The Secret Letters

The casket was a double-wide, with painted flowers on the side like a circus wagon. Pam said it looked like hippies had scrawled on it with crayons while tripping.

“She's at peace now,” one of our idiot cousins said to someone I half-recognized from when my mother used to drag us to West Virginia, where she was born. “Just a bunch of goddamn hillbillies in the Mountain State,” she always said, like she was Martha Stewart.

“Shut up,” Pam muttered in the cousin's general direction, smiling like she was saying something nice. I hoped she planned to provide snark during the funeral, since I didn't know how I would make it through otherwise. My other sister Norma was in the front pew sobbing. We were keeping our distance from her, not because of anything in particular, but because we always stayed out of her way if we could. It didn't pay to try to comfort her, since anything you said would be the wrong thing.

The casket was closed, thank God. Our mother had left strict instructions about this and everything else when she was still conscious. Even while dying, she was a control freak, and amazingly vain for someone who weighed just shy of 400 pounds, even with terminal cancer. “You're beautiful,” we always said to her in a Hollywood voice, “don't ever change.” She knew we were just messing with her, but she always smiled and patted her hair.

“That's a hell of a casket,” I said.

“Sure is purty.” Pam's eyes were red. I hadn't looked in a mirror since early morning when I'd slathered on eye makeup, but I'd been crying all day, too, and probably looked like a slutty raccoon. “Is Timmy here yet?”

“Haven't seen him. It's so crowded.” I scanned the room.

“Did any of these weirdos actually know her?”

“I don't know. I bet those fat guys were football players at her high school.” I wiped my eyes, though I knew it was a bad idea, smear-wise.

“Oh, there he is.” Pam pointed to the back of the room and I spotted our older brother. He was wearing a dark suit that made him look like a Mafia don, talking to some blond guy. She tried waving, but he didn't notice. His eyes were on the casket. He hadn't seen our mother in almost a year, and I was sure it was hard for him to believe she was gone. Tough shit for him, I thought. He could have come here when it would have made a difference. Now it didn't matter to anyone what he did.

“Is The Asshole coming?” I asked, referring to our father.

“No, he says he has a schedule conflict.”

“Probably golf. You'd think he could at least manage to show up for this.”

“At least he's clean and sober.”

“So he says. He's probably still banging down Zombies at strip clubs.”

“Try not to be bitter, Julie. It's unattractive.”

“Bitter? You think I'm bitter?”

As the minister cut in and began to read the eulogy my mother had probably written for him, my mind started wandering like I was in grade school waiting for the bell to ring. I tried to concentrate, but I couldn't. Every so often I'd tune back in and hear things that weren't true. Her devotion to other people. Her service to the community. Her wonderful family life—I could just about hear her voice coming out of the guy's mouth. I didn't know where she found him, since she never went to church. I figured he was an actor she hired to play a minister, and made a mental note to mention this to Pam.

As he droned on in his phony actor voice, I closed my eyes and imagined walking through the woods on the hill behind our house. Most of it was gone now, bulldozed to make room for the townhouse development just over the ridge. I made a
path through the old trees, and the dogs ran in circles around me. Ahead of me was the pond, though in real life it wasn't there any more either, except for the hints that sometimes bubbled up in people's driveways. I was going to dangle my bare feet in the water. I could hide there all day, and no one would know where I was. Then I would run back through the trees to our house, with the dogs behind me, and my mother would be there, and Frank, and Donny.

When I opened my eyes the minister was gone, and some cousin who hadn't seen my mother in years was reading from a wrinkled piece of paper. She was stumbling over the words, maybe because it was Mom's loopy handwriting, or maybe she couldn't read. It was Mom's life story minus all the bad parts and made going to high school in East Baltimore, meeting The Asshole, and having five children with him sound like an
E! True Hollywood Story
. Norma was born six months after the wedding, and it didn't take a mathematician to figure out the facts, but the cousin glossed over that, and the ugly divorce, and finished with the happy ending, my mother finding true love with Frank and then having little Ricky. Ricky, on my left, burst into loud sobs. I put my arm around him and he cried onto my shoulder. I could smell he'd been drinking again. I would have pulled him onto my lap like I used to, but he was a big boy now. When I looked at him with his tattoos, dreadlocks, and piercings, I still saw that cute little blond guy and felt how much we had loved him. We still loved him that much, but it was complicated.

