“I have kinda sad news to tell you,” my mother says through a mouthful of nachos. She knows I hate when people talk with their mouths full. “But don’t get too sad, okay?”
“Okay.”
“My dad died.”
I choke, and a shard of tortilla chip scrapes its way down my esophagus. She stares at me as I cough it back up into a napkin. The mariachi music in the restaurant continues.
“Are you doing all right?” I ask in accordance with social norms.
“Oh, I’m fine,” she says. “Didn’t even cry. None of us cried.” She means her siblings.
“When was this?”
She thinks for a moment. “A couple months ago.”
“Why didn’t you call me when it happened?”
“It wasn’t that important,” she says. Three weeks earlier, she called me to tell me about a documentary on hammerhead sharks she had watched.
“So,” she went on, “what we’re mostly worried about now is figuring out what to do with his cats. He had three: Robert, Sharon —”
“Wait, he named his cat after himself?”
“Yeah, and Sharon is named after his sister. And the third one is called Gimpy.”
“Gimpy?”
“He has three legs — oh, look, booze!” She points a long acrylic fingernail at the waitress approaching the table.
Our margaritas arrive in tacky, cactus shaped glasses. My mother squeezes a lime into hers. I take a sip of my own, and the alcohol burns the fresh cut in the back of my throat.
Three years earlier, I’m on the floor of my childhood bedroom. It’s maybe a day or maybe a week after my high school graduation. I’m holding a crinkled envelope with my name misspelled on the front of it.
I open the envelope, and a check for $750 falls out, along with $14 in singles. There’s also a small yellow lined piece of paper that reads something like: You’re my first grandkid to graduate high school. Don’t deposit the check until the patent goes through.
I bring the card and its contents to my mother’s room.
“Your father sent me a graduation present,” I say. “Do you know anything about a patent?”
“He was probably stoned when he wrote that,” she says, not looking up from her phone. She’s probably playing Candy Crush. “Just deposit it.”
“All right, and what about all these one dollar bills?”
“Like I said — stoned. Let me play my game,” she says. I leave.
A week later, Bank of America hits me with a $14 fee for attempting to deposit a check from a nonexistent account.
This occurrence would never be brought up again.
The mariachi music is still playing. My mother is talking about the last few days of her father’s life in the same tone one might talk about traffic on the way to work.
“— so Heather and Holli and Paris took turns admitting him to the hospital, but he’d always take his IVs out and leave without the physician’s approval. And then every time he was admitted again, he wouldn’t let them perform tests on him — you know, the nurse would say, ‘can I see your arm?’ and he’d say, ‘yeah, it’s right here’ without moving it. So they ran tests while he was unconscious —”
“Is that —”
“Legal? I have no idea. But they wanted to amputate his leg. And they said his blood sugar was off the charts. And they found a tumor in his lungs the size of a golf ball.”
“Jesus Christ, he didn’t see someone about any of that earlier?”
She furrows her brow. “Of course not. So anyway, Heather said that one morning when she was visiting him, he woke up, took a sip of water, closed his eyes, and flatlined. Then a doctor came in and recorded the time of death.”
“And then what?”
“I dunno, she went home.” My mother shrugs and downs the rest of her margarita. I look out the window and watch a seagull stand on a snowbank outside. It eats a piece of garbage.
“Was there a funeral?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “They didn’t bother. One thing he was good at was cutting people off.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. A funeral would mean I’d have to meet her siblings. Then again, he’s been rotting in the ground for two months now, so it’s a bit late for a funeral. My mother doesn’t want a funeral either, when her time comes. Just toss me in the bin, she says.
My own carcass is going to the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, so undergrads can watch me decompose in an open field—at least then I’d be useful.
“So now what?” I ask.
“Well, we still have to find homes for the cats,” she says. The waitress comes back with our orders.
I stare down the plate of inauthentic enchiladas in front of me and consider whether my mother’s father’s death will impede my enjoyment of them. And I know it won’t because I don’t really feel that bad. In fact, I don’t feel bad at all, which makes me feel worse. Because I know I’m supposed to cry, so tonight I will go home and attempt to cry myself to sleep.
They always say it’s okay to cry, but they never say it’s okay to not cry, and they certainly never say it’s okay to feel complete indifference.
I wonder what’s wrong with me — with us.
“So how’s school going?”
“Oh, it’s fine.”
Victoria Gough is a senior majoring in advertising and public relations and minoring in German. In her free time, she’s involved in The Daily Collegian as a lifestyle editor and in the Creative Writing Club as secretary. Her work has recently been featured in the 2022 edition of Folio. She loves snails.