“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.