“I know,” I said. Our eyes met, and I thought of the night before, as I lay in bed and heard the door to my room softly creak open. I knew it was her, but I remained still, pretending to sleep. She stood there for a long time—so long that I think I drifted off before she left. And I didn’t know if it was my imagination, or if I really did hear her sniffling. Crying. Now I wondered if maybe there was something she was trying to muster up the courage to say, some profound mother-daughter moment. Or at least an acknowledgment of her poor mothering skills where we’d laugh and say something banal like “Well, at least we survived, right?”
But sitting on the couch, she just inhaled her cigarette again and said: “So, I’m just saying, you don’t have to be so bitchy.”
Oh.
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I took another cookie out of the sleeve and put it in my mouth and tried not to think about how much I hated my mother. And how hating her made me feel so guilty that I hated myself.
She sighed, blowing out smoke. “Sure you don’t want to come with me?” she said, even though she knew the answer. To be fair, she had asked multiple times over the past few weeks in different ways. Lenny has plenty of space. You could probably have a whole guesthouse to yourself. Won’t you be lonely here all by yourself? I laughed at that last one—maybe it was some innate biology of being a teenager, but I couldn’t wait to be away from my mother.
“I’m sure,” I said, flipping a page.
We spent the last hour we’d ever spend together in silence—her chain-smoking, me pretending to be lost in my book. And then when the doorbell rang, announcing the arrival of her driver, she jumped up, patted her hair, and looked at me one last time. “Off I go,” she said.
I nodded. I wanted to tell her that she looked nice, but the words got caught in my throat.
She picked up her suitcase and left, the door easing shut behind her.
And there I sat, a book in my lap and an empty plastic cookie sleeve beside me. Half a cigarette was still smoldering in the ashtray on the coffee table, and I had a strong urge to pick it up. Put my lips to it—even though I knew it could kill me. Inhale my mother one last time.
But I didn’t. I just watched it burn.
And now, nine years later, my mother is dead.
The news isn’t out of nowhere, in the sense that about ten months ago, she mentioned that a suspicious scab on her scalp that refused to heal had been determined to be melanoma. She laugh-coughed and said, “Always thought it would be my lungs that got me.”
But Mom had a tendency to be overdramatic—like the time she got a mosquito bite, became convinced she had West Nile, and lay supine on the couch for three days—and I couldn’t be certain whether her pronouncement in subsequent months that she was dying was an actual diagnosis from a doctor or one of her elaborate schemes for attention.
Turns out, it was the former.
“The funeral is on Thursday,” Lenny says. “Would you like me to send a driver?”
The funeral. In Long Island. It feels as though a giant fist has reached into my chest and started squeezing. Tighter and tighter until there’s no air left at all. Is this what the beginning of grief feels like? Am I already grieving her? Or is it the thought of leaving the house that compresses my vital organs? I don’t know.
What I do know is that I don’t want to go—that I haven’t wanted to go anywhere for nine years—but saying it out loud would make me a terrible person. Who doesn’t go to their own mother’s funeral?
I also know it’s possible Mom’s Pontiac that’s been sitting in the driveway for nine years wouldn’t make the trip.
I gulp for air, hoping Lenny can’t hear the effort it’s taking me to breathe.
Finally, I answer: “You don’t need to send a driver,” I say. “I’ll figure it out.”
There’s a beat of silence.
“It starts at ten a.m. I’ll e-mail you the address,” Lenny says. And then I sense a shift in the air between us—a steeling of his voice, as though he’s running a board meeting and not discussing his dead wife with the stepdaughter he never claimed. “I know it may be an inappropriate time to discuss this, but I wanted to let you know your mother has left you the house, free and clear—I’ve paid off the balance of your mortgage and I’ll be transferring the deed—as well as her car, if you still have it. But, well, the checks she was sending you . . . I thought I should tell you as soon as possible that I won’t be continuing that specific tradition, so you’ll need to make other, ah . . . arrangements.”
My cheeks redden at the mention of my freeloading, and I have the urge to hang up the phone. I feel like a loser. Like those thirty-year-old men who live in the basement of their parents’ house, their mothers still washing their drawers and serving them grilled cheese with the crusts cut off. And I guess in a way, I am.
The first check arrived a week after she left.
I set it on the kitchen table and stared at it for three days every time I passed it. I had every intention of throwing it away. Maybe Mom wanted to live off Lenny’s money for the rest of her life, but I wasn’t interested.
And then the electricity bill came. And then the water. And then the mortgage.
I cashed the check.
I was eighteen and jobless and still trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. Surely it involved some sort of employment and college education. So I swore to myself this would be the only time. That I wouldn’t take any more money.
When the next check came, three weeks later, I still didn’t have a job, but I didn’t feel like leaving the house to cash it, so I thought that would be the end of it. But on a break from an intense game of Bejeweled on the computer, I did a quick online search and learned that I could just mail the check into the bank and the money would magically show up in my account.
And then, as I returned to clicking on colorful gemstones and watching them satisfyingly disappear, I wondered what else I could do without leaving home.
Turns out, a lot.
It became sort of a game—a challenge to see what I could accomplish while sitting in my pajamas.
Groceries? Fresh Direct delivers.
College? I got an English degree in eighteen months from one of those online outfits. I’m not sure how legit it is, but the piece of paper they sent me is real enough. I wanted to keep going, get a master’s, maybe a PhD, but $400 per credit hour was depleting my already stretched budget, so I started taking a handful of the classes Harvard offers for free online every semester. Free. Makes you wonder why all those geniuses are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for their Ivy League education.
Dentist? Floss regularly and brush after every meal. I haven’t had so much as a toothache, and I chalk it up to my good dental habits. And I’ve started to think that maybe dentistry is a racket.