Pam leaned across me and held his hand. “You'll be fine, sweetie,” she whispered to him, though we were pretty sure he wouldn't.

“JULIE,” said Norma's voice behind me. I jumped. “What the heck are you doing?”

“I'm—” I began.

“You're messing up my utility drawer.”

“—just looking for a bottle opener.” I held up a bottle of beer so she'd know I was telling the truth. I had hidden a six-pack of my favorite, Resurrection, in the back of the fridge. Poor Norma, she looked like hell. I could tell she had ducked in the bathroom for a quick clean up after the service, but there were streaks on her cheeks, and her lipstick was crooked. Her face was a thin, mean version of our mother's. I thought of giving her a hug, but was afraid she'd hold my arm behind my back till I cried.

“You just twist the cap off,” she said, like she was talking to someone who'd never had beer before.

“It's
real
beer. No twist-off. I can bite it off if that would make things easier for you.”

She stormed over to a drawer on the opposite side of the room and returned with a bottle opener. Her kitchen had a big island in the middle like she was a chef, though I happened to know her kids only ever ate fish sticks. If I had a kitchen like this, I thought, I'd be in heaven, though if I had to be Norma, I'd blow my brains out. She handed me the bottle opener. “Next time, ask.”

“Okay, okay.” I thought for a minute she was going to pick up an Italian risotto pan she totally did not deserve to own and crack me over the head with it, but she just made a little snuffling sound and walked away. I turned to leave and saw Pam in the doorway, shaking her head.

“Norma,” I said.

“She's taking it hard,” Pam said.

“Yeah,” I said. “You okay?”

“Oh, sure. Just fine and dandy. You?”

“Fine and dandy.” This was an expression of our mother's. The house was full of people and none of them were her. “It's weird, though,” I said.

“No shit.”

“Beer?”

“Please.”

I looked in Norma's fridge again. There was nothing in there but beer, ketchup, and the kind of fake food you heat up instead of cooking. I had a moment of panic, because it looked like someone had drunk all my beer, but I finally found two bottles tucked behind a shelf of Bud. I was just handing one to Pam, plus the bottle opener, when Tim walked in. When we were kids, Donny and I were always so excited to see our big brother that we jumped up and down, but Donny was gone, and I could care less about seeing him now. I glared at Pam to remind her Tim was on our shitlist for not visiting, but she didn't seem to notice, and gave him a little hug. He hugged me, too, before I had a chance to object. He had big, hard muscles, and it was like hugging a bull. His suit smelled like mothballs.

“Isn't there any decent beer?” he asked. His skin was tan and leathery, and his hair had quit graying and seemed to be turning blond again. He looked both older and younger than I figured he ought to. The last time he'd been in town was when we first found out Mom was sick. Since then he always said he was too busy with work to come home. He didn't call it “home,” but “back east.”

Without even thinking, I handed him my beer, then cursed myself for my stupidity. I decided grabbing it back might be hazardous, so I went back to the fridge, but all I could find were a million cans of Bud. I popped one open, cursing, and gulped down a bunch, fast, so I couldn't taste it. When I got back, Tim was introducing Pam to
the blond guy I saw him talking to at the chapel. The guy had one of those California faces, smooth and tan with little lines around the eyes. He looked like a dumb jock, like all Tim's friends in high school.

“I'm Alex,” he said, flashing a row of bleached teeth.

“Julie.” We shook hands.

“I've heard a lot about you guys.”

“It's all bullshit,” Pam said, and Alex laughed politely.

I tried to think of a clever remark, finally coming up with, “How's L.A.?”

“It's a golden paradise,” Tim said, taking a long sip of my former beer. “Not like this dump. They don't even have a Starbucks,” he said to Alex.

“The coffee shop on Main Street roasts their own beans,” I said in our defense, but he wasn't listening.

“How do you like our little town?” Pam asked Alex.

