I hung on to that thought, something good coming my way. Woke up, got dressed, waited on the bus with Tommy and Swap-Out in total and complete darkness because it’s way down in the fall by now, and I’m thinking the whole time: Hang on Demon, today’s the day.
Mrs. Peggot had to know, being the only person that had ever baked me a cake, but I saw Maggot at school and he had no clue. I didn’t tell him either, because why make your best friend feel bad. Mr. Goins took attendance, and the announcements came over the intercom. And then they called my name, Damon Fields to the office. Yes! Somebody knew. My first thought was that Mom got permission to come take me out of school. Or maybe Mrs. Peggot had brought me something. Food, I hoped.
I got to the office and saw it was Miss Barks. Okay, she could bring me a package, no law against that. She looked upset though, and told me to come into the attendance office. She closed the door and sat down. I looked all around. If she’d brought me anything, I wasn’t seeing it. I was still happy though. Obviously something was up. I sat down and looked at her across the big desk.
“Damon,” she said, and then nothing. It was utterly weird. She did not look so good.
“I know,” I finally told her, starting to get it. “It’s okay.”
She stared at me. “What’s okay?”
“That Mom forgot my birthday.”
Her blue eyes went big and round. “Oh my God. Damon. When’s your birthday?”
“Today. But that’s fine, that you didn’t know. I’m used to it.”
Miss Barks looked horrified and started crying. I mean, boo-hoo, grabbing Kleenexes out of the box next to the pictures of the attendance officers’ kids. Nose blowing, black makeup running off her eyes. This was batshit.
“It’s really okay,” I told her. “I don’t even care. Okay?”
She kept shaking her head, blowing her nose. “No, Damon, I’m sorry. It’s not okay. I’m so, so sorry. It’s your mom.”
“What’s my mom?”
“It’s bad news.”
Of course this is the point where I just lose it, saying Goddamn it, I knew it, you don’t even have to tell me, she got drunk again or took pills and I won’t get to go home for Christmas because she is such a goddamn fucking fuckup!
I’m dropping f-bombs on Miss Barks left and right and she’s putting out her hand saying No, no. That I really don’t know. Listen.
Mom is dead.
No way to that, just, no.
I’ve got no more to say here, I’m getting up out of the chair to leave, like maybe I could go to the office and call Mom at work or I don’t know what, while Miss Barks keeps saying yes, she’s sorry but it’s true. She is so, so sorry. I told her I didn’t believe her, but if it was true, then what did she die of, and Miss Barks said oxy.
Believe it or not, I had to ask. What’s oxy?
16
Maybe life, or destiny, or Jesus if you really need to put somebody in charge of things, had finally flung down one too many rocks in Mom’s road and she called it a day. That’s option one. Or two, maybe she didn’t aim to die but miscalculated, to cap off her twenty-nine-year pileup of miscalculations, one of those of course being me. I could spend the rest of my life asking which it was, suicide or accident. No answer on that line.
I’ll grant it did not look random, her clocking in as my mom and then out again on the same date. To hit the mark like that would take some looking at the calendar and getting stuff together, you would think. And that’s the thing, Mom was not a planner. Plus I can’t be sure she even remembered it was my birthday. Anybody that knew her would agree on that.
But now they were all sure she’d mapped it out. The wake and funeral being throwdowns of shame for this girl that had gone and abandoned her child. Bring on the fake nose blows, the eye-rolling towards me and shutting up if I came close. The child mustn’t hear. Like I didn’t know whose fault this was. Mom had promised to stay clean as long as I was a good enough son to make it worth her while. Nobody was hiding that from me, I knew shit. I was eleven now.
Everything about the funeral was wrong. First of all being in a church, which I guess is required, but church and Mom were not friends. This went back to her earliest foster home with a preacher that mixed Bible verses with thrashings and worse, his special recipe for punishing bad little girls. Moral of the story, Mom always saying she wouldn’t be caught dead in a church. And here she was, losing every battle right to the end, in a white casket from Walmart, the other place she most hated to be. Jesus looking down from his picture on the wall, probably thinking, I don’t believe we’ve met, and girl, where’d you get that dress? It was this ugly flowered one somebody put her in. She was getting seen by half the town and buried in a stupid dress she only ever wore to work on Manager Appreciation Day, as her personal joke. Now she’d be wearing it for the boss-appreciating days in heaven, so the joke goes on. She probably would have wanted the dress Stoner bought her in rehab, but knowing him he saved the receipt and took it back.
Oh, but he was all tore up, was Mr. Stoner. I almost didn’t recognize him in a tie, plus reflector sunglasses for the extra effect. People lined up to pay their respects, with Stoner standing at the casket so the ladies could hug him and tell him what a tragedy to see her taken so young, and him a widower. Then they’d walk away and say whatever shit they actually thought of Mom. I could see their faces change, heads leaning together, hustling back to the living.
The church was not one the Peggots or any of us had gone to, except for some of Stoner’s family. Sinking River Baptist. Maybe that made it Stoner’s home court, but I didn’t see how it was his place to be up there beside the casket. He’d barely known Mom a year. It was me that had mopped her vomit and got her to bed and hunted up her car keys and got her to work on time, year in, year out. I could have put her together one last time, but nobody was asking.
The Peggots did what they could. Came and got me from school, fetched my church clothes from over at the house, kept me over the weekend. Mr. Peggot got out his electric trimmers and gave me a haircut, which I was needing in the worst way. Maggot even more so, like years overdue, but out of respect they called a truce this once and didn’t have a hair war. Which just made me sadder. Like, what had the world come to if Maggot and his pappaw couldn’t fight over a haircut. Some cousins came in from Norton for the funeral, and normally with a full house there would be yelling over TV channels and the last chicken wing, a certain amount of soft objects thrown around. But they were weirdly quiet. Eyeing me like I’d turned into a strange being that might break if you made any noise. Mrs. Peggot for her part kept feeding me and telling me how Mom loved me more than anything in this world, which was nice of her to say, even if I was thinking at the time: Not really. She loved her dope buzz more.
I had roads to travel before I would know it’s not that simple, the dope versus the person you love. That a craving can ratchet itself up and up inside a body and mind, at the same time that body’s strength for tolerating its favorite drug goes down and down. That the longer you’ve gone hurting between fixes, the higher the odds that you’ll reach too hard for the stars next time. That first big rush of relief could be your last. In the long run, that’s how I’ve come to picture Mom at the end: reaching as hard as her little body would stretch, trying to touch the blue sky, reaching for some peace. And getting it. If the grown-up version of me could have one chance at walking backwards into this story, part of me wishes I could sit down on the back pew with that pissed-off kid in his overly tight church clothes and Darkhawk attitude, and tell him: You think you’re giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you.