Sean came in as she was sitting up in their bed, with her glasses on, looking through her own documentation at the notes her various doctors had made. She’d made it a point to save every piece of medical information about herself, if only because it was concrete (or rather, paper) proof that she was alive, that she had lived. It felt good to see her own vital signs in ink.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, sitting beside her.

“My medical records. Mom’s cancer reminded me that I need to go in for a physical and get all of my, you know, orifices checked out.”

Carol had broken down and told Sean everything after the police inspector had finally come and left from her mother’s house. It had been late when she’d pulled into their drive, and, like the walking dead, sunk into bed beside him, fully dressed and stinking of woodsmoke and worry. Despite swearing to herself that she’d tell no one about her mother’s health or the fire or her suspicions, she was unable to contain the weighty secrets anymore, and felt them spilling out across her pillow and onto Sean, who accepted them with a patience and understanding that she was sure she didn’t deserve.

“Orifices, huh? Hot. Yeah, I was reading an article that said every man over the age of like, 35, should get his prostate and colon checked every year or every other year.”

“Every year sounds a little over-the-top, but every other year probably isn’t a bad idea. I’m just so glad that we have health care. You know, a lot of people don’t. And they just have to like, hope they don’t get sick. Or, when they do get sick, the big pharmaceutical companies own them. They get their wages garnished for life for things that people with health care barely blink about.”

“It’s true. We didn’t have it when I was a kid, and my mom sewed up a cut my brother had herself. Like, ice, needle, thread, sewed. No anesthesia, no anything. And the whole time she was like ‘you think this hurts? Imagine how much it’ll hurt to not be able to eat because we’re paying off something that I can do myself.’ It was pretty intense. Every night, she’d pray that we wouldn’t get sick, because we’d all have been toast.”

“Right? I remember my dad saying once, like, right before he died that the only thing more expensive than living in America is dying in America. He was up to his eyeballs in medical bills that he knew my mom would get stuck with–and it didn’t help. He still died. They spent their entire savings believing what the doctors told them about his options, and he still died.”

“Maybe that’s why she decided not to get treatment. Like a protest. To finally take control over something in her life, when everything else was forced on her.”

“What’s forced on her? She lives out in the country where she wants to live, she gardens, she does whatever she wants. Nothing’s forced on her except paying bills for services rendered.”

Sean considered his wife for a minute. She was so clever, so kind–but she, and her brother, too, seemed so hard on their mother. Like she was just something that was there, but never someone that would ever go away.

“I mean…” he started carefully, “she’s out there all alone. She’s always just hoping you or one of your siblings will come out and see her. She’s broke, her truck’s always broken down, her own health is going, and she’s buried alive in debt for something that couldn’t save your dad. Why would she want to let more doctors come at her and force treatments on her if they wouldn’t help? She’s never seen anyone not die of cancer. It’s like…what’s the point? She may as well just go with it.”

Carol was kind of amazed. She knew that Sean was probably right–it did sound like her mother’s line of logic–but at the same time, it didn’t make any sense.

“Well…we’re the point. Her kids. Her family. We’re the reason to seek treatment, just like she and all of us were the reason dad did. He got help because he wanted to be alive for us and for her. Right?” She wasn’t even sure, but the idea that her mother had a death wish and that her own children weren’t enough to give her a reason to live was a painful awakening, and one she wished she hadn’t had.

She remembered her father’s slow, painful death. He had been such a giant man, so mythical. His hands had been big enough to circle around her own wrists easily, and he’d often lifted her high in the air, even after she’d finished growing in her teenage years. And yet, under the harsh and totalitarian reign of his illness, he’d become withered, nearly non-existent. His skin was as thin as paper, his eyes lifeless and without humor or even happiness. Carol had often hear people described as looking “like a shell” of a man, but, she thought, he looked like an actual shell. Or, more accurately, a shard of a shell, washed up onto the shore in Northern California, broken and thin. A fragile piece of calcium, bleaching out in the sun after being picked apart by seagulls and the hands of children building sand castles. Barely even anything at all, waiting to be chewed up and made into landscaping. He’d become so lifeless, she thought, he’d become detritus.

And her mother had watched, as the man she loved, her hero, had faded into oblivion, with half a million dollars in drugs coursing through his limp, soggy veins. Of course she hadn’t want to become another needle in a doctor’s biohazard box.

“I mean, you’re probably right.” Sean backed down. He knew he shouldn’t shrink her mom too much, since she wasn’t here to defend herself, and Carol didn’t seem to be very appreciative of it, anyway.

“No, I think you are.” Carol said flatly, and she wasn’t being sarcastic at all. “I really think that’s probably why. It’s not just because she’s stubborn. She just really has never seen cancer drugs treat anything, and she’s never forgiven Western medicine for sticking her with everything she’s got on her plate. Shit. I have to call Amy. We’ve been going at this all wrong.”

—-

In her own home, Amy, too, was thinking about health–but she was focused on the health of her youngest daughter, whom she’d been on the fence about vaccinating against HPV. She, too, was in her bed–but with her small netbook in her lap, her face illuminated by the screen and nothing else, as she silently probed the internet for information about the vaccine and its purported ability to prevent cancer.

Amy had been raised by her mother to have a healthy fear of doctors, of medicine, and of vaccinations. Not because her mother was one of those Jenny McCarthy loons who believed that vaccines caused autism, but because, as her mother had told her, they were just too damned expensive. Amy had received many of them for free at the request of her kindergarten teacher who, concerned for the other children in her classroom, had found a free clinic that offered the various shots for an inexpensive price. But aside from those, Amy had always had faith in the human body’s ability to fight disease and to heal itself. She was quite sure, in fact, that most vaccinations actually weakened the immunity of otherwise healthy children.

She’d had her own children vaccinated because of the stigma of not getting it done, and because her husband was the sort of Western man who believed anyone in a white coat and was mortified at the idea of not wearing a seat belt, let alone not being vaccinated.

But now…now, there was a vaccine that could prevent cancer. Which seemed both too good to be true, and too amazing not to be true. Could she really get her daughter a shot (a series of shots, actually, she learned after just a bit of Googling) that could help extend her life? What parent wouldn’t want that?

And what daughter, she thought, wouldn’t want to get the treatment for her mother that would make her life longer? What kind of a daughter would she be if she never confronted her mother, and simply let her cancer diagnosis lay fallow until it eventually grew and spread and took over her body? Wasn’t that just like standing by and watching a murder happen? Or, at the very least, an assault? Here she was, considering getting her daughter a series of shots that could prevent cancer…shouldn’t she also look into getting the series of shots that might cure her mother’s?

But unlike her daughter, who had her entire life waiting to be lived like a lobbyist in the wings of the capitol building, just waiting to bend the ear of an unwitting, wavering senator who wanted to side with both big business an the everyman, Amy’s mother had probably just a few years left in her–if that. And that was assuming she wanted them, which Amy wasn’t sure she did.

As Amy watched her mother’s barn crackling and splintering under the heat and weight of the fire that engulfed it, she had wondered if her mother had meant to be inside it, but had lost her nerve at the last minute. Had she wanted to lay upon the flames as if they were a funeral pyre, finally relieving her old body and stubborn mind of the discomfort that the last half decade had wrought?

She’d shaken the idea from her head then, but was unable to as she stared into her computer screen. It seemed silly, and yet, it seemed plausible. Her mother was a hard-headed woman, but she was also a sad and lonesome woman, wasn’t she? Wasn’t she someone who had often mentioned being alone? Hadn’t she been trying to give away her belongings and tie up loose ends? Amy had initially chalked it up to a response to her terminal (or probably terminal) diagnosis. But could she had been thinking about taking matters into her own tiny, brown hands? Had she had that kind of spark inside her to allow her body to be whisked away into the sky by a chemical reaction that had the power to level old growth forests and murder thousands? Fire could do so much. Certainly it could have relieved decades of ache from an old woman who lived alone in a world of mild awkwardness and vague depression.

