Over Her Dead Body(31)

“Honey, come say hi to your aunt Winnie,” Marcela commanded, and the boy reluctantly got up and gave me a hug. Of course I’d been there the day he was born, back when I thought I’d be invited for every birthday and family holiday. But when the invitations never came, I took the hint and sent a card. I dared to imagine he kept them in a shoebox under his bed and looked at them from time to time, but of course I never asked.

“Normally he’d be at baseball practice,” Marcela felt compelled to explain, as if I might judge her for letting a perfectly fit seven-year-old boy watch TV after school. Appearances mattered to her. Obviously. She was a hairdresser.

“OK, ready!” my brother announced as he emerged from the bedroom with a duffel and a suit bag.

“You’re bringing a suit?” I asked. I hadn’t packed the female equivalent and suddenly got nervous.

“Just in case.” He shrugged. I felt a little better when I realized I could always borrow something from Mom; her closet was like the designers-only section at Bloomingdale’s, and she didn’t need any of those clothes where she was going.

“I hope you don’t mind I’m not coming,” Marcela said. “Charlie said she didn’t want a service, and I didn’t see the point of going just to . . . y’know . . .”

“Go and collect our money?” I offered. That was the only point of this trip—someone might as well say it.

“The boys are such a handful these days,” she said, ducking my crude remark.

“Hopefully we won’t be gone more than a few days,” Charlie told his wife.

“We’ll be fine,” she said kindly. And I had no doubt they would be. My sister-in-law was as competent as she was beautiful. And now about to be rich, too. I wasn’t so cynical to think she married my brother just for the money, though I always suspected it was part of his appeal. As for why he married her right out of college, at the tender age of twenty-two, that was an easy one. Dad had just died, and Mom had never been much of a mother figure; with the only parent who ever gave a shit gone, of course he tied his wagon to a woman who would steer it for him. Mom never liked her much—probably because they were too much alike. Of course that didn’t stop her from throwing them a lavish wedding and buying T-bills for their babies. God forbid she be perceived as anything less than a magnanimous matriarch.

There were hugs and kisses all around, and then we were off.

“Marcela looks good,” I said as we backed out of the driveway. “You’re a lucky bastard,” I added, because now was not the time to shit on his marriage. Maybe it wasn’t fair to blame Marcela for the chill that settled over our relationship, but Charlie and I had been thick as thieves before he married her. We’d spoken or texted almost daily. Ever since we were kids, Charlie was my first “happy birthday” and I was his. I didn’t blame him for putting his wife and kids first, but it would have been nice to have been a close second.

“We’ve had our struggles,” my brother confessed. “Y’know, financially.”

“Well, all that’s going to change now,” I said. And his response was refreshingly blunt.

“I’m counting on it.”





CHAPTER 24




* * *



CHARLIE


I had forgotten how depressing my mother’s house was. I suddenly wondered if it had come to resemble her, or the other way around.

As Winnie and I turned onto the narrow driveway, choked by trees and brambles and every kind of wickedness, the memories came flooding back. I tried to stop them, but they pummeled my skin like stinging rain. Finding my dad dead in his bed. Calling 9-1-1 but not being able to get the words out. Huddling with Winnie while we waited for paramedics, and then for Mom to come home. She was in Milan. It was a long wait.

Then came my mom’s long battle with depression. Calling her to find out she had been in bed all day, and the day before that. Except it wasn’t depression. She was ill. And it was curable. But only if her children would step up.

I wanted to help her. I sincerely did. But things were complicated. I was recently married with a brand-new baby. It was my body, but not my life. Not anymore. I was a father now. I had new responsibilities, new allegiances, new priorities. If Mom was trying to buy my loyalty by throwing me a lavish wedding, it backfired—because the wedding came with a bride, and she came with demands. In a cruel twist of irony, Mom’s extreme generosity made it impossible for me to be generous in return. She was disappointed in me, and so in my cowardice I avoided her. Over the years the space between us grew and grew until it became a perilous ravine with edges too jagged to bridge.

Nathan was waiting for us as we pulled up to the house. He looked defeated with his rumpled suit and unkempt hair and shoulders slumping like a tired old tree.

“Nathan, we can’t thank you enough for being here for her,” I said as I hugged him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. And his eyes welled with tears.

“We’re sorry, too,” Winnie said. “We know how horrible it is to walk in on what you walked in on.” Yes, Winnie did know. She was the one who found our dad white faced with his tongue hanging out. She was just seventeen. Mom told me her drinking that next year was normal for a senior in high school and had nothing to do with what had happened that day. But Mom had always had her head in the sand when it came to us.