photo accompanied by a poor excuse for why he couldn’ t be in her life. I climbed into my adopted mother’ s minivan furious.
“ He looks like Captain Ahab,” I spat, fastening myself in quickly as we pulled out of the meter spot. Her tight, sad smile reflected my frustration.“ Why can’ t she just be alone? She was working. She was happy. She wasn’ t drinking anymore.” My eyes filled with tears that I refused to let fall. I wasn’ t stupid. I was thirteen. Two sessions of D. A. R. E. had taught me that every brain cell in my mother’ s head was slowly fading, that she was damaging her liver, that she was going to die.
After her death, I thought about looking Bill up. I wondered if he had still talked to her, if he worried about her. My first job after college was at a school just past his house, and every time I drove there in the 7:30 a. m. dew, I considered turning down his street and looking for the white house with the green awning. What would I say? Would he even still be there? Surely, he would still have the crocheted blankets draped on the couches. Perhaps he would be the one person who would understand all that I had lost.
I told Jenn about this idea after the funeral, when Sal retreated with his hooker friend into a sunken, grey Oldsmobile.“ Bill?” She asked, watching as black smoke poured out of the exhaust pipe, and the car rumbled out of sight.“ You mean the one who stole all her SSI checks?”
~
The night my mom told me I“ saved” her started like so many others in our U-block across from the golf course: someone had a case of beer, and someone else had a radio. It was late summer, I was five-and-a-half, and all along the ribbon of shared grass behind our row houses, the neighbors were gathering. They collected around Miss Caroline’ s big green cable box, beer cans in hand, smoke signals issuing from their mouths and fading above their heads.
The sky went from light blue to turquoise, and then my favorite, a blue so clear and deep that it seemed we could see forever. My mom called me in, to go up to bed, but I ran upstairs and went to my window instead. My room had the best view of the house— I could see our yard, Miss Caroline’ s and Ricky’ s, and the graveyard that ran behind all the houses. In the distance, soft round mountains rose and fell like waves, tinted blue by distance. I watched the party linger on, the beer case slowly depleted, and the box eventually used to collect all the empty cans before everyone turned in for the night. Someone turned off the radio, and I heard the back door slap shut.
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