Sam knew she’d be home. Brandi Rose stayed home most afternoons, ever since she sought early retirement and workman’s comp for fibromyalgia—a mysterious rambling pain that assaulted her extremities. Autry, her current boyfriend, took care of her most days.
Sure, Austin had a few kitschy trailer parks, cutesy chrome Airstreams that were rejiggered as Airbnbs or else food trucks and cozy bars where the cocktails cost as much as Sam’s pants. Sam’s mom’s place was nothing like that. The rooms were drafty and the neighbors rowdy, and they only got rowdier when they drank. Which was often.
Sam could see her car in the driveway and rang the bell.
Autry answered. “Sam!” he said, and slapped him on the back. “Honey, it’s Sam.” Autry was a sometime auto mechanic who was wearing his usual outfit of an undershirt, cargo shorts, and beer in his hand. He was tanned and slender through the limbs with a bowling ball of a booze gut. Autry was a simple happy guy. Though if he put up with Brandi Rose, something had to be going on with him.
Sam followed him into the living room to see that his mother hadn’t stirred from her usual spot right in front of the TV. Brandi Rose was angry. Her absorption in her TV watching and the abject lack of effort to glance over betrayed her sentiments. It took real work to ignore someone in such close quarters.
She was smoking a cigarette and drinking a tall glass of bourbon with an iced tea floater. He remembered when he was younger, how Brandi Rose had made the effort to hide the handles of Ten High whiskey. That was, until he’d partially melted a plastic bottle heating up a pizza. Brandi kept them stashed in different places in the house, and one hiding place was the roomy metal drawer under the oven. It had ruined the frozen pizza he’d paid for with the last of his sofa change. Sam left the gnarled, blackened bottle in the sink for her to see. He’d wanted her to be embarrassed. Brandi Rose had started drinking in the open after that.
The screen door opened and clanged shut, signaling another of Autry’s walks. That man loved his constitutionals. Talk on the block was that he never wandered far, since he frequently entertained Mrs. Packer, whose husband went to get TP one morning and never returned.
“Hey, Mom,” he said. She kept her eyes glued to the demonstration on induction ovens. You could cook a whole chicken—a frozen one—in under fifteen minutes.
The antique, cordless phone was in the pocket of her beige dressing gown. It was eerie. It was as if someone dumped amber over her head like the slime on children’s TV shows and preserved her whole. Nothing had changed since he’d left. Kicking her son out of her life hadn’t made a lick of difference.
Sam felt sweat sting at his armpits. He tried to look at something that wasn’t depressing. Like the dark brown stain on the carpet that resembled the head of fat Elvis in profile. Or the piles of catalogs that lay collapsed at her feet. Sam slowed his breathing. What he was tempted to do was make a movie about his mom. It would cover depression, addiction, and the poison it becomes when you don’t get a handle on any of it.
Sam felt strangely calmer thinking about filming her. Sad yet calm. Distant.
“I made you something.” He placed the Christmas tin of fresh cookies in her lap. The tin with gold and white reindeer was hers from when she was a kid. It used to be Sam’s stash box, and he’d had to wash it twice to scrub out the stink of burnt weed. “Prune, your favorite.”
“You know I almost had to sell the house,” Brandi Rose said, finally diverting her attention from the screen. When Sam was very young he remembered how her mouth would move along to the parts of the ads she knew by heart. “Me and Autry were almost homeless after the stunt you pulled.”
The stunt he pulled was that he called fraud protection on the credit cards she’d opened in his name.
Sam remembered the bills. His mother had spent four hundred dollars on anti-aging face peels that had literal diamonds in it. Not figurative. Literal diamonds.
Finally, Brandi Rose looked at her son.
Her eyes were dead. Sunken. Her hair had been dark once, but as she got older she’d dyed it a brassy, orangey-red. He realized it was exactly the same color as her bronzed skin. The way her cheeks had collapsed into jowls gave her chin and mouth the hinged appearance of a ventriloquist’s dummy’s. Brandi Rose’s thin lips puckered in disgust at him, as if she’d swallowed a bug.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Sam said. There was no sense in trying to explain to her that his credit was ruined. That as it stood it was near impossible for him to sign a lease or get loans for school.
“Selfish,” she said, turning back to the TV. “What good are cookies when it’s cold outside and I don’t have a house?”
Sam considered telling her that a residence you could put wheels on didn’t quite qualify as a house, and that as far as winters went she could do a lot worse than Texas.
“Share them with Autry,” Sam said. “Autry knows his way around a cookie.”
His mother didn’t say anything else. Sam turned his attention to the magical oven that was cool to the touch and made fruit leather for the kids and if you ordered now you could get a second for your RV half off. Sam was desperate to reach out and place a hand lightly on her shoulder. He knew exactly how the fuzziness of the robe would feel on his palm, the warmth and familiarity. Yet he also knew that if she flinched or pulled away he’d be devastated.
“All right,” he said brightly, kissing his mother on the head. “It’s nice to see you, Mama. Happy holidays.”
Sam couldn’t believe Thanksgiving was a week out.
There were dirty dishes in the sink, as usual. Sam thought about washing them and tidying up, maybe cooking something nutritious for her to eat. But it wouldn’t make a dent in the guilt he felt or in her resentment. There was a time when he’d thought he could pull them out of this. That he would man up and rescue her and move them someplace nice. But even if he freed her from the trailer, there was nothing he could do about the raging inside-person’s headache you get when you watch TV for too many hours in a row and her compulsion to do only that.
“I love you,” he whispered to the dishes, and let himself out.
? ? ?
When Sam got back to House, Jude was waiting for him on the porch swing.
“Hey!” he said brightly.
“Hey,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he responded.
“I can see that.” Jude extended her long legs forward to see how far the porch swing pitched back. “You look like hell.”
“I went to see my mom,” he said, taking a seat next to her. “Which is why the next order of business is to smoke this.” He held up a cigarette.
“Jeez, that good, huh?”
Sam sighed.
“Did you tell her Fraser’s granddaughter says hi?” Jude nudged him in the ribs.
“Who the hell is Fraser?” Sam laughed dryly and lit his smoke when he realized. “You know I only ever knew him as Mr. Lange?”
“Wow,” breathed Jude. “That’s twisted. Okay, so I’ve come to a conclusion,” she told him.
“Sounds fascinating.”
“Promise not to get mad?” Jude cast a sidelong glance at him.
“Nope.”
She laughed. “Are you in love with Penny?”
“How is that a conclusion? That’s a question.”
Jude rolled her eyes. “She says she’s in love with you.”
“She did not.”
“Fine, she didn’t say those exact words, but it’s the only explanation. She’s in love with you.”
“Stop,” he said. “You know she’s inscrutable. You ever notice how she seems furious when she’s super excited?”
Jude laughed. “Or when she’s actually furious and starts bawling? That’s a classic,” she responded.
Sam thought about the last time he’d seen her cry. How he’d wanted to place her in a bubble and firebomb everything around her.
“So it was you on her phone.”
Sam nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”