By Jim Marino

We’re three bites into not-quite-Christmas pie when my mother breaks into the epic tale of Dad leaving her for another woman. Sometimes it’s a blonde, sometimes a spurious redhead, depending on how inspiration moves the teller. Like all great oral epics, it’s founded on a myth. My father’s been dead almost four years. The other woman he left my mother for was an inoperable brain tumor. But who wants to hear that? 

“All those sexy young dental hygienists, and in the end? He leaves me for a patient.” Mom wags her fork like a finger, emphasizing, demanding attention, making just one point more. “This little Puerto Rican with big fake tits and fake blonde hair and two impacted molars. Consuela. And would you believe the worst part?” 

My husband wears the Jesuit-school poker face I envy so, eyebrows raised as if he’s just been told some modestly interesting fact. Eddie, approximately 2.4 years old, is busy experimenting with whipped cream between his fingers, and my sister Judy, who drove Mom the two days from Miami, still looks a little dazed. But Larry from work hangs on Mom’s every word.  

“She was younger than me,” Mom says. “Three fucking weeks younger. Can you believe it?” 

“Three weeks younger,” my husband repeats blandly, with an infinitesimal tilt of his head toward our son. 

“That’s what I said, Mike. Try to keep up.” Mom rests her forkful of pie on her plate and gives Larry a knowing look. 

“Well, obviously he traded down,” Larry says, a bit too eagerly. Mom doesn’t exactly smirk, but she’s not afraid of looking smug either. 

“You better believe it,” Mom says. “You’ll never guess where they’re living now.” 

Larry won’t, and neither will I, because if I did she’d change her answer. It’s usually Tampa, but sometimes Orlando or Jacksonville. Once she banished Dad and his imaginary slattern all the way to Hilton Head. 

“Fucking Boca,” Mom concludes in triumph. “Boca fucking Raton.” 

“Okay, Eddie,” Mike says. “Let’s clean your hands and watch Bluey.” 

“Booey!” Eddie claps his whipped-cream-covered hands. The good news is he’s too young to clap hard. 

“I’ll take him,” I say, as if this were doing Mike a favor rather than snatching away his chance to escape Mom. I’ll owe him for this. I wipe Eddie’s hands and face with a cloth that’s not too warm and not too cold. 

“Some people don’t worry about overdoing screen time,” Mom announces as I leave. 

I sit Eddie in front of the TV. Bluey is Australian cartoon dogs, surprisingly well made, the mother and father of the little pack warm and fallible and wise. It feels not-terrific that a pair of animated dogs have become my parenting role models. Eddie waves his arms in a dance while the opening music plays and I break my promise to myself about not checking my phone. All those nagging vibrations have been weather alerts I already know about—lake effect snow, wind chill, quarter-mile visibility—and yet another series of texts about The Shit At Work, which I do not read. Nothing about my biopsy. It’s after six, the lab closed, and tomorrow is Saturday, and Monday is Christmas. 

When I get back to the dining room, Mom’s moved on to the other man in her life, Donald J. Trump. “I’m through apologizing,” she says. “That’s why we elected Trump. Because we’re tired of apologizing.” 

Larry nods mechanically, eyes glazing like an icy road. I see my lonely-but-distinguished older colleague has shifted from picturing dinners and weekend getaways with Mom, things I’ve ambivalently connived to set him imagining, to picturing scorched-earth arguments with Mom in restaurants and hotel rooms. I need a long, long sip of wine, but I’m serving coffee, so I drink that. 

“At least you got here before the cold front,” Larry says gamely. “No one will be on the road tomorrow morning.” 

“Not with these gas prices,” Mom says. “How does anyone believe that global warming shit with this cold?” This is a mistake, because Larry has a detailed scientific explanation he’s eager to share. Mike, with no discernable hint of schadenfreude, helps out whenever Larry’s momentum threatens to stall.  

Finally, after Mom has withdrawn into hostile silence, Larry gives up the subject. (Where, O wise workplace mentor, is your game?) “That said, I should probably be getting on the road while I can.” Larry picks up his plate to bring it to the kitchen and Mike instantly confiscates it. “Everything was delicious, Lilah. You have to give me that pie recipe.” 

