Later, much later, the three of us are on the back deck. The nicest aspect to this house is arrayed in front of us: a lake of some ten acres. Each house has a dock of sorts tonguing out from the shore; nothing larger than a kayak or some other variation on small watercraft is anchored to them. This is not some huge, sprawling recreational lake abuzz with motorboats and buzzing, insect-y watercraft… which works in its favor, I think. This is a lake for relaxing, for looking at, for reflecting on the day’s events and planning tomorrow’s. I can hear cicada and cricket and peeper engaged in an impromptu recital in the undergrowth.
Corbin and Grace are upstairs, in their rooms. We’d said hello to each other, but to them, I am a nearly a stranger, Mom’s brother instead of Uncle Mark and I feel somewhat guilty that I have not been a larger part of this family. My only tangible contribution to their lives was to set up a college fund for each of them when they were born… but I can’t recall their birthdates even now or, really, their exact ages. I send cards for Christmases and birthdays. With Teresa’s prompting, of course.
This is also a lake for drinking, which is what we’re doing now. Each of us is nursing a glass of the official state drink; the bourbon feels good as it slips down my throat, and it reminds me of my father, who’d enjoyed a bourbon (or several, or far too many of them) at night.
None of us wants to be the first to disturb the calm and quiet, but I do only because I have no idea about anything.
“So… ” My go-to conversational starter.
Teresa looks at me, smiles. Even now I can see that her eyes are still rimmed red with her weeping. I can’t for the life of me understand why. “So… cremation, some time this week. She wanted it that way. We don’t even have a plot anywhere, anyway. You can go, if you want to. You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do. Of course I’ll be there.”
“Good. Um… a kind of memorial thing, Friday, at the church. It’s not really a service; she didn’t want that.”
Whichever church that might be; I gave up trying to sort out my mother’s metaphysical side long ago. “Okay. You think Daddy will be there?” I ask.
Teresa shifts in her chaise. “I don’t know. If he sees the notice in the paper, he will. Maybe. I called the last number I had for him and it’s not in service anymore. Of course.”
“Wasn’t he in, like… Texas? Somewhere like that? Amarillo?”
“Yeah. He said something about moving to El Paso, last time I talked to him. That was back in November.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve called everybody I had numbers for. I asked them if they had any contact info for him to let him know.”
“He still might not come.”
“I know. Might be better if he didn’t, but you know Daddy.”
“Yeah.” The sun slips to the west at a thousand miles an hour; the sky is fretted with clouds, a storm moving towards us from Louisville, perhaps, but pretty enough right now. “Teresa? Can I ask another question?”
“Sure.”
“Is there a will? I hate to ask that, but… ”
“Uh… yeah, actually, there is. I made her get one a few years ago and she actually did it.”
“Course, we paid for the lawyer,” Duane interjected.
Teresa nods her head. “There’s not much in it. She didn’t have anything, not really. Her car, which was a piece of shit. The house, which is almost a piece of shit—”
“Almost?” From Duane, with a slight chuckle.
Teresa rolls her eyes and looks at me. “When was the last time you were in it, Mark?”
Easy question. “The day I left for college.”
“Not since?”
“Nope. I swore I’d never set foot in it again.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to. You need to see it, anyway. It’s… bad.”
“How bad is bad?”
“Pathways running through crap bad, is how bad. You know how she was.”
“Jesus… ”
Teresa hisses a laugh out through her nose. “Even He couldn’t help her. It wouldn’t have surprised me if I’d gone over there one day to check up on her and found her buried under a pile.”
“Anybody have a lighter?” I ask.
Duane chuckles again. “Fucker’d burn for a week.”
“Duane… ” she chides, but I can tell she’s not serious. “But, really… ”
Duane squeezes her arm. “Don’t worry, baby. We’ll get through it.”
“I can help,” I say.
Teresa turns to me. “Really? That would be… great. But I thought you’d have to get back.”
“I can stay… for a bit.” Regretting the qualification, but there it is.
Teresa exhales loudly, looks like a ton of bricks have been lifted from her shoulders. “That would be wonderful. Thank you.”
—
We talk late into the night, end up drinking the entire bottle of bourbon—I wouldn’t want to be us tomorrow morning—and I remind myself to buy them a new bottle. Our conversation drifts in and out of our mother’s existence; already, we’ve begun to distance ourselves from the finality of it.
My mother is very nearly a stranger to me, now. She has almost always been that way once I understood that what I was becoming wasn’t what she wanted me to become, unable to convince her that all of her hand-wringing and imprecations were not going to change me.
I knew, that summer I graduated college, that I would never return to that house as long as she was in it. That, more than anything, impelled me to do well enough to have the luxury of choice. Teresa, for reasons known only to herself, had consistently screwed herself out of choices and had been forced to stay. I’d leapt at school in Atlanta as much for its location as for what it offered me. And I never looked back.
