I shuffle out front and open up my car. It takes me two tries to get the prop rod stable under the hood. Down the street, someone’s watering their lemon tree. The smell of it suffuses the dust in the air, delicate, not too sweet, and out of nowhere I imagine my mouth filling with the lemony slick of Zawadski’s—Veer’s—hair gel.
My hands in her hair, my mouth on her neck, the aftertaste of citrus, sweat, and eager fascination.
“What the fuck,” I whisper to the sun. Maybe if I stare at it long enough, it’ll burn the image right out of my brain. When that doesn’t work, I get busy pulling the dead battery out of the car.
Uncle Bill joins me after a minute. He scrubs coffee residue from his front teeth before wiping his hands on his jeans. “You know your mom’s full of shit, don’t you, Ellie?”
I never liked being called Ellie, but my mom made me swear I’d never correct him. “Nice way to talk about your sister.”
“You know I’m right.” He hoists the new battery over the edge of the bumper. “Want some advice?”
“No.”
“Quit letting her ruin your life.” The battery clicks into place. “Don’t tell me she’s not. She runs you around in circles, always has. What is it, you think you have something to prove to her?”
“She needs me,” I say automatically.
“No, what she needs is—”
“She needs us.”
He grips the hood and guides the prop rod back into its slot. “You know, if it was just her, I wouldn’t be bothering. She can make her own way. But there was you too. So maybe try thinking for yourself for once.”
A little black-and-white dog scampers past us, snuffles in the dirt of Uncle Bill’s front yard, and cocks his leg.
“Hey! Rudy!” A woman in neon workout gear sprints up behind the dog and whisks him into her arms just before his bladder gets going.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” she says to Uncle Bill. Her blond ponytail has the copper undertones of a home bleach job. “I don’t know why he does that.”
“It’s fine. Have a good one.”
She jogs off, Rudy at her heels, and Uncle Bill gives me a look likeAnd you think you have problems.
“What do you want me to do?” I hiss. “Stick her in a home I can’t afford, where they don’t know how to take care of whatever we are, and wait until she turns inside out and devours everyone in the place?”
“That’s not the only option.”
“You think I should kill her?”
He shrugs. “You tell me.”
“No,” I say quickly. “Fuck no. What’s wrong with you?”
Our wounds heal, because that’s the only way to survive with hunger ready to rip through you if you leave it too long. Our minds don’t. If one of us goes that way, lucidity and reason fading out before their body does, it’s the role of the next generation to slide a kitchen knife or a camping stake or a rusted machete through their loved one’s chest, to release them from the torture of appetite. But I still see flashes of my mom, the real her, in between the bouts of confusion and anguish, and I can’t help hoping.
Uncle Bill drops the hood closed with a bang. “Quit acting like you’re the center of the universe. There are other people going through it too.”
“Okay.” Not like this. Not like us.
“No, there—” Instead of finishing, he wipes his hands again on the dirty rag and tosses it toward the garage. He’s been around my mom and me long enough to know when something’s a lost cause, I guess. “Whatever, not like you ever listen anyway. At least try to have some fun when she’s not around.”
Easy for him to say. I chose this. I went to nursing school because it gave me options: I could have picked anywhere in the country and found a decent-paying job with plausible access to blood. I could have survived away from my family, but there’s a need for them somewhere in me that’s beyond survival. And there’s a debt. For that need, and that debt, I let my dreams of independence go when my mom stopped just forgetting where she put her keys and started forgetting what day it was, when to turn off the stove. And it’s not forever. When she’s gone…
Don’t. I owe my mom. I’m not sure what, maybe love, maybe obedience, certainly my time and my care and the good fucking attitude I can’t ever seem to scrape together. Giving her anything but my all would be the same as abandoning her.
“I’m only saying it because I love you,” Uncle Bill adds. On the next street over, someone revs a leaf blower.
“Okay, so then why—”