“Don’t forget the homemade whipped cream,” Mom adds. “Almost as good as Cool Whip, and only a hundred times the work.” 

Larry doesn’t quite flinch. There’s a sliver of a glance at Mom, a sub-fraction of a glance at me, a stray end of what might have started out as a consoling smile. Odd that this remark, of so many, is the one to burn the bridge and place Mom beyond the Unpassable Divide of Undateability. But it’s also a sign of how determined Mom was to burn that bridge. “I hope to see you again,” Larry says, but doesn’t. 

“If this one gets what she wants, I’ll be stuck in Cleveland all year.” If by want we mean dread in every cell of my body, this is true. Having Mom here full-time would bring daily misery and weekly catastrophe, but I have lobbied and wheedled for that calamitous misery. Cleveland has excellent senior living options. I could get to her in an emergency. Best cardiac hospital in America, et cetera.  

Larry’s gone and the snow’s already starting and Mom insists that she can climb the stairs by herself. I watch as long as I can. She puts on a decent show as long as I watch. Then I huddle over the sink with Judy, comparing notes on what Mom has told us and hasn’t, what she’s kept hidden and what she’s failed to hide: her balance, her blood sugar, her short-term memory and long-term prospects. We call it The News from North Korea: Mom’s mix of implausible propaganda, impulsive threats, and brazen falsehoods. We get a cheery e-mail from her every day telling us how healthy she is, occasionally from hospital rooms she doesn’t mention. Judy saw a cane in Mom’s house, shining new, but Mom refused to bring it and maintains it belongs to someone else. And somewhere along I-77 in West Virginia, Mom informed Judy that her diabetes is “officially in remission.”  

“Which of the Ds is that?” Judy asks. “I have no idea.” Each of Mom’s four Ds—Drinking, Depression, early-stage Dementia, and Denial—requires its own particular treatment but disguises itself as the others. Going after the wrong problem only inflames the one causing that day’s grief. Judy and I speak low and run water to baffle sound, just as we did as teenagers. Mom’s in the guest room right above the kitchen; I half expect her to reappear downstairs without warning. From upstairs I can just barely hear Mike singing Eddie every last verse of “Jingle Bells,” the ones about Miss Fanny Bright and going it while you’re young, and then “The First Noel.” 

“Did you get your test results?” Mike asks when we finally climb into bed. 

“No.” 

He slips his fingers between mine and squeezes. “It’s all going to be okay.” I hear Mom’s shuffle on the hall floorboards and her creaking steps downstairs. I close my eyes and don’t ask. 

Mom wakes up at seven. Eddie’s been up since five-fifteen. The sun won’t be up in this part of the time zone until eight and we won’t see it. Ice has formed inside our older windows, and the world outside is a block print, white on black or the other way around. From what I can see it’s already five inches of snow on the ground and more fleeting through the air, the keening wind made visible. Not as bad as it might be. Eddie is thrilled.  

“Mike’s sleeping in again, huh,” Mom says, not as a question, and pours herself some of the industrial vat of coffee Mike’s brewed. 

“Dada outside!” Eddie says, as if announcing the arrival of the Messiah. Dada being outside is currently his number one favorite fact about the entire universe. “He gots snow bower!” What could be more of a delight? 

 “Can’t he find a shovel?” Mom, diabetes officially in remission, begins her breakfast of leftover pie. She puts last night’s whipped cream in her coffee, and some Buffalo Trace from our liquor shelf. I can’t tell if she meant to be surreptitious but has lost her skills or if she’s daring me to admit I’ve seen. I want to offer cheaper booze if that’s how she’s drinking it, but can’t spare forty-five minutes repelling indignant counter-attacks. The kitchen lights flicker once, twice, and hold steady. We have nowhere to go this morning and every step Mike takes the wind half fills the footprint behind him with snow, but his belief in escape routes runs deeper than I’m always comfortable with. He manages to clear a lane forty yards long and one car wide before ducking back inside. Eddie applauds and calls for an encore. “Didn’t take so long,” Mom says.  