—–

Michael didn’t lose much sleep over the barn fire itself. He dealt with the logistical nightmare that came as a result of such a large event, and even managed to find some insurance money that he was fairly sure his mother would blow on frozen food, but he turned it over to her anyway.

What concerned Michael was the fact that he was quite convinced that his mother had been, if not actively suicidal, hoping that the fire would take her frail body with it. He also became increasingly concerned that she might try it again. What did she have to live for? Her veins, her muscles, her tissue was wracked, he believed, with cancer that would ultimately choke the lift right out of her. She could surely have had mere months left to live–and she had obviously not yet shared the information with anyone in the family. Perhaps she’d thought it would have been easier to make it all go away, instead of going through the usual channels of treatment and hospitalization?

Michael gladly would have paid for her treatment–but he knew that she would never have let him. She wouldn’t have cooperated with doctors, she wouldn’t have tried experimental therapies, and she certainly wouldn’t have been part of clinical tests.

Would she, though, have done something so dramatic to avoid having to make that decision, or worse, confront her children with the choice she’d made?

Probably not, Michael thought. He wasn’t sure what had happened on the day of the fire, but he was quite sure that something had gone wrong, and that she had meant to be in the barn with the photos, and the papers, and the secrets of their family. He was positive that she’d been trying to go with them, which was why, until the day his mother did finally die, he made it a point to call her to check in.

—

If anyone had asked Magdalene not if, but rather, why she’d burnt down her own barn and all of the memories of her children’s childhoods, her deceased husband, her days as a much younger woman, she would have at first waved them away, as if the idea was a crazy one. Why would she do such a thing? She’d have countered. It simply didn’t make sense.

But no one did push her. In fact, her entire family did something very uncharacteristic–they didn’t pick at it, they didn’t prod, and they didn’t try to get to the bottom of her actions. They simply accepted that it was an accident, that their belongings were gone, and that was that.

Instead, her children assumed, conjectured. Sat alone in their homes or with their spouses and pondered. Came up with theories. Batted around ideas. Guessed at motives. And finally arrived at various decisions, none of which would ever be confirmed or denied. Magdalene would ultimately take her reasons to the grave with her, along with millions of cancer cells and a knowledge that she was incurable, anyway, and that doctors knew nothing. In fact, Magdalene died knowing several things: that her children didn’t know why she’d burned down the barn, that they were unaware that she had not sought treatment, and that she had done the right thing. Only two of those things were true.

But if anyone had pushed her–and really pushed her, not pretended to listen the way Michael did or grown overly-concerned the way Amy did–about why she’d done it, and what her plans had actually been, she probably would have eventually answered in honesty, because she was old, and she was as it came to pass, actively dying, and she had no reason to hide anything any longer. But the barn had plenty to hide, including some of her worst fears: that her children were awful, that she’d done a terrible job as a mother, that she’d wasted her life doing what she was supposed to do, instead of trying to figure out who she was supposed to be.

The barn also hid secrets about her–that she couldn’t participate in the world like everyone else. Her health care bills, her incurable disease that left her, it turned out, just another few months to live, her own inability to pay for things on the money she hadn’t ever bothered to save. All of this was there, in those boxes, reeking of age and mildew and shame. She’d realized, almost immediately after taking on the challenge, that those items were better out there, untouched, out of sight, out of mind.

The barn didn’t know some things, though. It didn’t know that she would die exactly as she’d always wanted–in her sleep, eyes closed, in her own home. It also didn’t know that the person who would find her body was one of the neighbors she’d loathed so much, who had become concerned when her mail had begun piling up. But the barn had enough information, she thought, that it needed to be silenced.

Even the police inspector, who did finally come to the scene later in the evening, didn’t push her, because he had no reason to suspect anything other than an accidental fire, despite being copious clues to the contrary. Even an amateur penny arcade detective could have seen that Magdalene had done little to cover the crime–and yet, being that she was a kindly old lady, and being that she was quite sure there was no insurance money (there was. It was recovered quickly after the case had been closed, and she was entitled to enough to build a new, much nicer barn to improve the value of the property, which she didn’t do), no one bothered to find out much about what had happened.

Magdalene had figured that no one would pry too deeply, so she didn’t bother to do much to cover up the fact that she had set the fire. For example, she’d move the ride-on lawnmower, which usually lived in the barn to deter thieves, into the shed–something she never did, which was made clear by the fact that a lot of items from the shed had recently been re-arranged, exposing dust and rust on tools and outdoor decorations. She’d always been concerned about leaving the mower, or anything of much value, in the shed, which seemed so easy to pry into. Had the police inspector who finally did come to the scene asked her what she normally kept in the barn, she probably would have accidentally mentioned that the lawnmower lived there.

Had be been a more hardened detective, or even just actually interested in what happened, the police inspector probably would have also found it strange that the horse, who usually preferred the cool of the barn, was shuttered out into an opposing, and very overgrown (thus, rarely grazed upon) part of Magdalene’s property. He also may have asked about why no one called the fire trucks earlier, and why the fire had been allowed to burn for so long without assistance. But he did not, and so, Magdalene succeeded without being pushed to telling the truth.

And because no one pushed her on the matter, Magdalene never came clean about the real reason she’d decided to burn the barn and all of its contents, save for a few, to the ground. She didn’t tell anyone that she’d had the plan for several days, that she’d saved every piece of junk mail and collected every bill and piece of medical information in the house, and crumbled them all together.

She never told anyone that she’d taken her truck into town and sat in the library, a rather foreign place to her, to research making a campfire. She didn’t tell anyone that that morning she’d moved the horse into the field, collected a few choice items (her husband’s lighter, a few photos she’d saved out, the metal shell canister that Michael had kept his trinkets in but reminded her of Big Bill, one of Amy’s elementary school book reports (about a biography of Amelia Earhart) that had somehow, miraculously, been spared from years of water damage, and one of Carol’s die-cast cars, which she’d saved her money and cereal coupons to send away for.

These little items, all of which Magdalene had specific memories of her children interacting with, were spared from the flames, because, Magdalene knew but never told, because no one pushed her, nothing more could be revealed from them.

They held no secrets–just pleasant memories of Carol eating cereal by the bowlful and next to nothing else for three week, Amy studiously poring over a book and asking her mother to define several of the more complicated words, and Michael going camping with his father in the dead of winter. And that was all. There was nothing sinister. Nothing to be uncovered after years of being buried, because truly, Magdalene thought, why dig up the dead? Dead memories, dead secrets–they were fine beneath the surface, beneath the roof of an old barn. Or beneath a pile of ashes so thick, nothing could escape.

Though the memory was, like many memories, tainted with too many adult reflections and moments such as these when she remembered it (there have been studies, she’d heard on the radio, stating that the more times a person remembers something, the more dissimilar from he actual event the memory gets), it was very vivid and, she believed, very accurate. She could still see the flames of their neighbor’s home out her childhood bedroom’s window, and recall the combined sense of terror and awe she’d felt at her own abilities.

What had happened, as Amy remembered it, was that she’d awoken from a dream about flames–a house, specifically, that was in flames. Jolting awake in the kind of panicked fear that only, cruelly, strikes the hearts of sleeping children, she’d snapped her eyes open and, instinctively, she thought, ran to her window, climbing on the old hope chest that had long been emptied of her mother’s marriage materials and filled with her own ragged and used toys, where she’d seen it. The neighbor’s house, on the other side of the back fence, was on fire. There were no firetrucks, no emergency aid vehicles–and no people that she could see.

Despite her youth, she’d learned in school that dialing 9-1-1 was the proper course of action, and yet, she felt compelled to watch the silent flames through her window pane, her nose close to the frigid glass and creating a small cloud around itself. She was simply stuck, watching the fire as it weaved in and out of the windows and doors.