“It's not really a town anymore,” Tim said, “just a dumb suburb.”

We couldn't deny this.

“It's so quaint,” Alex said. “I love the historic district.”

“It's a shit-hole,” Tim said.

“It is
not
a shit-hole,” Alex said.

“That's our town motto. ‘Not a Shit-hole.' The tourist board uses it,” Pam said.

“There's a tourist board?” Tim looked amused, which made me want to poke him in the eye.

“Yep,” I said, “and a historical society.”

Pam turned to Alex. “It was really nice of you to come.” The charm she used on men was a little rusty at the moment, but I could see her revving it up.

“It was the least I could do.” Alex lowered his voice. “He doesn't show it, but this has been really hard on him.”

I almost burst out laughing.

“Yeah, he's a tough guy,” Pam said. “Do you work together?”

“No, no, not me. I couldn't do what he does. I'm a financial consultant.”

“Alex handles my vast fortune,” Tim said.

“How's business?” I asked, though I didn't give a rat's ass how business was.

“It's crazy. All those morons who bought their wives cars for Christmas? Right about now,” Tim looked at his watch, “they're realizing can't make the payments. Oops! My bad! Last week I towed a white Rolls and this guy's wife chased me halfway down the 405 in her furry bedroom slippers. We were laughing like hell.”

“Tim, Tim.” Alex shook his head.

“Alex hates my business. He thinks I should do something else, like run a soup kitchen or something.”

“Do whatever you want.” Alex raised his glass. “To repo.”

I toasted with what was left of my Bud, but my drinking was interrupted by Norma barking in my ear, “Jools, I need you to put the turkey on the table.” She pointed to a turkey the size of a Humvee on the counter, so I lugged it into the dining room, where some of the West Virginia cousins were reminiscing about Mom. Her great sense of humor. Her way around a kitchen, especially when it came to pie. The way she cared for all the people around her. “Then there was that Nobel Peace Prize,” I added. They stared at me like they had no idea who I was.

I went back into the kitchen and leaned against the counter. Whenever I had been in Norma's kitchen, my mother had been there, too, wearing an apron that wouldn't fit around her, shoving Norma out of the way and doing the dishes, cleaning the oven, though it was self-cleaning, waxing the floor on her hands and knees, yelling at us for spilling things, or for not being fast enough, or for breathing. I took my inhaler out of my pocket and sucked down a big blast.

***

One of the cousins was making a toast. “To our dear departed cousin Cynthia, who has gone home to our Lord,” he said, raising his Coke.

“And good luck to Him,” Pam muttered to me.

“She would have loved this,” I muttered back. We had always kidded our mother about how she liked to be the center of attention. “Yes, it
is
all about me,” we always said to her.

Thousand-year-old Uncle Joe began a rambling speech about our grandparents and “what fine, fine people they was,” and how Mom was “the salt of the earth.” I closed my eyes and again I was in the woods, running down the path with the dogs—our old dogs, who'd been dead for years—with leaves crackling under my feet. Then I heard Ricky's voice. My eyes shot open. “Let me tell you about my mom,” he said. “My mom was a special person.” He was slurring his words. Pam jumped up and started moving toward him. “She was the best mom in the world.” Before Pam reached him, he broke down and stood sobbing in a way that ripped my heart out. She put her arms around him and held him while he cried.

“Julie, do you want to say anything?” Uncle Joe's quavery old voice asked me.

