Like Mother, Like Son

June 23, 2011

“Dad’s dead,” my mother said. She was crying.

“What?”

“He’s dead, Ryan. Dad’s…dead.” In that moment, my mother was no longer on the other end of the phone call. Only a child who’d lost her father.

“They…” Her breathing crackled in the speaker against my ear. “They need me there. To identify his body.” It hurt to hear her crying. “Can you take me?”

“Of course I can take you.”

“But work…you’ll have to leave work…”

“I’ll be there.”

Beside the entrance door, a cigarette smoldered in a coffee can filled with sand. The cherry glow turned the last of the paper to ashes, hit the filter, and then burned out. The sound of a horn fired against the buzz of continual traffic along the street. I stood outside the tattoo shop I worked at, still holding the phone in my hand.

Inside, I found my boss and told him I needed to leave early. He was bent over a man’s shirtless chest, wiping away excess ink with a paper towel. I felt like a was moving in a dream state—nothing felt real. My boss talked, but I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. I heard only the repetitive thud pulsing throughout my body. When he stopped, his eyes wide and waiting for a response, I just nodded my head and left.

The truth was, I wasn’t very close to my grandfather. My maternal grandparents got divorced during my mother’s early adult years. My grandfather had found another woman. This new woman, Melinda, was younger than my mother by five years. On Christmas, we’d load the Plymouth with our gifts and head for my grandfather’s. My mother always joked that the car, its gray paint peeling and blistered from hood to trunk, was shedding its skin. She told us that some day the shedding would be over and a new car would appear in its place.

“You sure this is everything?” She asked me, looking over the two lonely bags in the back seat.

“Do we have to go?” I complained as the car warmed in the snow-covered driveway, an elbow denting the gifts. My brother was silently listening to his Discman after having scored the front seat.

“Yes,” she replied, not exactly thrilled herself.

Melinda greeted us in a dramatic fashion, arms waving in the glow of the multi-colored Christmas lights wrapped around the trailer’s front porch. “Come over here and give Mommy a hug,” she told my mother. Melinda was taller than my mother, with rivulets of blonde hair that shimmered like holiday tinsel. As my mother wrapped her arms around Melinda’s large frame, her face was as expressionless as a stone. My mother passed a hand over her toffee-colored hair, freeing some from the collar of her coat, and forced a smile onto her tired face. She wasn’t there for Melinda’s sake, or mine, or even her own. She was there for her father’s—the man inside the trailer who couldn’t be bothered coming outside to greet his only daughter.

I pulled into the driveway of my mother’s house, stepped out, and stood beside the car. It was no secret that the men in my mother’s life had always let her down. Her father, my father, the boyfriends she had during my childhood, and even her current husband. They saw her kindness as a rug to wipe their boots on, never concerned for the woman hurting underneath. She stepped out of the house, wiping tears from her reddened cheeks in the harsh midday light.

July 1997

“Do you think he’s going to kill her?” I asked my brother.

“No, it’s okay. Everything’s okay,” he reassured me, draping his arm around my tiny shoulders, the way big brothers do. We were tucked between a nightstand and the frame of my bed. Gray light leaked in through the window behind us and made our skin appear sickly. I was seven and he was eleven. The wall separating the next room over always seemed thinner when our parents fought. Not only could I hear, but their shouts reverberated inside my chest. I pressed my palms against my ears as my brother held me. We didn’t realize when our father walked out the door, he wouldn’t be coming back. We’d eventually learn he’d found another woman with two children of her own. For most of that summer our mother wore a splint on her forearm—a kind of badge of honor after battling to save her marriage of thirteen years. Over the following months, her Jeep got repossessed, and our electricity was disconnected. Sometimes the tears broke through her facade, handing us the dinner of instant mashed potatoes and hamburger, the paper plate sagging from the weight. But giving up on her two sons was never an option.

June 23, 2011

“Where does he live?”

“In Ironton,” my mother replied, patting her eyes dry with a crinkled tissue. He’d moved into an apartment a few years ago when he and Melinda divorced. With each mile that passed on the highway, my mother settled into a state of numbness. She was no longer crying, but stared at the blur of Queen Anne’s lace and occasional roadkill passing at over a mile a minute outside the passenger window. I knew she mostly felt regret. Regret that she didn’t visit him more. Regret that she never told him what he meant to her. Regret that he had to die alone. I tried to think of something to say, some bit of positivity that would erode her sadness. But what do you say to someone who has just lost her father?

I slowed the car to a stop at a traffic light, only then realizing that I’d never seen a dead body before. How long had he been dead? What would he look like? In his face, would I recognize my mother’s? My own? The red light changed to green and I accelerated through.

“Which street is it?”

“Just turn left after the gas station.” As the blocks chipped away, my mother’s stoicism melted into sadness. “Oh…I just…I don’t want to do this,” she spoke softly to herself as if a kind of prayer, picking at the skin around her fingernails.

I parked near the entrance to the apartment complex office. We stepped out of the car and into the sun. The heat was magnified against the asphalt. My shoes seemed to stick to it, or maybe I was reluctant to enter the building.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

Without saying a word, she walked toward the door.

