Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

Mike went to the bottom of the stairs, ready to shout at Rebecca. Hadn’t she noticed her mother’s words beginning to slur? How long had she been upstairs?

Pounding rap music and a black man’s voice filtered down. Gonna ride you like a freaky train / Bitch all up inside my brain / I’m thinkin’ what I lost and gained / feelin’ if it worth the pain.

Cupping his hands around his mouth, Mike took a deep breath and smelled Shayla. On his hands. Though he’d washed at least four, five times.

In the kitchen he washed again, this time with stinging hot water and dish soap, a strongly scented citrus type that cut grease “magically.” Then he poured a glass of water and went back in the living room, Fawn’s pills like little pink bullets in his palm.

Shayla’s ex had wanted the divorce. The request stunned her as much for its delivery as its content, so matter-of-fact, as if divorce were a reasonable improvement whose time had come. After he moved out, friends and family kept asking how she felt. For a while she gave the right answers, until the day she realized she’d been lying. She’d confused expecting to be devastated with actually being devastated. One day Shayla decided not to be devastated, and discovered it was easy. Like taking off one outfit and putting on another.

She supposed now she wore the outfit of a mistress, except she didn’t feel like one. Fawn had had a stroke three years ago, a freak kind of thing that left her permanently disabled. Mike didn’t speak of it in those terms, though. He hardly spoke of it at all. After they started sleeping together, the subject of Fawn was off limits. Shayla tried hard to resist the urge to probe for more information from his partners or the radiology techs, but it was like a scab she couldn’t stop picking at. Not because she wanted Mike to leave Fawn. Truth be told, Mike annoyed her at times. He talked too much, and insisted on things that seemed to defy certainty, like whether God exists, or whether there’s intelligent life somewhere besides Earth. Still, something about Mike and Fawn fascinated her.

That evening Shayla stared out her kitchen window, mulling this while a filet of grouper browned and a cold wind plucked the leaves from her silver maple. She’d already changed into pajamas and planned to watch the news over dinner, so when the phone rang she let the machine pick up. With the exhaust fan running, she could hear her mother’s voice, but couldn’t make out her words. Shayla decided to listen to the message after dinner. If it wasn’t important, she’d call back tomorrow.

Except later, on the couch, the message light blinking in her peripheral vision, she kept wondering what her mother wanted. It couldn’t be urgent. If it were, wouldn’t Norma have called her cell? Norma had no one else nearby to call. Shayla’s brother lived two hours away, in a big house on a man-made lake with his Canadian wife and four French-speaking kids. She counted back. Could it be last Christmas that she saw them? It bothered her enough to lay down her fork and think. Yes. Almost eleven months. They’d met at Norma’s the first week of December so Rick could spend the real Christmas in Quebec with his in-laws.

Shayla wondered if she’d see Rick for the holidays once their mother died. What else would change? Nothing came to her. That seemed wrong, so Shayla kept thinking, but there was nothing. Norma would be gone. That was it.

Once Fawn recovered her words, Mike asked if she was hungry.

“I am always hungry. Where is dinner?”

It hit him then that he’d forgotten to pick it up. “I thought we might order pizza.”

“It’s Monday, Mike. We get Olive Garden on Monday.”

For a moment he was happy. She knew it was Monday! Then he realized that from where he’d left her, sitting at the kitchen table with a fresh Pepsi, she could probably read the white board. She’d remembered Olive Garden, though. That counted for something.

“I know, I just felt like pizza.”

“Well, I don’t. I don’t like pizza. You know I don’t like pizza.”

“Okay, that’s fine. What do you want?”

“Ravioli. I always get ravioli from Olive Garden. Don’t change the schedule. I don’t like it when you change the schedule.”

Mike stuck his head in the dining room, where Middie and the youngest, Abby, sat doing homework. “I’ll be right back. You want the usual?”

They nodded without looking up.

“Your mother’s in the kitchen. If she wants to go back to the living room, can you help her?” Fawn got around pretty well with the walker, but it never hurt to have someone spotting her, especially this late in the day. His fuck-ups — the pills missed, dinner forgotten — meant it was already six thirty, only an hour before meltdown.

As he stepped into the garage, Fawn yelled, “And do not forget the breadsticks!”

After he fed her — Fawn could use a fork, but sometimes her hand veered off course, and he didn’t need her poking out the one good eye — Mike gave her a second breadstick. While she worked at it, holding it in her fist like a two-year-old, he loaded the dishwasher, wiped down the counters and put away the leftovers. Fawn had drunk the last Pepsi for dinner. If he hurried, he could start a load of laundry, put her to bed, run out to the store, and still catch the Bears’ kickoff.

Mike’s cell rang. He picked it up without looking at the screen and Shayla’s voice startled him. He glanced at Fawn. There was never any telling when she’d come in or out. For now, at least, she appeared absorbed in her breadstick.

He stepped into the foyer, making for his study, where he could shut the door.

“I’m sorry to bug you at home,” Shayla began.

“I’m busy.”

The girls had gone upstairs and Mike glanced toward the heat register, whose duct fed his study and, above that, Rebecca’s bedroom. He could go outside, except that would look suspicious.

“It’s about my mother.”

Relieved, Mike almost laughed.

“I just got off the phone with her and her speech is slurred. I asked if she’s okay, and she’s telling me she’s had headaches for a couple weeks. Can I get her in tonight for a head CT? I mean, I know normally you’d do it in the morning, and I’m sorry, but I’m kind of worried.”

Shayla’s mother was only sixty-two, a reformed smoker, otherwise healthy, so they’d treated her cancer aggressively, taking out half the affected lung and blasting the rest with radiation and chemo. The symptoms Shayla described could be nothing. Or they could be a minor stroke. Or they could mean the radiation and chemo hadn’t gotten all the cancer and it had metastasized to her brain.

Mike said sure, she could take her mother in. “I’ll let the techs know she’s coming.”

“Can you read it?”

Mike hesitated. He’d have to tell the techs to send it to his computer instead of the radiologist on call, and they might wonder why.

“Mike? You there?”

“Sure, yeah.”

“You’ll call me?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you. Everything okay at home? Fawn okay?”

Taken aback, Mike said, “I’ll call you as soon as I read it,” and hung up.

Shayla drove Norma to the hospital, the silence between them both familiar and unsettling. There should be something to say to the woman who birthed and raised her and was now, possibly, dying.

“How’re you doing?”

Norma shrugged. “I’m all right.”

Shayla sat in the waiting room’s blue vinyl chairs while they did the CT. On the way home she forced herself to ask if Norma had eaten dinner, and felt relieved she had. Shayla could take her home.

“I’ll call you after I hear from…” She almost said Mike , but didn’t want her mother to know he existed. Which was insane. Shayla knew several dozen doctors in town well enough to request a favor.