I offer no apology to my sister in that regard; twins we were, but only through the accident of our synchronous birth. Were we identical, or even the same sex, it might have been different, but this is what it was and what it still is. I think that time and distance have blunted some of the sharper edges in our dealings with each other, but I know that there are other land mines out there, floating silently in that roiled sea of our lives.
At one o’clock in the morning, with a vast bank of stars overhead—more than I could ever hope to see in New York—and the songs of insect and amphibian dying away, we stumble off to our respective bedrooms. I’m too exhausted and too drunk to do anything more than undress and fall onto the bed.
—
My mother’s house is—at least from the outside—a handsome thing, Italianate in style, built sometime in the 1850’s, crafted from beautifully-dressed Kentucky limestone. It is little worse for wear on the outside than it had been when I left it twenty or so years ago, testament more to its solid construction than to any attention on my mother’s part during her tenancy. She and my father had bought it shortly before they made the decision to have children (presumably despite the howls of anguish and turmoil from the gods that must surely have sounded) because they’d thought that a small-town upbringing would be preferable to any other.
In that, of course, they were mistaken, but not through any intrinsic fault of the place they’d chosen for this misadventure.
—
Early the next day, Teresa, Duane and I are gathered on the front porch of the house; the children have been spared this odious thing and currently enjoying the comparatively sybaritic comforts of their neighborhood pool. I took Corbin aside this morning and offered him a hundred dollars in cash if we could trade places, which earned me a wryly amused half-smile but no acceptance of my bald-faced attempt at bribery.
Duane’s truck is loaded with every chemical-based cleaning compound known to man, but today’s visit is only an initial foray to assess the degree to which life and limb might be sacrificed to this task, equal in spirit to that of Sisyphus.
On the way over, Duane had jokingly asked Teresa to add “hazmat suits” to the list of things to be bought.
I think he was joking.
We look at each other.
“Take a deep breath,” Teresa suggests.
“Yeah, because it’ll be the last fresh one you’ll take for a long time,” Duane counters.
Teresa pulls the keys out of her pocket; out of the corner of my eye I can sense neighbors peering over hedges or from behind curtains. I sincerely hope they pray for us.
The door swings open into…
If how one lives is a reflection of how one thinks, what goes on inside a person’s mind, then my mother was… obsessive, but surprisingly neat. It’s not all that bad, once we walk in. It’s disconcerting, perhaps; I hope to God I don’t inherit this tendency, but living in Manhattan in about four hundred square feet does tend to make one fairly editorial in what one chooses to keep.
There are, indeed, paths marked out on what looks to be grimy broadloom from the seventies, some indecipherable pattern barely visible under the gray haze of ground-in dirt. Some part of me remembers this carpet from my youth.
We meander through the maze of neatly stacked items; my mother was indiscriminate in what she kept. A great amount of ephemera, it seems… every piece of mail, every newspaper, every magazine and catalog. But there are other things, as well; garage sale items, for the most part: framed art, pieces of cheap pressed glass, puzzles unopened in their boxes, kitchen items, articles of clothing, toys.
“This is why I would never let the kids come over here,” murmurs Duane, picking up some kind of plastic toy. “I was always afraid that they’d sneeze and get buried alive.”
I turn to Teresa. “I don’t recall any of this from when we were kids.”
“Well, the basement,” she answers. “We never went down there much. She managed to keep it under control, but I remember her bringing a lot of stuff home back then. It’s probably still down there. And, of course, she had our rooms to use when we moved out.” Teresa makes a face. “I think she got worse after we moved out. Nobody around to keep an eye on her.”
There’s a rustling sound, furtive and eerie, and we all jump, instinctively.
“Cat?” Duane.
“You hope.” Teresa.
“I’m out of here.” Me.
Teresa chuckles, then stops. “I’ve already been through all of this,” she starts. “It’s just… more of the same.”
“So, how do we start?” I ask. “Is any of it worth keeping?”
Teresa sighs. “I’m not sure I care at this point. I don’t want it.”
“Well, I don’t have any room for it,” I add.
“You don’t think she has anything valuable?” Duane asks. “Jewelry? Coins?”
Teresa scrunches up her face, thinking. “Well, if she does, it’s probably in the bedroom.”
We make our way there; the room is neat enough, the bed made, horizontal surfaces in need of dusting, but it’s tolerably clean, unless one suffers from asthma. On the dresser, amid more piles of things, is a small, many-drawered box of wood and mother-of-pearl.
“This was Nana’s, I think,” whispers Teresa. Her hand moves to open it, stops. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
Duane looks at me. I tug open the top drawer, then more and more. Much of the stuff is costume jewelry, its provenance unknown, cheap and gaudy, amusing.
“Nothing,” I say.
“There’s a deposit box, in one of the banks downtown,” Teresa replies. “Maybe… ”
Duane sneezes. “Sorry,” he sniffles.
“Let’s get out of here for a bit.”
Teresa goes around, opening up windows, airing out the house.
On the front porch, we sit on the top step, the only uncluttered thing out here.
“Now what?” Teresa asks.