Finally, after what she remembered to be ages but was probably no longer than a few moments, she’d become overcome with curiosity and flung the windows open, breathing deeply, and enjoying the loud roar, which surprised her, and the rusty, grey smell of woodsmoke and melting snow and icy air. It was the sound of her window that awakened her mother, who came running down the hall and stood, stunned, in the doorway, eyes wide, and muttered “Oh, those poor children.”

The house behind them was exactly like theirs, but faced the opposite direction. Amy had played there before, and had found the opposite-ness of it, the mirror-image quality intensely strange. When she’d read Through the Looking Glass as a teen, she’d recalled the strange sensation of being in a backwards house.

And now it was burning, and she’d dreamt it. She didn’t think that she had caused the fire, but she had certainly seen it in her dream, and awoken first. Had it not been for her, the entire home might have burned to the ground, and, she thought in terror, their own house may have been burned. She was such she’d been told of the fire by some higher power, which had prompted her to awaken, and, by proxy, awaken her mother.

She held the belief that she was a psychic until she was eight, and read every book in her school library even remotely related to the occult or ESP, which was a rather limited selection. She secretly, when she awoke at the wee hours on Saturday, sought out any kind of television show about ghosts or anyone with clairvoyant powers, which, too, were few. If she’d been a child of the Internet generation like her own offspring, she’d have been able to Google the various words or experiences she knew of, and probably learn others. She’d have probably found spells and become an expert at interpreting dreams because, even as an elementary school student, she was studious and intense and drawn to knowing about everything.

Amy’s mother told her during this phase about a great aunt she’d had in Mexico, who her own mother had known, who had professed to being a psychic. She’d lived in a tiny shack, she said, where she dressed in rags and stared into crystals and pieces of broken glass. She’d experimented with mind-altering drugs that Indians had sold her, hollering out at villagers and passing children, screaming about God and the spirits. She had eventually been declared mad, and hauled into a terrible place with white walls and jackets with no sleeves and no food for days. It was where they put people who believed in things like being a psychic. Things which weren’t real. But Amy had persisted, despite the warnings, because the occult was kind of chic, then, and because she truly believed it.

Amy was eight when her father, embarrassed and concerned by Amy’s persistence in her “powers”, which she’d been talking about at the dinner table again, as she remembered it, angrily told her that it was time to grow up, and that he would prove to her that psychics simply made no sense, and that only crazy people would want to be one.

Fortunately for Big Bill’s plan, it was winter break, which meant that the very next day, he was able to wake her, tell her to get in the truck, and drive. He took her up to Carson City to an indoor fair for tourists, driving well above the speed limit. It was a bit like a carnival, but because it was held inside the fairgrounds, there were no rides–just booths, food, and a few freaks. Well, they didn’t call them freaks then, but that’s what they were, she’d thought.

It had been one of the stranger days of her life, because they’d attended the fair without actually attending–the entire point was to go to the psychic.

When they arrived at the fair, Amy couldn’t believe that her father was going to pay admission–and a psychic–just to prove to her something that would likely become less appealing when she realized, as a teen, that burners and weirdos were into it. And yet, he’d become so focused on proving the impossibility of the idea to her in a way that would be memorable, he’d forgotten his seemingly innate frugality.

Amy had sat with her father in the dim, heavily-scented tent of the card reader, who’d been dressed in bizarre clothing, a bit like a clown, draped in gold coins and black fabric. She’d had her nose pierced through, and Amy recalled thinking it was a very unusual sight. As the woman, who had nearly comically-long finger nails and more dark eye makeup that Amy could believe, carefully, slowly explained each card (the Hanged Man, the Tower, and something else?), her father wrote the predictions down on a yellow legal pad, careful to include every detail, in case anything was “a sign.” He pretended the entire time that he was fascinated by the interaction, but both Amy and the reader knew that he was mocking them both.

For months following the odd day at the fair, Big Bill would ask Amy and her brother and she if any of the predictions had come true yet, which they’d check by running to the legal pad in the desk drawn. There, Michael would loudly read the psychic’s predictions in a high-pitched, yet serious voice, and cackle to himself. None of them had. The woman, the family had single-handedly proven, was a fraud, who was taking advantage of suckers and “cleaning up”, her father had said.

Had she, she though as she parked her car, dreamt of fire last night? Whirling around toward the barn, she racked her brain about the previous night’s sleep. Had she simply drifted off and remained in darkness until morning? Had she had any dreams at all? Had she been drinking, because that surely couldn’t hurt? But no, she remembered nothing–certainly no fire or anything indicative of powers. She’d seen nothing of this coming. This was entirely a surprise.

“Amy, we thought you’d never get here.” Magdalene was in her garden with her hands in the dirt and her gardening shoes on. She seemed serene and guiltless, but Amy immediately realized that she’d probably started the fire. Magdalene gestured at the horse, which was standing strangely calmly on the other side of the field, away from the burning barn, “We had a bet going as to how late you’d be.”

“Mom, what did you do?” Amy gasped, unable to look away from the bar.

“Me? Nothing. Probably kids smoking out in the barn and leaving old butts around. Or maybe one of your father’s old lighters burst into flames and just started it off.” She squinted into the sun, so Amy wasn’t quite able to see if she was smiling or not.

“Mom…we have to call the fire department,” Amy said in a low voice “like, right now.”

“Oh, I did already. I mean, I told them it was just a little burn in the old barn and that I probably could put it out, so I don’t think they’re in a hurry. But it’s ok. I feel so relieved not to have keep digging at that shit out there, huh? Now we don’t even have to deal with it.” The tiny woman stood, beating the dirt off of her hands, and then the knees of her pants. Amy was still staring into the flames, unable to move her eyes.

She slowly withdrew her cell phone from her rear pants pocket and dialed 9-1-1, just like she’d been taught as a child.

“Ah, hello, ” she tentatively said to the dispatcher “there’s a fire at, um, my mother’s house. It’s very large and, um, it could threaten the neighbors’ houses.”

The dispatcher was brusque with her.

“Ma’am, where do you live?” She uttered slowly, without interest. She could not have been less worried about the fire that was currently causing the photos of her as a child to curl over and become black, then white. She couldn’t believe that this woman wasn’t being nicer. She hurriedly answered all of her questions, and tried to make a mental note to go online and find a place to complain later. When things were back to normal.

Amy put her arm around her mother’s shoulders and breathed heavily. She steered her toward the house, which was a safe distance from the flames and separated by a shallow, mostly-dry creek bed that her mother had apparently hosed down when the flames had begun.

—

Carol reacted differently than Amy did upon approaching the fire. She found herself surprisingly impressed, and slightly relieved. At no point as she made her way toward the flames and her mother’s house, had it occurred to her that the fire was anything other than arson, by her own mother. She wasn’t concerned about the health of safety of the woman, nor was she particularly unhappy about the rotten, misery-filled barn’s demise.

She was mostly just proud of her mother for doing something that Carol herself had considered when their family home had been underwater. It made perfect sense–it would get those evil bankers nothing, and would save her from becoming a family outcast, blamed for the loss of the house and the homelessness of her parents. But she’d ever had the courage, nor had she possessed the wherewithal to set a fire that wouldn’t look as if it had been set by a woman who kept a baggie of cocaine folded into a matchbook. So she’d chickened out, and, instead, allowed her parents house to be turned over to a man with a face like a wheel of waxy cheese.

So good for her mother, she thought as she dialed 9-1-1, just like her older sister had taught her to, to report that there was a burn full of memories and painful reminders burning to the ground out in the county, and that it looked like a big one.

—–

By the time she was pulling up, a small crowd of couples in boot-cut jeans and ridiculously ‘rustic’ hats had gathered around her mother’s house to watch the fire and attempt to speak with Magdalene, who had little to no patience with these neighbors. The old man with the cows was nowhere to be seen, and Magdalene decided he must have died, after all.

The fire department, however, was still nowhere to be seen, which Carol had found odd. She’d really only called them out of formality, and was sure her mother already had, and that they’d already be there. But they were not, and Carol began to grown nervous and concerned.