August 2004

My mother held the teddy bear in her  hands. The bear’s throat had been cut and stuffing spilled out onto the red heart it held, Happy Valentine’s Day scripted across in white lettering.

“Charlie left that where?” my grandmother asked my mother.

“On the windshield of my car,” she replied, dropping the bear into the kitchen trashcan.

I was pulling out the spare mattress from my brother’s room into the living room, which my mother and I slept on. The apartment was small and barely had a space big enough for the mattress. We’d just moved into the apartment with my grandmother and brother after a summer of living with Charlie.

My mother and Charlie grew up on the same little country road. Decades had past when he reached out to her. Time can change a person, but my mother still held to that image of him from their youth. The fair-haired boy standing in the cow pasture with a crooked smile. When I met him for the first time, he still had the same smile, but it gave me an uncomfortable feeling. His skin stretched tightly over sunken cheeks. He always wore a black doo rag popular among middle-aged bikers, though he didn’t own a motorcycle. I noticed the way he tightly held my mother’s shoulder as they left our apartment.

Months passed and my mother told me we’d be moving into a house. Just me, her, and Charlie.

“You know he’s addicted to meth, right?” my brother asked me as we loaded boxes into the Oldsmobile. The Plymouth had shed its skin, but there wasn’t a new car waiting underneath.

“I know,” I lied.

We moved into a house clad with black siding and very little natural light inside. Charlie became more possessive. My mother noticeably cowered into the recesses of that dark house like a dog afraid to be kicked. I worried every bus ride home from school I’d walk in a second too late and she’d be dead on the peeling linoleum.

One evening, Charlie and my mother started fighting. I heard the familiar sound of abuse pierce my bedroom wall. But I wouldn’t hide from it any longer. I ran to the kitchen and pushed Charlie up against the wall with all of my thirteen-year-old strength. He stepped forward and I pinned him against the wall. I drove my forearm into his throat until I could feel it collapsing. He smiled, laughing a percussive laugh through his tightened throat.

“You just fucked up,” he said. His eye were wild and blank as he threw me to the floor. I stood back up, pushed him again, and punched a hole in the kitchen wall where his head had just been. But Charlie, who’s authority had never been questioned, stormed out of the house and drove off.

“We need to leave,” my mother told me through her tears that night. My brother drove over as soon as she called him. We repacked the same boxes we had unpacked only months earlier, loaded them into the Oldsmobile, and drove to the apartment where my grandmother and brother lived.

Charlie stalked my mother for a few months after that. He begged her to take him back, then he left rambling voicemails describing how he’d kill her. He started leaving things on her car overnight. Like the teddy bear with its throat cut, which she’d bought him earlier that year. Over a decade later, Charlie died in the hospice center my grandmother worked at. My mother never visited him. But late one night I saw her crying for the fair-haired boy in the cow pasture with a crooked smile.

June 23, 2011

“I am terribly sorry for your loss, mam,” the funeral director said once we were inside the building. He was dressed in a black suit that seemed more fitting for an Oscars party than collecting a dead body. He reached out his hand and awkwardly shook mine and then my mother’s. Beside him stood the older woman who managed the apartments.

“It just ain’t like Junior. I knew something had to be wrong,” the lady said. “I just saw him at the laundry-mat last night. But it ain’t like Junior not to be out and about.” The woman fidgeted with a pack of cigarettes. “Sorry, hon,” she said as she patted my mother’s back and walked away.

“He’s just in there.” The funeral director pointed at a door to our left.

The apartment complex was more like a dormitory or hotel, where a long hallway divided rooms on opposite sides. The apartment was a single room with a galley kitchen. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke. The white walls were tarnished a dingy yellow, the carpet a roadmap of stains. A guitar leaned against a wall near the room’s only window. My grandfather’s body was in a sitting position on the floor, between a couch and a coffee table. His arm rested on the seat of the couch. His skin was slightly discolored, though his face revealed a serenity I’d never seen him have when he was alive.

My mother wrapped her arms around me and cried, her head against my shoulder. We stayed like that, separated from the harsh reality of the situation, for what felt like eternity.

“That’s him,” she said, leaving the room. “I...I just can’t…believe this,” she whispered to herself.

We sat in silence the entire drive home. In the passenger window I saw her reflection. The way the lines near her eyes rippled lightly onto her cheeks reminded me of my grandfather. In her reflection I saw the inevitability of death that would find us both.

I parked the car outside of her house. She placed her arm around me as I walked with her inside.

“Thanks for taking me,” she said, stepping into the house. “I can always count on you and your brother.”

The sun was setting outside, and through her living room windows a tawny light shone onto the clock hanging on the wall. My grandfather had given it to her seven months before. I’d driven her to meet him in the parking lot of a Drug store on a cold December morning. I can still see the joy dance across her face as he handed her the poorly wrapped gift. It was the first one I remembered him giving her. The clock was chipped on a corner and obviously not new, but she was happy he’d brought something for her. Only then, sitting in her living room, did its significance hit me. Is it possible to give back the time we feel we’ve wasted? In the evening glow, I watched as the little hand touched the big hand and then stopped.

“It keeps doing that,” my mother said, taking the clock off the wall.