After lunch the wind has calmed, the plows have done their work, and Judy has made it to Al-Anon and back in a borrowed coat. Mike’s managed to start a pot of soup and assemble a lasagna using Dad’s family recipe but with turkey sausage. Then Mike pilots the family Honda down the hill to the Wade Oval museums, Judy and me squeezed on either side of Eddie’s car seat. My phone buzzes and buzzes again in my pocket, because The Shit At Work is evidently crucial to national security, the gossip and accusations taking on a manic, deadline-crunch intensity. One Christmas carol plays on the radio while Mom sings another under her breath. The road curves and recurves down Cedar Hill and then we’re passing the Orchestra’s concert hall adorned with the obligatory wreath and the Museum of Art’s glazed lagoon, two disgruntled ducks pottering across it in the whirling snow. Judson Manor, Cleveland’s premier senior-living complex, looks benignly down; Mom glares back. And the little park ringed by three museums is, for today at least, a pocket-sized winter wonderland. I’d like to think Eddie will remember this someday, but I don’t. 

The Botanical Gardens have decked their grounds with fairy lights, glowing like embers in the dusky afternoon, and transformed their indoor spaces into vast showrooms of holiday kitsch, crammed like a hoarder’s attic with entries in the local Christmas-tree-decorating contest, the local gingerbread-house contest. There’s a tree laden with dozens of elf-on-the-shelf dolls, a tree infested with Grinches. There’s little room to stand, and most of the visitors feel entitled to all of it, affronted by strangers invading their space. “Gnome. Sweet. Gnome,” Mom reads from a wreath on the wall. “That’s cute.” There’s a tunnel of white poinsettias, eerily spectacular, leading to a room decorated with various ornamental mirrors and a nine-foot plastic statue of a petal-clad Snow Queen, like a department-store mannequin with delusions of grandeur.  

“Does she look Asian to you?” Mom asks, and I see with discreet horror that she may be right. Are those sightless features meant, for whatever well-intended, ill-conceived reason, to suggest an Inuit? “I think she looks Asian.” Mom turns to a sixtyish couple wearing Ohio State logo gear, caught hovering just close enough that they can’t pretend not to have heard. “Was that not woke enough? Saying ‘Asian?’ Sorry I’m not woke, but my husband ran off with an Asian. This dental student straight from Taiwan.” 

The Ohio State couple chuckle, taking that little half-step from discomfort into co-conspiracy. “Oh, we’re not woke,” the husband says. “Don’t you worry about us.” 

“You poor thing,” his wife adds. “What was her name?” 

“I can never pronounce it,” Mom says. “She just told everyone to call her Kimmy. Would you believe, it wasn’t until they’d run off to Saint Pete that I found his motel receipts. He was taking her to the Super Eight every Monday and Thursday, Mr. Big Spender.” Her new friends are smiling and nodding, basking in her warmth, so Mom leans toward them with a big stage whisper. “She must love him a lot more than I did.” The husband laughs like the voiceover on a holiday cartoon, all kindly warmth. The wife pats Mom’s arm indulgently: what a scamp! 

After we have duly inspected every last fir, spruce, and gingerbread bungalow, Eddie wants to go outside, as he always does, and watch the ice skaters on the little rink in Wade Oval. It doesn’t matter if the skaters wobble and skid, if they pull themselves along clutching the rail. Eddie’s utterly rapt. He will watch as long as we allow him, in even the bitterest cold, and weep when he take him home. There is nothing in the world he wants as much as he wants to skate. 

A sound system plays Christmas pop. A handful of the skaters glide by the rest, doing their tricks and turns. A gnarled oak bough stretches over the center of the rink, almost perfectly horizontal with the ground, like the center beam of an imaginary ceiling; arborists have rigged  a steel cord to keep it from falling. The snow drifts sidewise in idle flakes, but this is the snow off the lake, which can change from flurries one moment to whiteout blindness the next. The daylight’s fading to blue, and Eddie’s cheeks turn poisoned-apple red. “Wanna skate,” he repeats. “I wanna skate when I a big kid.” 