Additionally, she saw as she unbuckled her seat-belt clumsily, her sister’s car was there–which meant that her sister and mother may have already been out of there, sorting things out when the fire began.

Her stomach, she felt, had been filled with freezing water. She nearly vomited as she ran toward the barn.

“Carol, you have so much to live for!” her mother called form the front door before she could get there. She’d seen her pull up and realized that it may have been a disconcerting moment. She’d also figured that Carol, stupidly, would run into the barn and probably get herself killed.

Carol had never been so relieved to hear her mother’s voice yelling from behind her, and she’d immediately turned and run toward the house, more sure than ever that her mother had, in fact, started the fire.

When the fire department eventually did arrive, it was if the men in the truck had just suddenly realized it was the first day of school, and they’d all slept in. Looking frightened and awfully young to Magdalene, the firemen seemed utterly bewildered by the absence of a fire hydrant, which, Magdalene explained, was just a little too fancy and modern for the old timers on her street.

But, she said, there was a well at the bottom of the slight hill by the creek, which separated the house from the field that housed the barn, and they could probably drop a siphon down into it and draw some water. Under different circumstances the suggestion would have merited eye-rolling from the usually-smug young firemen, but on this day, and perhaps because they were young, they nearly took her seriously. But, much to their relief, the department dispatcher had been clever enough to take note of where the residence was and dispatch a water-carrying truck, as well. She was abrupt, but she was thorough at her job.

After the blaze was finally drenched thoroughly enough to consider it safe to look into the barn, the oldest fireman approached the blackened skeleton of a building cautiously, calling over his shoulder to Magdalene.

“Was anyone alive out here?”

Quite the detective, she thought. As if she’d have been clever enough to actually put someone in there, she sure as shit wouldn’t tell this guy. Did she really look like someone who would kill and tell? She chuckled to herself, then stifled it, remembering that once she’d read a book about Ted Bundy, who’d smirked when he was on trial. She didn’t want to incriminate herself, even though all she’d done was burn down a piece of her own property. She really hadn’t killed anyone.

Magdalene had little confidence in the ability of the local firefighters, and was fairly positive that they would conclude that the fire was accidental if she said it was, and didn’t think they’d be quite bright enough to know not to. Sure, her lack of insurance on the thing did make it much less suspicious (she didn’t really, she’d have admitted to anyone who asked, understand insurance, and didn’t particularly want to), but she still could, she thought, get tossed in jail. Her! In jail! What a laugh, she’d thought.

The firefighters stayed and wandered through the deep, wet layer of charcoal and horse manue, looking for, Magdalene thought, nothing in particular. What could they possibly be after? An unburned gas can, majestically waiting in the corner with a spotlight on it, singing like a siren to the men in their brown coveralls that they were the secret to the investigation? Ridiculous, she thought. She’d seen Law and Order. She knew that they had to test things and shine lasers to figure out how the fire was started and wear. Besides, because of the thorough job they’d done with the water from the pressurized truck, they’d caused numerous boards and slats to fall through, with surely, Magdalene thought, moved evidence in damning ways.

And weren’t the police supposed to be out, she thought? Or was it just too rural for the single county cop to come out and write a report?

“Ma’am,” the oldest firefighter had told her “we don’t believe there’s any wrongdoing here, and we think you’re being straight with us. We don’t know how the fire started, but the area in the far corner does seem to contain the most damaged material. What were you storing over there? Rags? Paint thinner? Some things can just catch on their own.” The firefighter seemed to be enjoying the experience ever-so-slightly, because, Magdalene imagined, he rarely got to trot out this kind of language. He was proud, maybe even a little excited to be able to rehearse the lines he’d had to learn when he was just a kid.

“Well, I appreciate that, sir. No, we were just storing some old boxes of family belongings. Photos and that sort of thing.” She’d told him warmly, wanting nothing more for him to scoot along already, so that she, herself, could see what, if anything was left. She, too, was slightly giddy at the emotional occurrence.

“Oh, well, ma’am, I’m sorry to hear that. Well, I wouldn’t go back in there except to fall the thing. Poking and all that at the stuff out there might cause some of the beams to cave, and it would be real dangerous to be in there when that happened. Try to just get someone, maybe one of your neighbors, to come on out here and give you a hand bringing the roof down before digging around, ok?” He was genuinely concerned, now, she thought. It wasn’t a great day on the job, anymore. It was a silly old woman whose children’s mementos and framed photos of her husband had been so burned, they’d never be recognizably as anything other than charred stuff.

The firefighter gave her a pat on the shoulder and turned back toward his truck. The younger men had grown bored once the fire was out and there was nothing to see, so they were sitting around the back of the truck and playing some sort of dice game. Magdalene felt sorry for the idiotic young kids, who’d probably spend more time chasing after loose farm animals than flaming buildings. Once they’d left, she thought, she’d probably call the county and complain.

They did finally leave, much longer after Magdalene or anyone else had wanted them there. With them there, standing and judging, none of the neighbors had felt comfortable approaching Magdalene with their rehearsed well-wishes and their sheepish faces. When they were gone, the fancy young couples streamed up, one by one, and offered their condolences. What a terrible thing to happen, they said. We’re so sorry. We know you were storing a lot of items out there, or, at least, we’d heard. We’re so sorry.

“Alright, the show’s over” Carol finally shouted from the porch at the people, whose looks of faux despair and non-empathy had finally driven her into an angry lather. “If you’re actually a friend or relative of my mother’s, you can stay. If you’re a neighbor who asks which direction the sun rises in these here parts, you can take yourselves home and talk it out over dinner. I’m sure you will.”

The crowd murmured but, knowing when they were unwanted, began to disperse. A few of the couples walked down the driveway together, while two others took the narrow aisle between two of the rear fields. All of them eyed the inky remains of the barn, and all of them would share their theories as they ate pot roast and potatoes and over-cooked chard from their gardens that evening before the sun set.

Carol went back inside, where her mother and Amy were sitting on the couch, discussing possibly scenarios that may have started the fire. Amy didn’t seem even remotely suspicious, Carol thought. Truly a dullard.

“Well, it definitely could have been something flammable in one of those boxes that was exposed to sunlight for the first time in a million years.”

“Or, it could have been something that got left in the barn by a potential neighbor.”

“Or, it could just be that there was a piece of glass or something that reflected the sun into the alfalfa and hay and it was just like a magnifying glass used to kill a bug.”

“That’s a good one.” The two of them pitched ideas back and forth, often speaking at nearly the exact same time.

“Mmmmmm, ladies.” Carol interrupted. “Isn’t there someone else who should be involved in this little scenario? Someone who will probably know someone who can actually help us out with like, fixing this and building a new barn? And someone who will also know someone else who might be able to get some insurance money for it?” Carol couldn’t believe neither of the others in the room had called Michael yet. Because even though Michael was terrible at showing emotion or being a decent human being, he was very, very good at solving problems and stepping in when things became complicated and difficult, like this. He was exactly who they needed at that time, and he would probably be able to come over.

“There’s no insurance.” Magdalene said as she walked toward her phone, past Carol, to call her only son. “The barn’s not worth anything. Actually, the house kind of isn’t worth anything. We thought about insuring it, but we didn’t because it was too expensive or something. I don’t recall, your dad was in charge of that kind of thing. Anyway, some of the stuff in the barn, like the horse tack, is insured, so there’s money for that. But the actual barn and the land and stuff is all valueless. I mean, in the eyes of the law.” She was holding the mouthpiece of the phone away from her mouth and toward the living room as she listened to Michael’s phone ring. When she was a child, she’d thought the ring you heard was the actual echo of the other person’s ringing phone, which resonated through to the caller. She was fairly sure that that was no longer how the technology worked.

“Hi, Mom.” Michael answered as he flipped through the channels absentmindedly. The children were at his ex’s house, so he was able to watch adult programming, like cooking shows and golf, without the complaints of the Spongebob crowd. He felt nearly delirious with power.