“Me?” I thought about the things I could take this opportunity to say. How my mother had never liked the West Virginia cousins. How she thought the whole family ought to get off their fat asses and make something of themselves like she had. She had gone to secretarial school and then junior college, where she majored in business, and when she got married and moved to our town, she worked her way up to become the office manager for the insurance broker on Main Street. I could tell them what she really thought of every one of them. How her real opinion of Bob, Norma's husband, was he had no spine. How she couldn't stand half the people she worked with and thought the other half were stupid, and by the way, the boss cheats on his wife. How her
girlfriends from high school were married to assholes and had ugly kids. I could have said how Mom was nice enough to your face, but then went and talked about you behind your back, and, sure, she had a good sense of humor, but mostly at your expense, and she smelled odd, like sweat and cologne, and she cussed like a sailor and ate like a lumberjack and drove us nuts with her constant criticizing and controlling, barking orders at us in a voice like an air horn with a heavy Baltimore accent. She was spiteful, petty, angry, especially since Frank died, and mostly interested in her own comfort. She was hell on wheels, and just because someone was dead didn't mean you should get up and babble a bunch of bullshit about them. I stood there for a moment, seriously considering saying these things. This rosy picture the idiot cousins were painting of her was just making everyone feel worse. I had a number of complaints about her, and my biggest complaint was that she was dead. For some weird reason, I missed her. I missed her so much I could hardly stand it. The earth felt so empty to me now it made my head spin. I opened my mouth to say all this and found I was gasping for breath.

***

“Stick it in the dishwasher,” Pam said. “It's the kind where you don't have to rinse things.”

I was in a kitchen chair, breathing into a paper bag. I still couldn't get enough air into my lungs. I had used my asthma inhaler, but it didn't help, so Pam handed me the bag and told me to breathe into it and then suck my own breath back in.

“Mom told me to always rinse everything first.” Ricky held up a hideous flowered bowl with the remains of a red slop someone had thought was salsa. We were watching him to make sure he wasn't going to fall over and break it. Norma seemed especially interested because it was her bowl.

“That's because she has that shitty old Kenmore.” Pam grabbed the bowl away from him and stuck it in Norma's dishwasher. She added, “Had.”

“Maybe we should buy a new one,” Ricky said. “Would we have to replace the whole cabinet, or could we just put in a new dishwasher?”

Pam shot me a look. I knew what she was thinking: Ricky seemed to think he was going to be able to go on living at Mom's, when the plan was to sell the house and split the money. Real estate was hot right now after a long slump, and prices in town were going through the roof. Pam had looked at “comparables” and figured our house would go for about 400K. Even split five ways, that was a nice chunk of change, in fact more money than we ever dreamed of.

“Do they have them at Best Buy?”

“Of course they do,” Norma snapped.

“Cool.” Ricky wandered out of the kitchen in his usual daze, leaving the rest of us to clean up. I stood next to Pam at the sink and tried to be helpful, though I still felt like I was going to pass out.

“What the fuck?” she whispered. “He's living in a dream world.”

“Give him a few days,” I said.

“Where's
my
dream world?”

“You can't have something just because Ricky has it,” I said. “He's the baby.”

“I want to be the baby.”

“Babies can't be lawyers.”

“I'm not a real lawyer. I'm a baby lawyer.”

Back when she finished college, unlike the rest of us (okay, art school), Pam had a bartending job she loved at one of the many bars in our town, but Mom decided Pam's fancy diploma wasn't worth the paper it was printed on and started hounding her to go to law school, since she was the smart one. Any idiot could be a bartender, she yelled, even Julie. “Over my dead body, no fucking way,” etc., etc., Pam yelled back. At the party we had when Pam passed the bar exam, Mom told anyone who would listen, “She
just went from one bar to another.”

“You're doing it all wrong.” Norma yanked a dish towel out of my hand and folded it lengthwise. “Pammy, go see if Ricky's okay.”

Pam rolled her eyes and went after him.

“You better talk to him,” Norma snapped at me.

“Me? Why me?”

“He'll listen to you.”

“No, he won't. He'll agree with everything I say, but that's not listening.”

“Jools, when that moving van pulls up and starts taking the furniture out of there, I don't want Ricky still laying up on that couch.”

Instead of saying, “Who made you the boss of me?”, I escaped into the living room, where Norma's kids Bobby and Billy were doing their homework without being forced, which seemed totally weird to me. Ricky was trying to help them, but he knew even less about math than I did and was still drunk as shit. Somehow, we managed to roll him into Pam's car. As I stood in the doorway and watched them drive out of Norma's creepy cul-de-sac, I found myself wondering what her street would look like from a plane. Like a crater on the moon, I thought. Suddenly I felt like I was in the air, looking down on everything. From up there, the earth was just a green speck.