Thoughtful romantic that I am, I texted, “Hey, instead of flying first-class to Jamaica to drink rum out of coconuts and risk skin cancer roasting under the sun, how would you feel about instead spending nine hours wedged into a rented car with my dead dad’s ashes to go to Nashville and eat biscuits and gravy and listen to terrible country music for a week?” In hindsight I realize that that is a heavy fucking thing to ask a normal person with actual human feelings to accompany you to do. In my mind it was like Weekend at Bernie’s, but in real life she has a mom she talks to on the phone once or twice a week and isn’t used to my whole LOL I KILLED MY MOM shtick. This could be an emotional minefield.
I’m not sure that I can articulate this exactly the way I want to without alienating anybody cool, but my parents have been dead for so long that it almost isn’t even sad to me anymore. I can’t remember their voices or what they liked to put on their pizza; I couldn’t tell you what teams my dad rooted for or what shade of lipstick my mom liked to wear. They had no part in my adult life, so it’s not like I miss our Sunday dinners or their career guidance. And, if I’m being straight up, I know that if the trajectories of their lives had continued down the paths they were on, I’d be sharing a one-bedroom apartment with my mom and giving her a daily lottery ticket allowance while my dad spent every day passed out in a racetrack bathroom. My life would be the kind of sitcom that’s more situation than comedy, full of scenes in which my adorably confused mother called me in my sad beige cubicle five times to remind hapless me to pick up her cigarettes at the gas station where my potential love interest works on the way home from the office as my Stereotypical Angry Employer stands huffing over me, the audience collectively worried that this is the episode that my likable yet annoying and overbearing mother will get me fired. My dad would make a cameo during sweeps week, all dressed up in a Salvation Army suit, smelling like Old Spice, and make a lot of promises he had no intention of keeping, then disappear at the end of the episode not to be seen again until the season finale.
There would be lots of walking-home-late-in-the-rain montages in which I’d adjust my unwieldy purse and clumsily drop the bag of Doritos I am going to eat for my dinner on the floor. The gas station attendant—who is secretly handsome under his oil-stained cap and thick, out-of-style glasses—works up the nerve to do something about his long-standing crush. He won’t, though, at least not this season; he’ll just watch me with longing as I tuck the pack of Virginia Slims next to the sensible office heels in my workbag. “Ma’am?” he’ll call out as I reach the door, and everyone at home on the couch will totally lose their shit because maybe he really is going to put down his wrench and sweep me into his strong, alternator-fixing arms. I’ll turn around hopefully, because I have a secret crush on him, too, and, duh, I’ve never been kissed and an Aretha Franklin song is swelling to a crescendo in the background, and holy fuck I might finally get to have sex, but that hope shatters into a million pieces as I realize he’s just holding out a pack of matches to take home to my mom. Roll credits, sad trombone.
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That is for real what my life would be, shame-spiraling into spinsterhood as my mom made an ever-evolving list of reasons I could never move out and abandon her. We would definitely have too many of whatever pet we could both agree on, and she would sit smoking in her armchair and nodding along with Oprah while calling me constantly throughout the day to either (1) remind me of things she needed me to bring home, or (2) recount to me, in explicit detail, the happenings on her various beloved television programs. We’d be the type of people who had both of our names on household accounts. You know what I mean? Like when you get a new MasterCard and there’s that “Do you want to add an authorized user?” box, the one I currently check FUCK NO on while doing the untethered single-person running man. I would answer a begrudging yes and get a second card with Grace Irby on it. We would undoubtedly be sharing a bed, one that I definitely made the quilt for, and I would never post anything on Facebook other than videos of frolicking baby goats and inspirational infographics while wishing real hard every night that someone at the church would force her nonverbal son who is “too sensitive to get a job” to take me on a date to Baker’s Square and ask to touch my privates after. So I guess what I’m saying is that it’s okay they’re dead.
Our family tree is so goddamn sparse that if you shake it you’d probably start a fire. My dad was born in Mississippi but spent his formative years in Memphis, where he fathered my brothers before ditching them to move to Chicago and eventually meet my mother, who already had three young girl children of her own.
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I have neither seen nor spoken to either of my brothers since they attended my mom’s funeral in June 1998. That’s part of the reason I’ve never done anything with our dad, because it’s just my luck that the minute I decided to dump that asshole in a barbecue grill or sprinkle him outside the shady SRO he lived in for a while, one of them would turn up and be upset that I hadn’t included him in the decision. Our father was terrible—he tried three times and still couldn’t get the kind and loving parenting thing down—but it still nagged at me that they might want to say good-bye or something. (My sisters don’t give a shit—he was the kind of jerk stepfather who yelled a lot about nothing and nailed the windows shut after they’d snuck out of them at night to go meet their boyfriends.) My brothers are not men who Facebook. They are not gentlemen who tweet. Once every couple of years, I will do some lightweight Google sleuthing and call the first handful of phone numbers I run across, but they have all led to dead ends. The last time I was in Memphis I was fifteen and spent the entire time taking pictures of heartbroken women earnestly sobbing over Elvis’s grave with a disposable drugstore camera, not risking getting my head blown off going door to door asking “Are you my brother?” in unfamiliar neighborhoods.