“Hi, honey. Hey, um, do you want to come on over here tonight?” Magdalene hesitantly asked, looking deliberately away from her daughters, who were staring at her.

“MOM!” they shouted in unison.

“Hey,” Michael grew a little more keen on the conversation, “are Amy and Carol there? Why are you just now calling me? What’s happening?”

“Well, um…they were coming over to clear out the barn and, well, um, then, it caught fire and burned to the ground.” She hurried through the last part, once again remembering how much she detested being the bearer of bad news.

“JESUS!” Michael yelled. He wasn’t sure why the news came as such a surprise, but of all the cards he’d been anticipating that his mother would say, that had not been in one he’d expected her to pull. Had the barn really burned down? He’d heard the girls, and he’d definitely have heard them again if that’s actually what happened. There’s no way they’d be in on a joke like that, would they? What was funny about it?

Michael briefly thought about all the crap out in that barn. That had made his sisters snipe and each other and his mother for the better part of the last few weeks. That had brought up angry questions and bad memories. That had occupied so much time that could have been better spent barbecuing and pretending the past didn’t exist. Good riddance, he thought, thinking about his old junk burning up. Old sports posters that were worthless because his father had encouraged him to treat them like posters and not potential investments, post-cards from college girlfriends who he’d later forgotten about until he ran into them, say, getting baby formula or something equally ludicrous. He’d never be able to say it out loud, but he actually felt quite relieved and glad the entire thing would be dealt with now.

“Jesus, that’s terrible,” he began again, realizing he’d begun to drift away in thought “I mean, you guys were still sorting through all of our stuff. All of our childhood things! Gone!” he was perhaps going a little too far in feigning grief over the stuff, but he couldn’t help it. He needed to be convincingly upset, he thought, or else his sisters would, once again, label him a stone man. A person incapable of feeling. Which he was sure wasn’t true–because he was feeling a powerful sense of joy at the prospect of having so little to deal with once his mother finally did die. Her estate would be so small, he thought, which would really be easier on everyone.

“Do you want me to come over? Of course you do. You said you did. Why wouldn’t you? I’ve got a friend who’s an insurance adjuster so he can come out and look and make sure you get all taken care of with that. And I’ll also get a lawyer on the phone, just to ask what kinds of legal stuff you might have to do to build a new barn. And we’ll have to get some help cleaning the place up first, though I’d gladly hire someone to do that for you. Ok, I’m coming over.” Michael was excited to get to be the good son, instead of the evil brother. He’d been out of his mother’s favor for an uncomfortable amount of time, and was anxious to be able to do something for her that would remind her that he wasn’t all bad.

“Oh, about the legal stuff…” Magdalene started, as she unraveled the series of events that had transpired–including when no police officer actually came to the scene. Jesus Christ, he thought, rolling his eyes at the ridiculous nature of country people.

Within minutes of hanging up the phone, Michael was in his car with his hands-free attachment in his ear. He flipped through his contact book before he pulled out of the driveway and called the lawyer to ask for advice, which was helpful, but not particularly enlightening. Of course, they’d have to get a new permit to build another barn, and the land would have to be up to code. They’d also better call the police if the police hadn’t actually come out, as they may want to take some photos of their own.

The lawyer friend sounded incredulous that the police hadn’t come to take statements but, Michael reminded him, it was the county, and the county had only one police officer, who had better things to do than gander at burning barns in old ladies’ yards.

After that, Michael called his friend the insurance adjuster, who owed him a fairly sizable favor, and asked that he come out tomorrow to survey the property and look in the barn and write up a claim for his mother. He also requested that his friend actually look over his mother’s insurance information, since he was sure she’d probably been mistaken about her own level of coverage. There was no way Dad hadn’t insured the barn itself, he thought. A fire in a barn is about as common as bad breath on a dog.

Finally, Michael called his friend the contractor and explained the project a little, and even dropped in the information about his mothers’ cancer in hopes of getting a discount on the work he’d agreed to do to get the ground ready for building, but urged his friend not to mention it, as it made her very uncomfortable to talk about herself. You know, Michael told him. It’s a Mexican thing.

By the time he’d arrived at his mother’s house, Michael had already solved many of his mother’s concerned, and called to ask the police to come out. They’d agreed that gathering statements from the neighbors was probably necessary, but that at least taking a report of the accident and his mother’s account of what happened. His sisters, too, would give their accounts.

At this point, Carol became nervous. She’d temporarily, though not surprisingly, forgotten about the cancer discussion, but still had plenty of reason to be anxious about–including the fact that she would now have to lie to the police, or say that she honestly believed that her mother probably burned down the barn.

When Magdalene got up to use the restroom, Carol, knees now bouncing, turned to her brother and whispered in a low voice.

“You don’t honestly think this is an accident, do you? She definitely did this.”

“Oh my god, Carol, that’s ridiculous” Amy leapt in with a tight whisper that was both frantic and angry. “Come on. Seriously? You think she did this?”

“Amy, that’s not…it’s not the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. I mean, think about our mother. Think about what she does. Think about all the stuff that was out there.”

The toilet flushed. They all snapped upright, staring at each other in bewilderment. As she came back in, Amy shook her head, but Carol nodded–signals they all understood. Amy didn’t want Michael to bring it up, but Carol did.

“Amy, what don’t you want your brother to say?” her mother asked. Decades, and these damned kids still thought she was a goddamned idiot.

“Nothing.” Amy snapped, red in the face and looking out the window, ostensibly for a cop car.

“Something.” Her mother said, going into the kitchen for a diet soda.

“Ah, Mom…” Michael began cautiously “you didn’t, um, burn the barn down, did you? Because if we’re going to give a statement to the cops, we should all say the same thing, so…”

“So we all need to know you didn’t do it so we don’t have to lie.” Carol stepped in. She, like her mother, loved police procedurals, and knew exactly, she thought, how to handle a situation like this. “None of us can break, or else we’ll all go down.”

“Jesus, Carol, you sound like an episode of CSI.” Amy was so surprised by her sisters dramatic affect that she became less afraid of the consequences of her mother’s answer.

“Of course I didn’t burn down the barn, you dopes. And even if I did–”

“DON’T. Don’t say it.” It was Michael who stopped her verbally, but all three had a hand in the air or their hands over their ears. “We don’t need to hear anything more. We all know it was an accident and that’s what we’ll tell the county cop when he wraps up his donut break and comes out here to take a statement.”

“Yup. Yup, that’s what’s happening.” Amy said, almost as if she was in a trance. She probably wouldn’t be the most convincing witness, Carol thought.

“Maybe Amy can tell them that she dreamed it and that it happened because of her dream.” Carol laughed, trying to lighten the mood.

“Jesus, Carol, you weren’t even born yet when that happened.” Amy snorted, insulted and irritated that that was something that needed to be brought up–even though she, herself, had thought it just a few hours before.

“Oh right, your psychic summer.” Michael rolled his eyes and stood to make himself a drink.

“It was winter, and it was longer than that.”

“It lasted until you were eight.” Magdalene clarified, remembering how disturbing she’d found her daughter during that time. Looking for spells and trying to speak to the dead. Absurd. And creepy.

“Oh my god, I don’t need this. As soon as I talk to the cop, I’m leaving.” Amy said. “Like none of you ever did anything embarrassing when you were younger.”

“Even if we did, there’s no proof anymore.” Carol said, and then immediately realized it was kind of a terrible thing to say aloud. But Michael laughed, and that made her laugh, and then they were all laughing, as the remains of the ancient barn full of terrible secrets and incriminating information sad, still slightly warm from the heat of the fire and the setting sun.

—–

One thing that Michael would later realize probably, but not definitely, was lost in the barn (it could have, he thought, been lost at any point during his younger days), was a metal artillery canister that his father had bought him at an Army surplus store that they’d visited together on a winter camping trip that he had only vague memories of, and which he’d used to store the kinds of items that little boys save. The skull of a squirrel he found in the yard, some rocks, a matchbook his father had given him with all the matches removed “because you kids can be kind of stupid about fire”, and other assorted pieces of childhood memorabilia.

