Winter Loon(12)

The word wrung out of my tongue and took the shape of a question behind my teeth. Carefully, I let it escape my lips on a tiny bubble. “Mom?” It came out again, wet and choked and pleading. “Mama.” And finally, one last time, the life sucked out of it. I slipped below the surface and let the soap sting my eyes and fill my mouth. I stayed under as long as my lungs would allow, then came up for air because I could.

Hazy, boiled, and medicine drunk, I crawled back into my mother’s bed. Ruby found me there, hours later. She poked at my shoulder. “You got to be kidding me. Up. Now.” Had I forgotten to drain the tub, turn off the water? Was she looking for the medicine bottle I’d emptied and kicked under the bed? I found her in the kitchen, hands on the high waistband of her work pants. I’d spilled sugar on the floor and left the bread and butter out on the counter. She reached up to me and whacked the back of my head with a wooden spoon. “I’ve been wringing chicken necks all day long, and this is what I come home to? You will pull your weight around here, Wes. You hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Lucky for you it’s winter or the place’d be crawling with ants. Now, clean up after yourself,” she said. “I got to go get changed. I smell like the chicken coop.”





CHAPTER 4

THE SECOND NIGHT, I had a horrible dream. My eyes were popped open but I was crouched in complete darkness, and all sounds were muffled like the cotton-stuffed quiet of hands cupping ears. At first, I thought I was dead, but then I realized I was alive but in a grocery box, the flaps taped closed. When I opened my mouth to scream, water cascaded over my lips, filling the box, rising over my ankles. I woke in my mother’s bed, drenched in sweat. I’d been afraid to even ask about the things from the back seat. I had no idea what had been salvaged from all that had been lost.

Ruby was in the kitchen, cranking a hunk of roast through the meat grinder. “What do you mean ‘your stuff’?”

“The stuff from the cabin. From town. Our stuff. It was in the back seat.”

She jammed the ends of celery into the grinder to follow the wormy ribbons into the bowl. “You got your box. The clothes and such. Gip saw to that.”

“I mean the other stuff. Mom’s things.”

“Gip took most of it to the Commodity Center yesterday. What would you want with that old stuff anyhow?”

“Did you at least go through it? Did you even look at it?”

“Filled with bad memories.” She crammed an onion into the metal cone and wiped her eyes.

“Not for me, it wasn’t. That wasn’t yours to decide. So what belongs to me, huh? I lose everything, is that it?”

“You watch your tone with me, you hear? Gip thought it best we be rid of the lot.” She unclamped the grinder from the countertop and dropped it into the sink. “Plenty of her crap still in that bedroom, you want to get all sentimental about it.”

The fumes from the onion were getting to me now, and I pinched my nose as I inched closer, like I was moving in on a rattler. “Don’t you miss her?”

She wiped her hands on the apron she’d tied around her ribcage. “Can’t miss something you never really had. I don’t think she liked me much.” She stared out the kitchen window like she was looking at something other than the propane tank behind the trailer next door. “Get out of here now,” she said, returning to the kitchen, the gray sink water, the chipped countertop and worn linoleum floor. “You’re on my nerves.”

I rifled through the trash barrels alongside the shed next to the house. Nothing in there but food scraps and household waste. When Gip came home from work, I asked him the same thing I’d asked Ruby.

“What the Commodity Center didn’t want, I threw away there.”

“What about photo albums? What about her sewing projects? I can’t believe you’d just throw it all away.”

He cranked the recliner back. The rank smell from his stiff socks filled the room. “I have about had it with this. First Ruby and now you. She’s gone and so is all that shit, you hear? And that’s all it was. Pile of shit not worth a plug nickel. You got any more thoughts on the matter, you keep them to yourself.”

“So that’s it? If you can’t pawn it, you got no use for it. I get it.”

Gip snapped open his newspaper. He cleared his throat and swallowed hard enough I could hear the glob pass—his answer for me.



ALL WINTER LONG, I HOLED up in my mother’s bedroom staring at the walls, listening to scratched 45s on her old record player, waiting for my father to materialize from a promise. I found magazines stuffed under the bed, sweatshirts still in the dresser, even outfits hanging in the closet. I wasn’t sure how to carve out a space for myself in a room that didn’t belong to me.

I decided no one would notice if I emptied one drawer for myself. This began the process of dividing up the space in the back bedroom between my dead mother and me. I’d look at her picture and have one-sided conversations, so much so I thought I was going nuts. “I’ll take this one drawer and this side of the closet, and you keep these drawers and this section here.” No matter how much I encroached, there was just the one bed, and that I shared with her ghost.

For the most part, my grandparents and I stayed out of each other’s way, though I watched them for signs of the grief that revisited me each morning when I would wake up confused, not certain where I was, a teenage version of my mother staring at me. I would right myself on the earth first, then in the house, in the room and bed, then finally back out to a world where my mother no longer lived. I kept wondering if it was that same grief that was keeping my father away. I suppose I let myself imagine that his heart had grown fond of her in death and that he blamed me for taking away another chance to get it right. And so I began most days as I had that morning on the ice, curled up in disbelief, wondering how this thing had happened and who could explain it to me.