How High We Go in the Dark(34)

“Can I think this over?” I said.

Bryan shook his head, leaned over the table like he was going to grab me. My mother looked as if she was about to crumple like a sheet of paper.

“What is there to think about?” Bryan said, loud enough for the people at the other tables to hear and turn to look. “You were god knows where when Dad died. Figured you might give a shit this time.”

“You’re causing a commotion,” I said. “Don’t do this in front of Mom.”

“I’m causing a commotion?” Bryan stood and stepped outside of the dining bubble, holding open the flap for me to follow. I could see our waitress talking to the manager. “I thought there was a slim chance you might actually step up to help Mom, but if you can’t do that, then you need to leave.”

I turned to my mother, finally reached for her hands. They were unbelievably soft and delicate, like the skin of an infant, punctuated by a filigree of veins.

“I wish you would listen to your brother,” she said. Her voice had shriveled to a wisp.

“I’ll call you, okay?” I stood and kissed my mom on the cheek, half expecting her to pull away. She smelled like a medicine cabinet and wet wipes, rather than the menthol cigarettes she used to smoke when I got in trouble. She held tightly to my hands as I slipped away.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said. I pushed past my brother, who was still outside the bubble as if he were standing guard. “Thanks for dinner.” I sprinted toward the door before Bryan could say anything else. When I looked back, I saw my brother consoling our mother, who was crying into a napkin.

Between my day shifts of changing towels and rolling bodies to the crematorium, I liked to chill on the fire escape with my only floor mate, Val, a young widow who dressed like a 1960s flight attendant: scarves, pencil skirts, an aura of cigarette smoke. My boss, Mr. Fang, didn’t like us going out there and would always say during meetings, “You have to at least pretend like you care about these people. I can’t have you dangling off the side of the building with a bottle like some lowlife.” His hoity-toity sensibilities kept him away from me, usually—he didn’t like associating with people he considered low class if he could help it. I probably exuded no class in his eyes. Most of the time, Val and I were on the fire escape offering each other free therapy. This meant listening to Val wax poetic about why I continued to ignore Bryan’s calls and, more generally, why I was such a fucking screwup. But sometimes, usually on hump day, we’d hit happy hour with what little money we’d saved and treat ourselves like royalty.

The week after my family dinner we went to the Lumberyard Club, a former pool hall turned adult entertainment emporium. These days, the only industries that half thrived in this city dealt in sex, death, or the means to distribute those things on the internet. I ordered chicken wings and an IPA from a waitress named Ambrosia dressed like Princess Leia in that purple-and-gold bikini from Return of the Jedi.

“Den,” Val said, short for Dennis. Also: Den of iniquity. Den of despair. A den, she told me once, was a place where things just settled in their own filth. “Have you still not decided what to do about your mother?”

“Val, what about him?” I said, changing the subject, pointing to Hung Solo gyrating his hips across the room. I guess it was Star Wars night. She rolled her eyes. “Look, I’m still getting my ducks in a row. I don’t even have a suitcase anymore. I can’t just up and leave. I’m needed at the hotel.”

“I think you’re full of shit,” she said. “Your brother’s rich. Mr. Fang can replace you with some reject in a second. Unlike most of the other dipshits in this place, you actually have somewhere to go.”

“Don’t you have a sister in Philly?”

Val talked all high and mighty with her tiny-liberal-arts-college superiority, but she always got real silent when I turned the tables on her. Once, not long after she moved in a little over a year ago, she asked me to help hang a painting that her late husband had bought her—an impressionist portrait called Clara Searching, a mother and daughter digging in the mud by some Japanese artist named Miki. We’d been exchanging firsts—first album, first kiss, first toy we could remember getting during the holidays. I thought we were in a place where I could ask about her husband. She had a little shrine devoted to him in her television entertainment center—a bunch of photos, a watch, a pair of glasses, all surrounded by votive candles.

“Was this an anniversary gift or something?” I said.

“More like an ‘I want to seriously date you and you said you liked art once’ gift.”

“Sounds like a good guy,” I said, after we’d finally managed to hang the piece so it wasn’t tilting to one side. “How long were the two of you together?”

She got real quiet after that, pulled out her client files, began flipping through their family requests, something I was often too lazy to do. But I knew from the way her eyes were moving that she wasn’t really reading.

“I’m sorry if I . . .” I said a minute later, over the whir of the vacuum as she started straightening the room. I stood by the doorway, watching her tears drop onto the carpet before letting myself out. Val ignored me for weeks after that, and I never really knew what to say to her. When we passed each other in the halls, I’d complain about the water pressure. If I saw her at the employee continental breakfast that the hotel provided once a week, I’d hand her a plate of mini muffins. I knew she liked them, and they tended to run out.