What he was slightly stung about, however, was a photograph he’d had of his mother and father just after they’d been married. Taken somewhere in Hawaii, the two of them were, in the photo, sitting across from each other at a dinner table, with a large bay window and sunset behind them. They’re back-lit slightly, so it’s difficult to see their exact faces. But it had come unstuck, once, out of a photo album he’d moved to the side when he was dusting (punishment for writing in the dust on the side of the book case). He’d spied the corner of it peaking out, and realized it must have slipped from its upright position.

Michael had never had much interest in old photos, but this one was different. His mother was beautiful, he thought, and his father was tall and handsome. Together, they looked so much more elegant than he thought of them–his father with a beer gut and no job every other week, his mother with rage in her eyes and the shortest temper of anyone he’d ever met–and it stirred in him something strange.

Years later, when people would tell him that he looked like his father, he’d rush home to open the canister and find the photo, to see if they were telling the truth. Surely, his father was better-looking, with piercing eyes, where Michael’s were, he thought, too close together, too shy-looking. Too much like being cross-eyed.

The canister was metal, so surely it stood a chance of surviving a fire, but would the heat destroy the contents within? Probably, though it was military-grade, he figured. But he wasn’t even positive that that’s where the canister was anymore, because he hadn’t actually seen it, because he’d never actually wanted to go to the barn to see what was there, and it was only after that something may have been lost that he realized there may have been something he had been meaning for some time to find.

—

Carol didn’t want her family to know about the role that narcotics played in her youthful indiscretions. Michael didn’t want his sisters to know that he knew that his mother had cancer. Magdalene didn’t want her children to know that she was dying. Amy didn’t want her siblings to know that she had found the image of her mother, pregnant with a child that was never to be born, the last time she was out working in the barn. The barn, it seemed, was the only one who held secrets that it desperately wanted to share–Carol’s failures, Magdalene’s health troubles, the sibling that wasn’t, the unpaid bills–and yet, it was the only one that wasn’t given ample opportunities to do so.

As Amy and Carol, just moments apart and in separate vehicles, came around the bend toward their mother’s house, Magdalene was gardening with her back to the barn, Michael was absentmindedly flipping through the multitude of channels that he satellite afforded him, and the barn was being rendered silent.

—–

When Magdalene was a teenager, and just beginning to become acclimated with the roping circuit, she used to spend a lot of time looking at catalogues, which she had convinced her father to allow her to order, because they were free and because they sold apparel for ropers and riders. Had they cost even a nickle, he’d never have allowed it, but because they cost him nothing except space in their mailbox at the end of their driveway, he had no problem with her sending away for them–on the condition that she not actually purchase anything. It created in her a feeling of powerless, hopeless wanting and longing which she would grapple with her entire life. From the time she was a teenager, until the moment right before she left this world, Magdalene would want for things which she knew she could never, ever have. And often, in a struggle to get the things she wanted the very most, she would have to destroy things she loved.

But it started with the catalogue.

The catalogue, with its glossy pages and shiny-haired white men and women who possessed, she thought, more teeth in their heads than any human she‘d ever seen, had contained the fringed, colorful separates and dresses that all of the day’s best ropers wore. Sparkling, lavish pieces worn by smiling blond women with a lasso in one hand and the mane of a chestnut mare in the other. Of course, Magdalene had chuckled, no one roped on a chestnut mare, but the fancy people who took the photographs for the catalogues had no way of knowing that, nor did they care. And besides, most roping horses were so wild-looking, so dappled and white-eyed that they’d have looked downright silly standing beside the women in their get-ups.

How she’d wanted them–perhaps because she knew she couldn’t have them. Or, perhaps because not only could she not have them, but she would have to settle for something else. Something less than perfect. Something that was not what she wanted.

Because she had to wear something other than dungarees and a gingham blouse to compete and garner attention from local media and important people on the circuit, Magdalene wore costumes that her mother sewed for her out of material she acquired from the fancy lady whose laundry she did. When the woman would become too thin (fancy women, Magdalene knew, were always shrinking, trying to become more frail, more petite–another reason that she herself had decided to never be fancy) or too modest, or too tired of a piece of clothing, she’d offer it to Magdalene’s mother to cut up and make into something for her children.

Of course, cutting such fine garments to turn into trousers for primary school boys and blouses for an awkward young woman was, Cecelia had thought, a true measure of sacrilege, but, as the fancy woman had told her, it was either the garments were recycled and went to Magdalene and her brothers, or they were sent away to the Salvation Army, where they’d end up draped upon the backs of gauchos and Okies, who had no business wearing fine items.

So Cecelia diligently sewed ruffles and fringes, doing her best to incorporate her own knowledge of Mexican costume dresses with what the modern American ropers were wearing, creating a sort of pastiche that was both exotic an exciting to white onlookers. And while they weren’t purchased from a catalogue, Magdalene’s roping outfits were truly a sight, Her mother had been proud.

But Magdalene was not. Still very self-conscious about her parents, her appearance, her mother’s work, her own lineage, the teenage Magdalene wanted nothing more than to look like every other roper. While many of those who came to see her perform loved her Old World-reminiscent ensembles, she, herself, hated that they called attention to how she was different. She just wanted to look like the other girls, Her mother hadn’t let her use peroxide to lighten her hair, and she’d chided her for stealing lemons out of the kitchen to attempt to lighten the skin of her face–and now, Magdalene thought, she was trying to dress her in outfits fitting not a fine, American-born, daughter-of-California roper, but rather, some immigrant. Some migrant worker. Some broken-English, black-haired princess of the Aztec. She hated it, and she hated her mother and father for making this her only option.

With each small clip in small-town papers that touted her performances, making mention of her “ethnic apparel”, and calling her a “dark-skinned beauty”, or worse, a “talented half-breed”, Magdalene had grown to hate her homemade costumes more and more. She seethed when other girls would ride in red, white, and blue–and she came out in orange, green, and brown. Even her horse had a name that betrayed her–he was named Julio, after some man her father had once worked with who’d been killed at the hoof of a wild pony he’d found and tried to rehabilitate. To everyone on the circuit, her most notable feature, aside from or perhaps in addition to her immense skills, was her Mexican heritage.

It seemed insurmountably terrible, she thought, to continue riding in that costume. Each time she thought of it, she felt sick to her stomach and overwhelmed by the impossibility of it. It felt crushing, suffocating–like she was being smashed by a giant thumb, which ground her into the dirt like a cigarette. The weight of it made her hungry for air and freedom. Something needed to be different, and yet, she had no way to gasp for breath.

Finally, after a particularly glowing review–which glowed more about her “festive” choreography and “gorgeous south-of-the-border smile”–Magdalene had had enough. As long as she still had something “festive” or “ethnic” to wear, she knew she’d continue to be pegged as a Mexican roper. A spicy lady of Latino origin, brought in to each show to keep the line-up from being too homogenous, or to attempt to bring more migrant workers and their families in to see the show. Something had to change, she thought, if she ever wanted to be on television or the radio, because Mexicans were on neither, except perhaps at side-kicks, and she was too good a roper to be a sidekick.

One sunny afternoon while both her mother and father were at work, Magdalene had dragged her hand-made costumes, constructed of expensive material and by the loving hand of her mother, and lumped them in a pile in a hot, dusty field behind the horse barn. There were, at that time, no neighbors for several acres behind the horse barn, and she knew she’d have enough privacy to do what she wanted–no, what she needed to do. She loved the costume her mother made her, but she hated what it made people say about her. She hated that it helped people judge her for a part of her for which she was already very ashamed. Had she been a taller, blonder girl–perhaps someone who was white or could have passed more easily as white–she wouldn’t have minded being suffocated by her own racial history. But as a Mexican girl getting put on show just to be Mexican, it was more serious.