“Do you believe I came from Florida for this cold?” Mom’s saying to someone. “My no-good ex-husband’s toasty warm in fucking Boca, and here I am freezing. Left me for one of my bridge friends two weeks and a day after her husband died. Whatever, she always overbid.” 

“Mama, can I skate when I a big kid?”  

“Yes. Of course.” But he can’t stay out here much longer. Mom’s newest confidante, a placid-looking Russian grandmother with a Chief Wahoo scarf, cuts in to introduce herself and commiserate about my father’s bad character. “We alternate holidays,” I tell her. “Next Christmas is Dad’s. Nice to meet you.” Mom gives me a scouring look, but I have to coax Eddie back to the car and that’s going to take my full attention. 

Dinnertime comes. Mike takes heirloom-recipe lasagna from the oven, ladles out chicken soup, tosses a kale-and-cranberry salad. Mom’s taken over as DJ, all the Dean Martin and Sammy Davis holiday standards in relentlessly tight rotation. “It’s a marshmallow world in remission,” Mike sings in my ear. “In remission it’s a marshmallow world.” A plow goes by. Our plates and bowls steam. Frank Sinatra informs us that through the years we all will be together. Eddie sings a song with two lines repeated ad infinitum, about Rudolph and his shiny node. 

“Shoulda got Chinese,” Mom says. “I mean, real Chinese,” by which she means the most Americanized Chinese food to be had. Two Christmases ago we ordered from a semi-hemi-demi-authentic Szechuan place and Mom still holds a grudge. (“No pu-pu platter? Why are they even in business?”) With no audience for fables about Dad’s infidelity, she spends dinner railing against the malevolence of Big Pharma.  

“It’s not just the vaccines,” she says. “All these doctors with their little prescription pads, they’re all in on it. It’s like a game to them. The side-effects your father had. I shielded you two from seeing it.” When radiation didn’t shrink Dad’s tumor, he got selected for an experimental drug trial. Ordinary chemo wouldn’t work. Surgery would have been fatal. I still remember how happy he was the day he got into the trial, laughing like a little kid. 

Better than Christmas morning were his exact words. 

Mom was a champ with him. Watched his IV line like a brooding hawk, changed his diapers, cleaned his piss and his shit. But no, Judy and I saw those side effects. They were not hidden from us. 

“And don’t you think they all get their piece?” Mom says. “Every doctor in his white coat, taking his little slice. Wetting his beak.” She snorts in private laughter. “When all you need is a couple hundred dollars a month of vitamins. They don’t want you knowing that.” 

I’ve tuned out, reducing Mom to background noise like the yuletide Rat Pack, and I’m having trouble refocusing. Sammy Davis, Jr. is singing “Jingle Bells” for the eleventh time today and his professionally simulated good cheer has grown oppressive, like a line of wilting cards on a hospital windowsill. Is this something Mom’s really done, or thinks she’s done? Something she’s saying to bait me into a fight? To bluff me out of one? Which of the four Ds is this? Or is it just the fifth, defiance? I have no idea how drunk she is right now. Judy looks at me, waiting for the intervention, the needed and absolutely not optional intervention. Mike steps in, because he loves me, to play Concerned-Bad-Cop-in-Law. “But vitamins in addition to what your doctors prescribe,” he says, in his hey-there-buddy-how-about-a-liferope? voice. 

Mom gives him a triumphant smirk. “You don’t need to take them with anything else, Mike. That’s why they call them supplements.” 

“Okay,” Mike says cheerfully. “Bedtime. Ready steady, Eddie?” We go through my son’s ritual of choosing books and giving hugs and saying individual good nights to everyone in the room. No one but Eddie speaks to anyone but Eddie. Meanwhile I shuffle through my private deck of recriminations, rationalizations, stratagems. Why haven’t I used my medical power of attorney, checked in more with Mom’s primary-care doctor? Why haven’t I gone through her bills every month, her accounts? And in some discreditable back corner of my soul I’m still searching for the sharper’s trick, the hole card that will let me avoid confrontation. Can I find someplace online to perform my overdue diligence, check medical records, inspect suspicious charges? But what then? Download an app that makes Mom take her pills? 

