“Hey,” I say in my head. “If you’d been there tonight, you would have tried to undress Ollie on the dance floor and then gotten trashed and hit on your boss. And after you ended up getting fired, you would have come home and slept with Nick.”
“It would have been fun, though,” she says back to me.
These silent conversations always make me feel both better and worse. I feel better, because at least I’m not as bad as she was. She’s the low bar that makes me feel like I’m doing okay at life. But I’m still so angry at her, and that always hurts, now that she’s not alive to hold up her end of an argument.
It’s like Abby said to me a week after the funeral. “Mom could at least have slipped in one apology at the end, right? Just on her dying breath, like, ‘Hey, sorry I sucked as a parent. Your therapy costs are my fault.’” Abby imitated a dying groan as she said it.
We never got that apology from my mother, even after the years we spent taking care of her hospital bills and sending her money whenever she was about to lose her housing. We never got an apology for the time we spent taking care of her, instead of her taking care of us.
I’m not repeating her mistakes. That’s something. But I still managed to ruin my chance with a great guy. A nice, well-dressed, sexy, stupidly handsome man. I lie down, put on headphones, and punish myself by watching another one of Ollie’s videos. As I do, a text comes in from my sister Abby.
How was the guy?
I consider her message for a long moment and then write back:I think I messed up.