Beneath her frilly dress, Magdalene stuffed wads of crumpled catalogue pages. She knew that she’d never be able to have any of the storebought items on their pages or covers, so, she decided to use them as kindling. As it was, they were useless to her, and at least using them for this purpose would mean that they would become nothing more than dust and ash, without growing embarrassingly old and out of style. It was the humane thing to do, she’d thought at the time, as she stood surrounded by nothing but hot sun, dry dirt, and a dusty dress sitting atop a pile of catalogue pages, folded into balls which, she thought, resembled paper roses.

It was windy on that afternoon when, strong-willing and ignorant, Magdalene stood over her costume and catalogue pages, flummoxed by a book of matches.

Her father, a smoker, had had plenty of matches, so Magdalene hadn’t had a problem getting the match book itself. He’d made it a lifelong habit, it seemed, of taking one from every bar and general store he visited. But as Magdalene herself had only ever observed the smoking of a cigarette and the lightening quick spark that made it possible–but the action of lighting was, she realized, something she had no experience with. Faced with how to actually make fire come from what appeared to be a series of soft sticks folded into an envelope, she wasn’t entirely sure how to light them. Could she strike then in the book like her uncle did to make her laugh, where he left the matches attached? Or did she have to extract one from the pack and strike it against the matchbook’s red runway of flammable material, like the men who hung around outside of the bar she walked by to get home?

She’d decided to remove one and strike it–which had immediately resulted in a painful burn to her finger tips, as a result of holding the match too close to the end. And for a second, she’d reconsidered her decision to do the only thing she thought she could to change her roping career. But as she thought about riding one more show dressed in her ridiculous Mexican get-up, her rage bubbled up again, leaving her more determined to make a change in the only way she thought she could.

Crouching close to the pile of items, Magdalene tried to shield the matches from the wind, which whistled in her ears and pulled strands of hair out of her long, thick braids. After half a dozen attempts, which were blown out of unsuccessful, she was finally able to get a spark–and then, a flame, which she touched to the corner of one of her beloved catalogue pages. The flame, which was bright and smelled of sulfur, licked at the surrounding pages, leaping from one to the next, bolstered by the wind and the dryness of the thin paper. Excited at the sight of it, Magdalene began lighting the rest of the matches from the flames themselves in a sort of fever, and tucking them into the folds of the fabric and paper. When she’d run out of matches, she threw the entire matchbook onto the pile, and began laughing. She felt incredibly free, unbelievably clear-minded. She was hopeful, liberated.

Magdalene waited, watching the dress turn black. Holes formed in the expensive, lush fabric, and the fringes began to meld together before becoming light as fresh snow. Ashes were whipped away in the wind, carried away like wishes or prayers. Underneath the material, the smiling faces of ropers an the soulful eyes of pristine ponies crumbled and curled. It was amazing, she thought, that something she loved so dearly could suddenly become nothing at all–and yet, she didn’t feel that she missed it at all. There were more catalogues, she figured, and more dresses. These weren’t the ones for her, and life without them felt uplifting and freeing.

Once the pile of incriminating evidence had burned itself out, Magdalene tossed dirt over it, stirring the ashes into the dusty earth. It didn’t entirely cover the patch where the land had been burned, and it certainly did nothing for the heavy smell of charred fabric and paper. She smelled her own hair, and could detect the burning on herself. But she didn’t care. She was afraid of her parents anger, but she was also exhilarated by the action she’d taken. It was bold, she thought, and righteous.

Magdalene never did get punished, because she was never caught. The dress, her parents thought, was lost by a careless ranch hand who they’d hired for a small amount of labor, including loading and unloading Magdalene’s tack and horses when she performed in the local shows. They fired him–which, while it made Magdalene feel ashamed, also left her feeling relieved, because it meant that nothing would ever be done to her for burning it–and finally broke down and purchased a storebought dress with silvery fringes and nothing “ethnic” to be seen. It was gorgeous–and made better by the fact that because of her own decision, she was free of the awful dress, of the temptation of the catalogues, and the suffocation that came from wanting and not receiving.

—–

The air on the two-lane road leading to Magdalene’s small trailer home was thick with the smell of wood smoke and garbage when Amy, who was thinking again about how many more times she would make the drive to the house where her father died, where her mother had found so much solace, turned onto it. Her windows were rolled up, and she couldn’t smell over the scent of her car’s air-freshener, which was both pleasantly scented and environmentally friendly. It was even, she thought she recalled, charitable.

What she did see, however, was the roiling black river that seemed to be churning into the sky from somewhere on the street. One of the neighbors was burning their trash, again, probably because they were nervous about the years they’d spent dodging taxes and hiring illegal laborers. Country people were so paranoid, she thought as she rumbled too quickly down the small strip of road, velocitized by the speed of the freeway behind her and driving too fast. Just a few minutes behind her, Carol, too, saw the cloud–and smelled it, too, because she’d unrolled her window to breath in the scent of the air and calm herself in the face of the confrontation that was just moments from her.

What was on fire, she thought? Trash? Wood? The surrounding forest? A home? Were items of great value or emotional significance being slowly turned into furious energy and inert little ashes, while someone stood by, weeping? Was someone’s life about to change as a result of leaping flames and surging heat?

—

But it took close to a week for Michael to even reconcile with what he’d heard. He spent the week feeling like he was living in a bubble, like his mother had somehow plotted to expose him to her terrible burden to rope him in to feeling for her, to helping her. But how could she have known that the information would travel back to him? Moreover, how could she not have known, when she was seeking treatment at a clinic so near to where he himself lived? Had she wanted him to find out without actually telling him, or was he imagining it? Was it just a coincidence that he had found out at all?

Perhaps, he’d thought during the week he spent pondering what to do with the information he’d accidentally been made privy to, she had never intended to tell any of her children about the cancer. Perhaps she’d intended to just brave it alone–a theory that made the most sense, when thinking about it rationally, Michael decided. And yet, he couldn’t shake the notion that somehow he had been cosmically trusted with this bit of knowledge.

If given the choice, Michael would have preferred to be left out of the loop. He hated it when his sisters began sharing things in low whispers, heads bent together, hands slightly raised to just barely cover their mouths. He hated the look his mother got when she dropped bad news into the middle of a room like an emotional atomic bomb, eliminating every tree, building, and animal in its path, leaving room of stunned and still-processing witnesses who felt as if they’d just been blasted by a burst of radiation that had turned the room icy, like the first frost of a nuclear winter. She was that terrible at delivering bad news, and it had scarred him for life, and left him terrified of ever hearing new information.

This didn’t help.

And so he continued to stew privately, going through the motions of his day and desperately hoping that an answer would fall from the sky and into his lap, telling him exactly what to do. Tell his sisters! the sign would say. Or perhaps it would tell him to not tell anyone, and let his mother come to them when or if she was ever ready. Maybe telling anyone would be an invasion, he thought. An invasion of her privacy that she so loved.

His mother, Michael rationed, loved nothing more than telling him things he didn’t want to hear. She relished bringing him down, he was sure. Wouldn’t she find it just delicious to tell him about something so serious? Unless it really was so very serious that she couldn’t bring herself to tell him.

He was exceptionally confused by the situation, and thought of nearly nothing else for days. And then, a week later, when Michael found himself back at Whole Foods with another weeks’ worth of groceries, tenderly fondling several selections of brie to see which was the ripest, it occurred to him that it had, in fact, been seven days since this particularly rotten egg of misfortune had been dropped unceremoniously into his basket. Seven days–which was exactly as long as he figured he’d had to tell his sisters, or to not. And he had not.

Which is how it came to pass that while Carol, several drinks deep, was nearly having a panic attack in her overheated attic as she pored over her mothers’ medical records, Michael was having a glass of organic iced tea and grilling some grass-fed beef patties for his children, thinking not at all about their mother and her cancer, but rather, about how his yard was looking slightly imprecise, and how he’d probably have to hire a different neighborhood boy to cut it the next time. But finding a good lawn-cutter who didn’t charge more than, say, $10, was just so hard to do in his “modest” (meaning modestly affluent) neighborhood.

