I sat down on a kitchen stool and let California’s most mediocre merlot take me into her warm embrace. It had been two weeks exactly since my last drink—yes, I was counting, but only for sport. I could stop whenever I wanted. I had gone longer than two weeks without a drink many times, and not just to save money. But these were extraordinary circumstances: my mother had just died. I was having a glass—OK, a bottle—of wine to calm my nerves. Any number of normal people did that; it didn’t make us all addicts.
I arranged the six bottles of non-GMO merlot I’d just bought on the counter like soldiers on the front line of battle, then—emboldened by their fortitude—picked up the phone to call my brother.
CHAPTER 22
* * *
CHARLIE
“It stinks in here!” Marcela, my wife, said when she walked into the kitchen. “Don’t you smell it?” I didn’t answer. Not because her tone was belligerent and the question rhetorical, but because I had just learned my mother had died and I knew it was my fault.
“Jesus Christ, Charlie, Theo is sitting in a pile of his own shit.”
I knew that, of course. I could see him red faced and straining when I was on the phone with Nathan. But listening to my cousin recount how Mom’s nurse had found her dead body growing stiff in her worn leather armchair made a dirty diaper seem small on the scale of things to get upset about.
“I’ll change him,” Marcela announced as she extracted our eighteen-month-old son out of his high chair, then held him at arm’s length as she carried him out of the room. She had let me go surfing that morning on the condition that I took care of Theo when I got back, so I found myself not only motherless but also on my wife’s bad side. Since having a second kid, our marriage had been reduced to one long, protracted negotiation of who got to do what and when. Neither of us worked what you might call “regular” jobs—she did hair by appointment, and I played in a band and tended bar. Every time I wanted to take a gig or a shift, I had to clear it with her, and if she wanted to take a client outside normal hours, she had to clear it with me. It was a perfect formula for mutual resentment, and we had amassed quite a formidable reservoir.
“Can you at least clean the kitchen while I do this?” she called to me. She had a right to be bitchy; I was “on duty,” whereas she had earned a well-deserved nap.
I stared out into our cluttered galley kitchen. Every surface was covered—blender, toaster, SodaStream, electric kettle, bottles, jars, sippy cups, a bunch of bananas. An inch of old coffee stagnated in the pot. The gas range was encrusted with petrified spills, and the walls were spattered with food. We weren’t slobs. It was just impossible to keep up. Our seven-year-old was in school, but we still had to do morning drop-offs, make lunches, drive to baseball practices, read bedtime stories, shop for groceries. Before the baby it was manageable. Now we were drowning.
I almost got up to wash the dishes, but then I remembered the dishwasher was full （because I had failed to empty it）。
“Why are you just sitting there?” Marcela said, handing me the baby as she went to the sink to attack the mess. “Oh, for God’s sakes! The dishwasher’s full?” She said it like a question, because she was expecting a response—something along the lines of “Sorry, I’m on it.” But I offered no such apology. Because my throat had been seized by the iron hand of suffocating guilt. When was the last time I even spoke with my mom? Last week? Last month?
“What is wrong with you, Charlie?” my wife asked, and not in a concerned way. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her Mom had died, because I couldn’t face the most horrific part about it—that I was the one who’d killed her.
RING. My phone rang. Saved by the bell. It was my sister, Winnie, calling me back.
“I have to take this,” I muttered, then got up to take the call.
“Hey, Win,” I said into the phone as I walked out of the kitchen. “Sorry if I was a dick earlier, I guess I’m a little messed up.” I had called her the instant I’d hung up with our cousin. I didn’t remember what I had said, just that I’d hated myself in that moment and likely, cruelly, taken it out on her.
“Hi, Charlie.” My sister’s voice was quiet, defeated, sad. She wasn’t married or in a relationship, so more than likely was alone. I tried to put my self-loathing aside and be the big brother.
“You OK?”
“Ha!” my sister scoffed. “Define ‘OK.’”