing homes because the patient-to-nurse ratio at those places is appalling. Like 30:1 sometimes. I get them in double diapers, unwashed, bedsores that drill right into bone. When I was in my thirties I wrote into my will that I didn’t ever want to go to a nursing home. I had two kids. One of them could take care of me somehow, I figured. Except now it was just Sarah.

? ? ?

We named Sarah after her father’s grandmother. Chet’s grandmother was a good woman and was always kind to me, which is more than I can say about his mother.

Gram Sarah was ninety-seven years old when she died. Had all her limbs and never had to go to a nursing home because she was sharp right up to the end—in her own old tiny brick trinity row house in Old City, with neighbors who’d look in on her. She outlived her two kids and her husband and pretty much everyone she ever knew. Except us.

When she died, I was there and Chet couldn’t make it fast enough from work.

She said, “Where’s Chet?”

“He’s coming. He left work a few minutes ago.”

“Boy was never on time for shit,” she whispered.

“He still oversleeps,” I said, and we both laughed slow, like old Southern women in movies laugh. I knew she was dying, though. I’ve seen people die a thousand times. She knew she was dying, too.

She coughed. “I thought you two were splitting up.”

“Where’d you hear that?” I asked.

“Same place I heard you haven’t slept in the same bed for a year,” she said.

I said, “We work different shifts.”

Her chest rattled. “Bullshitting a woman on her deathbed is not you, Helen.”

I felt bad talking about this. The woman was dying.

“Let’s not talk about sad things now.”

We sat in quiet for a minute and she wasn’t in any pain. I think that’s fair. After ninety-seven years on the planet, I think it’s fair to die with no pain. I held her hand because I knew she was at the end. Her breathing was mixed with the snoring sound of death. The rattle. Her eyes were closed and she still had a small grin on her mouth because Gram Sarah was destined to die with that grin.

She opened her eyes and whispered, “Don’t die unhappy.”

I leaned close to her ear and said, “I won’t.”

“You could die tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“Chet wasn’t ever anything compared to you.” She took in two short, difficult breaths. “Boy never had dedication to shit.” And then she died.

She didn’t know I was pregnant. I didn’t want to tell her I was pregnant because it would make the whole conversation even more depressing.