“Oh,” my mother said. “How interesting.” I glanced at my phone for the first time since sitting down and felt Bryan’s eyes watching me. I checked my crypto holdings—fifty funerary inc tokens and 0.000068 Bitcoin.
“I’m buying, by the way,” Bryan said, clearly annoyed.
I ordered another Manhattan and concentrated on my food.
When our after-dinner coffee arrived, my mom gave Bryan a pointed look. Here we go.
“So, here’s the situation,” he said. “Mom’s real sick. We thought we got all the cancer cells a few years ago, but there are spots all over her lungs. We need help, Dennis. At home.”
“Okay, but what about a home aide or nurse?”
“Yeah, we’ve tried those. We’re paying out the nose for those. We were hoping you’d help out here. You weren’t around when Dad died.”
“I don’t like strangers in the house, poking around my things,” my mom said.
“So, I’d live in your house?” I asked.
“That’s the idea,” Bryan said.
“You’d have your own area,” my mom said. She leaned over the table, held out her hands, palms facing upward as if she wanted me to hold them. “I know this isn’t ideal—for any of us.”
I drank my coffee. I looked at a sea lion swimming outside, Alcatraz off in the distance. I once got into trouble there in middle school for leaving my field trip tour group. I snuck into a restricted part of the prison with a girl to smoke Parliament Lights and practice sticking our tongues down each other’s throat. Before that, my family thought I was a pretty good kid, I think, anyway. I folded my napkin into a shitty swan and tried waving down the waitress, sticking my arm out of our bubble for another drink. I did everything except look straight in front of me at the desperate old woman shrinking into her chair.
“Can I think this over?” I said.
Bryan shook his head, leaned over the table like he was going to grab me. My mother looked as if she was about to crumple like a sheet of paper.
“What is there to think about?” Bryan said, loud enough for the people at the other tables to hear and turn to look. “You were god knows where when Dad died. Figured you might give a shit this time.”
“You’re causing a commotion,” I said. “Don’t do this in front of Mom.”
“I’m causing a commotion?” Bryan stood and stepped outside of the dining bubble, holding open the flap for me to follow. I could see our waitress talking to the manager. “I thought there was a slim chance you might actually step up to help Mom, but if you can’t do that, then you need to leave.”
I turned to my mother, finally reached for her hands. They were unbelievably soft and delicate, like the skin of an infant, punctuated by a filigree of veins.
“I wish you would listen to your brother,” she said. Her voice had shriveled to a wisp.
“I’ll call you, okay?” I stood and kissed my mom on the cheek, half expecting her to pull away. She smelled like a medicine cabinet and wet wipes, rather than the menthol cigarettes she used to smoke when I got in trouble. She held tightly to my hands as I slipped away.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said. I pushed past my brother, who was still outside the bubble as if he were standing guard. “Thanks for dinner.” I sprinted toward the door before Bryan could say anything else. When I looked back, I saw my brother consoling our mother, who was crying into a napkin.
Between my day shifts of changing towels and rolling bodies to the crematorium, I liked to chill on the fire escape with my only floor mate, Val, a young widow who dressed like a 1960s flight attendant: scarves, pencil skirts, an aura of cigarette smoke. My boss, Mr. Fang, didn’t like us going out there and would always say during meetings, “You have to at least pretend like you care about these people. I can’t have you dangling off the side of the building with a bottle like some lowlife.” His hoity-toity sensibilities kept him away from me, usually—he didn’t like associating with people he considered low class if he could help it. I probably exuded no class in his eyes. Most of the time, Val and I were on the fire escape offering each other free therapy. This meant listening to Val wax poetic about why I continued to ignore Bryan’s calls and, more generally, why I was such a fucking screwup. But sometimes, usually on hump day, we’d hit happy hour with what little money we’d saved and treat ourselves like royalty.
The week after my family dinner we went to the Lumberyard Club, a former pool hall turned adult entertainment emporium. These days, the only industries that half thrived in this city dealt in sex, death, or the means to distribute those things on the internet. I ordered chicken wings and an IPA from a waitress named Ambrosia dressed like Princess Leia in that purple-and-gold bikini from Return of the Jedi.