“By ‘passed,’” I asked, because I was genuinely unsure, “do you mean . . . dead?” OK, I know it was an uncouth thing to say, but I was sober and in shock—two states in which I found it difficult to think straight.
“Yes, sorry. Perhaps I should have just said that.”
I stood there surrounded by five kinds of apples, trying to process the possibility that what Nathan was saying was true. I knew Mom had health problems—they had hung over our family like putrid smoke for the better part of the last decade—but it’s not like she was on death’s door. We were told her condition was “manageable,” and we’d hired a nurse to do the managing. She couldn’t be dead.
“Winnie? Are you there?”
“I’ll call you back.”
I abandoned my cart and headed for the liquor aisle. It was equal parts lucky and disastrous that I was in a grocery store when Nathan called. Lucky, because I didn’t keep alcohol at home for the obvious reason that I would drink it—likely all in one sitting. Disastrous, because it was Whole Foods and my fix was going to cost me a small fortune. If I were a look-at-the-bright-side person, I might have taken comfort that my pacifier was organic and GMO-free, but finding bright sides was not my forte, which was probably why I liked to drink.
I had a car, but I wasn’t currently allowed to drive it, so I had taken the bus. If what Nathan said was true, money was about to be a nonissue for me, so fuck the bus; I called a cab. Those bottles of merlot were heavy, and I needed to get them open as soon as possible. As I sat in the back of the Prius taxi, I cursed myself for not getting twist-off.
“Turn right here,” I instructed the cabbie, who was about to go the roundabout way. Besides those three months when I went back to help Mom, I had lived in San Jose since I’d graduated from Stanford. Being back in LA had proven too fraught, so returning to the town where I’d gone to college was the next-easiest thing. The earthy-crunchy vibe of Northern California made it easy to rebrand my laziness as “taking time for self-reflection,” and so I took refuge in a culture that lauded rather than demeaned me for my slothfulness.
My phone rang as the cab pulled up to my condo. It was Charlie, my brother. If I were petty, I might have gotten a little thrill that Nathan had called me first. But I wasn’t competitive with Charlie; he had his own problems.
“Hey, Charlie.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck?” he said, and I immediately regretted that I had him on speaker. I glanced up at the cabbie. If he’d heard my brother’s expletive-laden greeting, he didn’t let on.
“I’m just getting out of a cab—”
“We knew this could happen, we could have prevented it.”
“Charlie, I—I need to call you back.” It was time to pay, I had to find my house keys, I was already at my multitasking limit.
“If she was getting worse, why didn’t anyone warn us? Her condition was supposed to be under control!” The cabbie had run my card and I was trying to figure out the tip. What is 20 percent of thirty-two dollars? And how could I have graduated from Stanford and not know that?
“We invited her for Thanksgiving, you know,” he said, like having the person who birthed and raised you over for a meal made him some sort of saint.
“Charlie, just let me get inside—”
“We even bought new dishes!” Isn’t it just like the first-born son to not give a shit about anybody’s needs but his own? The phone slid off my lap as I handed the credit card machine back to the cabbie. I gave him a ten-dollar tip, which I knew was more than 20 percent but small compensation for having to listen to my brother.
“I’ll call you back in five,” I said as I picked my phone up off the floor and shoved it in my purse. Credit card, keys, wallet, wine—I made a mental checklist as I got out of the cab. The walk to my front door was only the length of a swimming pool, but I was drowning so bad, it felt like crossing an ocean.
I opened the door to my condo and shed my coat. I had thrown my wine opener away when I vowed to “quit drinking for good this time,” but there were plenty of other ways to open a bottle—house key, screwdriver, coat hanger, shoe—one of the more useful things I had learned at Stanford. My key was already out, no need to complicate things. I jammed it into the cork and had the bottle open in a matter of seconds, and wine in my mouth a few seconds after that. Aesthetics weren’t important, so I didn’t bother with a glass. I just needed to get a buzz on before I called my brother back. I probably didn’t need to drink half the bottle, but I was going to finish the whole thing anyway—I figured I might as well get a jump on it.