“Oh, don’t give me those faces,” Mom says. 

Judy leans her elbows on the tablecloth and her eyes on the heels of her hands. “Ma,” she says. “You know we love you.” 

“Don’t tell me what I know.” 

“We’re thinking of your health, Ma,” is the best opening gambit I can manage. 

“Please. You know better than me now? I used to wipe your asses.” 

Judy’s drawing breath to answer when we hear feet and cheerful voices on the steps. We sit mute as store-window dummies while Mike brings Eddie back downstairs.  

“Eddie has something he wants to tell you,” Mike says. It’s ridiculous how my son’s plaid footie pajamas pierce my heart. Trite. Manipulative. Absurdly, achingly cute. “Where does Santa live, buddy?” 

Eddie, suddenly shy, half burrows into Mike’s shoulders before he says, “Funky Boca.” 

I smile. I keep smiling. My cheeks hurt. Judy’s grin starts looking like rigor mortis. Mom’s lips curl in something between a sneer and a smirk, unrepentant. Judy says, “I’ll get a start on the dishes tonight,” as soon as Mike and Eddie are gone. It’s just Mom and me. She looks dead sober but might be too drunk to remember this tomorrow. 

“Go ahead,” she says. “Out with it.” 

“It would be a big help if you could keep from cursing in front of Eddie.” 

“That’s your problem? Fucking fine. He’s in bed.” 

Take a breath, count to five, start again. “Eddie’s never going to meet Dad.” That sentence hangs there for a while, neither of us liking it or able to change it. “But Mike and I, bringing him up . . . Grandpa Eddie is going to be important. We want him to grow up with stories about Dad. Good stories. True stories.” 

Mom takes a cigarette and gilded lighter from her purse. She quit eight and a half years back. When she started again’s a mystery, at least to me. “You want to hear a true story?” she says. “I’ll tell you a true story. It’s about a couple of doctors who wanted to be famous.” 

And here we are. It’s the other story, the one she tells herself when she’s alone with no audience but her grief, in which Dad’s been murdered by the ruthless scientific ambition of his oncologists.  

“So they say, ‘No, we’re sorry, you’re inoperable.’ Inoperable. Too bad for you. They just left it there in his skull, killing him, while they tried to get into the New England Journal of Medicine. Is that right? How is that right?” Mom waves her unlit cigarette, deferring open disrespect until the perfect moment. “No regular chemo, oh no. Can’t get fancy new jobs giving people regular old chemo. But why not? People who never took care of themselves the way your father did, never ate right or exercised, they get the regular chemo. They’re still alive. Nancy Shaughnessy’s fatass husband has beat cancer twice. But no. They wouldn’t give my poor Ed anything but brand-new experimental shit from the goddamn space program, so some whiz-kid doctors could campaign for the Nobel fucking Prize in Medicine. The way it poisoned him, but he didn’t want to complain. You know he actually thanked them?” 

“Yes, Ma,” I say, because arguing will make this worse. “I know, Ma.” 

“He should be alive today. He should be sitting right there. But they needed a lab rat. And that man, with everything he achieved, should not have been anybody’s lab rat.” 

“No, Ma. Of course not, Ma.” I sit, and nod, and murmur when I must. After a while Mom will lose steam and make her way to bed. So will I. She might not remember this conversation at all, or pretend she doesn’t. Tomorrow will be a new day, Christmas Eve. Eddie will be excited and the adults will dote. Mom clicks her lighter and clicks again, cursing her unsuccess. Breakfast will be cheerful, without arguments. The ferocious unreason of loss will be politely concealed, or rudely, behind whatever mask Mom improvises. And after that Christmas and presents and the new sled, Mike pulling and Eddie laughing. Everything but my biopsy will be positive. I pour the brownish dregs of wine into my glass. We will have a family holiday my son will remember happily, and in time each sorrow and trial will be washed away by the warm, repeated bath of memory. That’s my story, at least. I’m sticking to it.  

---

Jim Marino‘s other stories can be found in the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Santa Monica Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. He also writes academic non-fiction and teaches Shakespeare at Cleveland State University.