Future Home of the Living God(7)
“Soooo,” she says.
“This is your sister,” says birth mom, “the one I told you about last night.”
“Oh, nobody?” Little Mary smiles at us, dreamily vicious. Her teeth look sharpened—could they be? Her canines are a bit longer than her incisors and very white against the black lipstick, like elegant fangs. She’s pretty, like her mom, prettier than me, I think, instantly doing that thing girls do. Who’s prettier. I suppose sisters compare all of the time and right at this minute I am glad I didn’t have a sister, ever before, in my life. I’m glad I didn’t have this mom and this family, except maybe the grandma. I think of Glen and Sera and all that we share, and tears now do come into my eyes. I turn to my birth mom and I reach over. I hold her fingers and then warmly grasp her whole hand in mine.
“It’s all right, Sweetie. Really, it’s all right,” I say, with the sincerest note that I can muster in my voice. “Just looking at Little Mary I can tell what a good mom you would have been.”
*
My sister Mary is sixteen and it turns out, after Mary leaves, and we really start to talk, it turns out that Sweetie believes that, although she isn’t doing very well in school, Little Mary has no drug habit, she does not abuse alcohol nor does she smoke. Sweetie actually shakes her head, marveling.
“I know you meant your comment as sarcastic, you know, ironic, what have you. Good mom. I know I’m not the best mom. I know that. But Little Mary’s really doing good. She’s the only girl who doesn’t fuck and do drugs in her whole class. She says that she’s about to crack.”
“Crack? And who can blame her.” I swallow the urge to fall down on the floor and laugh and thank every saint in the book, once again, for the life I’ve had. “It’s hard to be the only sober one at the party. It’s hard to be the sole intelligence.”
We sip tea quietly for a while, contemplating the difficulties of Little Mary’s social life. Of course, as soon as I think about a sole intelligence I imagine whoever the last of our species will be . . . that last person contending with all of the known and the unknown; for all I know that last person might be you. Or me. I find that I might be unusually long lived, like Grandma. Or maybe, darker thought, the last of the species will be Little Mary.
“Can she talk to Eddy?” I ask. “Is he an understanding type of guy?”
Sweetie shakes her head, a bunch of shakes, real quick, a gesture I’m beginning to like as it jiggles her messy upsweep in a pleasant way. “Them two had a helluva fight the other day and traumatized us all. Eddy caught Little Mary hauling all the Sudafed from the Pumper storage to the car—she let him catch her, of course. A cry for help. Hey, though, she don’t do the stuff, but she was selling it behind our backs to some meth kid.”
“Sure,” I say, “yeah, so Eddy. What about him?”
“Eddy,” says Sweetie, and her face goes soft while Grandma’s goes sharp. “My Eddy.” She gives that happy shudder. “Meow!” She makes a little claw of her fingers and she and Grandma laugh.
“So what’s his life story?” I ask, trying to push things along. I don’t really want to picture what that little meow means.
“Oh, he’s smart, yeah, he’s got the brains. He went to Dartmouth for his undergrad and then Harvard for his Ph.D. in education. When he came back, he tried to fix the school system on the reservation, but so, well”—now Sweetie’s face turns sad, and her whole look fills with sorrow—“the attempt gave him a breakdown. After he returned to this reality, he decided to open up a business, support his family that way, I mean us. He ran for tribal council, and he’s writing a book. He is up to over three thousand pages now.”
Sweetie purses her lips and indicates a door in the wall, a closet. “It’s in there. Drafts of his manuscript, which is all about me. He follows me everywhere I go and watches all that I do.”
“Where is he, then? Why isn’t he here, witnessing this historic meeting? You and me?”
“Well, he’s gotta mind the store,” says Sweetie. “Besides, I am supposed to, well, I do have something on my agenda today. I’m giving a presentation to the tribal council. After that meeting, we’re gonna lay sod.” Then, shyly, she says, “Wanna come?”
I’m feeling better now, getting the hang of being here, and although I’ve got the most awkward part of the meeting out of the way, I haven’t got to the part where I pump the family for genetic information. But as soon as I’ve got that, I’m leaving. Getting out of Dodge, so to speak, the reservation version of it anyway.
“What’s the meeting for? And the sod?”
“For the shrine. Not the one in our yard. A shrine for Kateri, you know?”
“Yeah, I do. Really?”
Sweetie tells me about the wayside shrine that she and twenty other parishioners have decided to erect at a place on the reservation where people swear they have seen an apparition three times in the past four years. She says that people think it may be Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks, patron saint of Native people. Again, here’s that congruence. Catholic stuff. After we finish our tea, the two of us put Grandma down to sleep on a little bed stuck in one corner, piled high with quilts. Then we get into my Honda and drive over to the tribal offices.