“Well… ” I venture. “One dumpster, maybe, for starters. Get out everything that we obviously don’t want to keep, like all the paper that isn’t, like, a bill or anything we need to keep. After that, we can reassess.”
“Sounds good to me,” Duane adds.
“Who’s been mowing?” I ask.
Duane raises his hand. “Every week, every spring and summer. I ended up buying a mower, storing it in the garage. It was easier than lugging ours out here.”
The day goes about its business around us; I can hear mowers in the distance. Traffic passes on the road in front of the house, going into town, coming out of it. A neighbor across the street comes out with two young kids, sees Teresa and waves at her. Teresa waves back.
Again, I’m left with a sense of watching this unfold around me like some kind of theatre, involved but not, an observer only. And then, it hits me. This is my mother’s house. Inside are my mother’s things, the sum total of her life. Each of those things meant enough to her for her to buy them, bring them home, find a place for them. She lived her life surrounded by them, some small comfort in a haphazard, day-at-a-time kind of life.
I start crying. Teresa notices. “Mark?”
“Sorry.” I sniff and wipe my eyes with my fingers. “It’s just… ”
Teresa squeezes my arm. “I know.”
—
We break for lunch. We may not go back; we now have some kind of plan, and I can start calling trash disposal companies when we get back to Teresa’s house.
We end up at a fast-casual place, better than fast food. While we wait for our food, Teresa calls Corbin, to make sure than neither he nor his sister have committed the unpardonable faux-pas of drowning.
“So, after we clean the house out… ” Teresa starts, when she ends the call.
“I guess we sell it?” I counter. “Or try to.”
“As is, or… ?”
I shrug. “Depends. We’ll know more when we get it cleaned out.”
“Well, you remember it, of course. I don’t think it’s changed very much. So, everything’s from, like, the seventies.”
“Yeah, I know. But buyers like to put their own stamp on it. I’d probably just do some of the grunt work, paint the walls, do the floors, make sure it’s not falling down… ”
Duane chuckles. “Once you get all of her shit out there, the house will probably rise a couple inches.”
I smile. “Probably true.”
“Is grunt work something you could do, Mark?” Teresa’s voice is tentative; she understands what she’s asking.
“I… don’t know, Teresa. That’s a big commitment. Time and money.”
“I know. That’s why I asked.” She smiled. “Just putting it out there.”
“How’s the real estate market here?” A reasonable question, but I also don’t want to keep talking about staying here.
“Okay,” Duane answers. “Not great, but not bad. We get people from Lexington and Frankfort, commuters, mostly. Some pretty expensive places here.”
“Well,” I muse. “Underneath all of it, it’s a pretty nice house. She bought well.”
“It was probably cheap back then,” Teresa says.
“Do either of you know any agents?” I ask.
“I do,” says Duane. “I get calls every now and then for bids.”
Teresa sighs. “It makes me sad, to think of selling it.”
I turn to her. “You want it?”
She chuckles and shakes her head. “No. Not really.”
I think she’s after something; I refuse to give it to her. Duane sees it, too; he glances between us, a wary look on his face mixed with a slight smile… meant, I think for me.
He clears his throat. “Babe… why don’t you call the kids again?”
—
On the way back to the house in Versailles, Teresa’s phone buzzes again. Her end of the conversation is simple, mostly a litany of yes… yes… okay… thank you… yes. Then she hangs up, spends a long moment looking out the front window at the road rushing towards us.
Duane glances at her. “Who was that? The kids?”
Teresa shakes her head, blows out a nervous breath. “She’s ready,” she says, quietly, nearly a whisper.
“Who’s rea—oh.” And I understand.
“We might as well go pick her up,” Duane suggests.
“Where is she?” I ask.
“Lexington.” Duane executes a deft pirouette with the truck and we’re soon heading back the way we came.
—
The cremation place is a small, nondescript building in a rough-looking, industrial part of town. Its appearance surprises me; I’m not sure what I expected—perhaps a churchy kind of place—but I knew it wasn’t this.
The woman behind the counter is brisk and professional, somewhat distant, not unkind. She hands our mother to us in some metallic urn, dark bronze, shining dully under the buzzing fluorescent light. We thank her and I take the parcel, testing its heft, tucking it into the crook of a bent arm.
I look at Duane, at Teresa. I don’t know what to say. I’m holding my mother. It—she—weighs about as much as a newborn infant. The three of us stare at each other; the woman —Pat, on her name tag—coughs discreetly, inviting us to have this little moment elsewhere.
We leave.
In the truck, I don’t know what to do with my mother. Placing her on the floor seems safest—less chance of an accident—but seems wrong, as well, as if I’m relegating her there like an untrusted pet. I place her beside me in the seat; as Duane starts off, I pull the seatbelt loosely around her, securing her. I place a hand on the top of the urn, which is warm under my touch. I imagine the heat of the oven which has done this to her, imagine the heat of her ill-starred life coursing through this gray ash like foxfire at night.
Posted 30 November 2024