Uncle Bill pats his pockets and produces his phone. I can’t hear it ringing over the leaf blower, but he grimaces. “Gotta take this.”
Of course he does. This is why I’m the one taking care of my mom, not him. He’ll help us, begrudgingly, but he’s never been interested in being responsible for anyone but himself. If I left things up to him, he’d look for the quick way out. He’d reach for the knife.
“Bill here,” he says into the phone, his voice brash and businesslike. But the bravado doesn’t make it as far as his face. He looks disappointed, and like there’s something else he’d rather say, but he knows better than to say it. He tucks the phone into the angle of his chin and whispers, “Grab something out of the garage before you go, okay?”
That’s another thing about Uncle Bill. He never likes to sayblood.
He turns back to the phone, and I head for the garage door, but he pulls me back in by the shoulder, not demanding, just a little solemn, and kisses the top of my head. Like he used to when I was in high school, when I’d roll my eyes, thinking I was too old for it. Like he used to, apparently, to my mom, when they were kids.
“Thanks,” I mutter. I’m not quite sure what I’m thanking him for.
The temperature of the air drops as I let myself into the garage. The single light bulb dangling over the door flickers awake. Uncle Bill’s truck looms over me, a hulking black pickup with tinted windows and a bumper sticker that readsI DON’T HAVE ROAD RAGE, YOU’RE JUST AN IDIOT. I step carefully around the tangle of power tools and paint buckets discarded in a heap on the floor. It smells like concrete and cold in here, like spilled beer and spent shells and other things I don’t really want to look at too closely.
Except for the massive stainless steel freezer humming in one corner. That smells like blood.
I pull a plastic bag from atop the freezer, line it with cold packs, and wedge the vials gently in among the crevices. They’ve still got stickers on them, some of the names smudged where they pressed up against melting ice. I try to avoid reading them—it feels like an invasion of privacy. I wonder if any of these people imagined this was where their samples would end up when they sat down with the phlebotomist.
I take enough for a week.
Uncle Bill’s gone when I come back out, probably in the back saying things I don’t want to hear into his phone. It’s another part of our unspoken agreement with him: he feeds us, and we don’t ask him who his friends are or how he managed to buy a house on a custodian’s salary.
The leaf blower is still going, its rumble adding a layer of discomfort to just standing still. Halfway home, I realize that the song I switched on to drown it out got stuck somehow, and it keeps repeating, over and over, the same swell of triumph, the same downward inflection, the same chorus of disappointment.
4
MY MOM’S WATCHINGNIGHT COURTAND DOING HERnails when I come in. On the screen, Judge Harry Stone ogles a beauty queen in a witch hat and bad wig. My mom leaps up, and half a set of checkerboard press-ons cascades to the floor.
“Hi, Mom.” I nod at the plastic bag dangling from my hand. “Let me get these into the freezer.”
Her face crumples, and she slinks back to her seat. On-screen, the clerk shouts, “Why didn’t you use a knife?”
Through the fuzzy TV speakers, the canned laughter sounds especially hollow.
“How’s your morning?” I ask as I pry the slippery cold packs free. The apartment is laid out in the shape of a T, living room and kitchen mashed together in the front, our two bedrooms and a bathroom in a row in the back, with beige walls and laminate flooring that looked slick when we moved in but has since deformed at the seams. Constellations of Post-its crawl across the walls, the door, the countertops, like neon cicadas waiting for dusk.Can opener in herestuck on one drawer in vivid pink.Wash hands before eating!next to the sink in eye-watering orange.
The books I read suggested I show her old photo albums, ask her for old stories, force her to keep a grip on her memories by repeating them out loud. But we have no photos in the living room, and my mom has never been one to dwell on the past. Most of her stories end in disappointment.
“My nails,” she moans. “They’re all over the floor.”
“I’ll get them in a second. Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know.”
The ice machine spits out a few forlorn cubes as I wedge the vials into the corner of the freezer. They teeter on top of stacked bags of frozen vegetables, but I can fix that later. Right now, I need to focus on my mom. It’s a delicate thing, judging whether she’s actually incapable or just demanding things of me because she knows she can. It changes day to day. Maybe she really is overwhelmed by something so small. The knotty edge of the living room carpet digs into my knees as I scoop the scattered nails into her waiting hands.
“Let me do it for you,” I say.
“Do what?”
“The blood. If you’re hungry.”
She frowns. “You know, baby, I nearly passed out when I had you, not from the pain but from the sight of all that blood.”
When I look at her, the brown flecks in her eyes seem swollen against her gray-green irises. Her face is slightly slack, her expression vacant.
“I’ll be right back,” I promise her. “I’ll take care of everything.”
My mom isn’t afraid of blood. You can’t be, with a hunger like ours. But I don’t mind her lying about it, because it’s something she always claimed, all my life. Means she’s still in there, somewhere.