It was also how, when Carol and Amy were speaking over the phone in the hushed tones that so made his skin crawl, making their plan that decidedly did not involve him at all, he was sitting on his overstuffed, yet still modern, IKEA couch with Dora, watching some cartoon or another, while sipping a delightful port that someone at work had given to him to celebrate his anniversary with the company. He’d saved it for quite some time, thinking that eventually he would have it on a special occasion, but had decided that night that, because he didn’t intend on getting married or having any more children again any time soon, that day was as good as any to celebrate his own success as both a father and an employee. Cheers to him, he thought.

And that was how it came to pass that on the day when both Amy and Carol strategically drove out to their mothers’ house to tell her that they did not appreciate her secretiveness, and to discuss her diagnosis with her, that he was taking his daughter to her childrens’ book club, which was held in the back of an independent bookseller not far from the place where he’d first learned that his mother had cancer. And yet, when he drove by the Whole Foods, he thought not of his mother, but of his own necessity for persimmons and gluten-free (it was just something he was trying) pasta for dinner the following night.

If Amy and Carol had known, indeed, they would have been thoroughly disappointed, though not at all surprised, by their difference in reactions to the same piece of information.

—-

Magdalene liked little more than working in her garden. Sinking her tiny hands deep into the cool soil, even on the warmed of days, to find whatever was hidden beneath the earth’s baked surface was such a sensory experience, it made her feel like she was truly part of something larger than herself, and larger than her little plot of land.

Her own plot, she thought, as she extracted small pebbles and threw them over the fence. From where she sat, in her rubber gardening shoes, Magdalene could see no people. No humans. A few cows in the distance, several barns, some more derelict than others, some fences, a broken down truck in the middle of the field behind her that had simply never been moved, and about a million blades of long, yellow grass in the overgrown lot that belonged to the old man who was either dead or just gravely ill. But no people. She felt that at that moment, like many moments since her husband had died, that she was really and truly alone.

Living alone, while it had its perks, to be sure, was not something that Magdalene had ever had any desire to do. When she was a girl, she’d lived in a bustling house, with Okies in the lawn, and the rich woman up on the hill, and neighborhood kids up and down the street. She didn’t go to college, so she never had any need to move out of her parents house. It just wasn’t something that occurred to any of them, and she’d married so early that it hadn’t really become an issue. In fact, until she’d become a widow, Magdalene had never spent more than a couple of days at home–and home–alone. She’d never had her own kitchen, where everything was exactly how she liked it. She’d never arranged a bathroom and had it left that way. She’d never had her own garage, her own attic, her own sitting room–but nor, until the day when Big Bill’s body was carted out the front door on a stretcher, in a bag, by medics who had tried to revive him in spite of her insistence that he was really, truly deceased and had been for some time, that she had ever slept in a home, alone, and thought “Yes, this is all mine.”

As soon as Big Bill had died, Magdalene had done a few things to the house that she knew he never would have approved of–as if she wanted to ensure, with her actions, that he was never coming back. She’d painted the wooden cabinets a sunny shade of yellow, which her daughters and son had all groaned at, telling her it looked like a stick of butter had decided, just before it killed itself, to smear itself over every surface in her kitchen.

“To hell with you.” she’d answered, not giving a shit what they thought about her and her kitchen.

She’d also re-decorated the bathroom as best a woman with no discernible taste and little spending money could. She’d bought a few new decorative hand towels, a new framed image of a watering can that she thought matched them, and a new cup for her toothbrush.

The toothbrush cup, however, had proven contentious–because it meant that she had to throw away Big Bill’s old toothbrush, which was bristly and dried out from lack of use. Before the new cup, their brushes had been stored in a sort of caddy that she absolutely abhorred, because it collected all kinds of gunk at the bottom of it, and had to be cleaned at least once per week. And yet, when the time came to throw away both his toothbrush and the caddy, which he had always liked, she felt paralyzed. Throwing out his toothbrush, the tool he’d used for much longer than he should have, every day; the tool that was covered in his DNA (and couldn’t scientists do things with DNA? Of course not, she though, don’t be silly.)–how can it suddenly become garbage?

But after his death, so many things that had not been garbage just days before suddenly were. They were waste, now, with no use to anyone. His broken reading glasses, held together by wood glue. His slippers, practically worn through. His favorite pillow that was little more than a mountain of dust mites and bacteria. His hopelessly unfashionable brown corduroy jacket, which hung limply in the closet like a soft, ribbed ghost of a different time. His drawing pencils. His mustache-waxing kit. His hair brush that was missing half the bristles and was probably older than many graduate students. All of these items, which Bill had touched and used and needed so frequently were now rendered useless, because there was no more Bill in the world. His hair and teeth and eyes and shoulders and hands and feet were all being cremated, she thought–they had no needs anymore. And so, she painfully threw the items away. All of the items, she thought, until she’d remembered the barn.

Now, outside, she sat with her back to the barn, enjoying instead something that was full of wonderful surprises, something that had no remnants of her husband or her children or anything that ever was or would ever be. Her garden was very much hers, and had always been, and she enjoyed the freedom to do with it what she pleased. She could plant whichever herbs or fruits or decorative flowers in whichever rows she liked. She could water or not water. She could pluck the dead leaves, or she could leave them to fall off on their own. She could leave her watering tin out for evenings on end when it was dry, or she could tuck it up under the porch. It was a small amount of freedom, but she enjoyed it. Though, if pressed, she’d have admitted that her live without Big Bill was decidely quieter, and lacking in companionship.

She now went days without speaking to another human being, aside from perhaps one of her fancy neighbors of the Schwann’s man who was so kind as to stay and chat, and show her photos of his children, or tell her about something that was happening in his neighborhood. She appreciated his willingness to speak with an old lady out on her rotting wooden porch, when even her own sun wouldn’t do the same.

Magdalene was overcome, then, thinking about her son, with a wave of anxiety and loneliness. He never came to visit, and, she was sure, thought that he was so much more worthy and important than she was. He saw her as a burden. He saw her as a mean old crone, growing older and drier and more haggard out on her witch’s farm, with dead old trees and too many ravens, and bonfires fueled by the fat of neighborhood children. It was a shame, and it made her feel like she had failed. She plunged her fists into the soil to calm herself, as if she could bury herself in the garden that she loved and burrow somewhere where her son wasn’t such a petulant, snobbish little man.

And that was how her daughters found her, hands in the soil, back to the barn, when they came to launch their bilateral attack on her privacy.

—-

On the drive to her mother’s house, Carol rehearsed what she might and Amy had planned to say.

“Mom, you know we love you….” It sounded so phony, so ridiculously when she said it out loud to herself as she sped down the freeway, alone in her car, with NPR’s afternoon news breaks making a barely-audible, sleep-inducing drone underneath her own words.

“Ok, ok. Try again,” she said to herself, trying to prepare for the conversation that was now, she thought, looking at the clock, maybe 20 minutes away. “Mom, you know we love you, and, well..”

She stumbled on the words. Was there a better way to approach this? Should she pull Amy aside for a minute to discuss the conversation and rehash what they’d planned to say?

She shook her head. No. No, this was the plan. They made a plan, and this was it. This was the plan.

“Mom, you know we love you and we only want the best for you, and that includes your health. We know you’ve been keeping something from us and we’re really worried and we want to make sure that you’re doing all you can to keep you healthy. Is there something about your health you’d been meaning to tell us?” Carol sped through the lines, which she’d been practicing since the day before. It sounded unnatural, like a bad actor reading her emotionless, stilted, uninspired lines. Like a child apologizing when she didn’t mean in. Like a liar telling a lie.

“Mom,” she started over, more honestly, “is there something you’re not telling us? About your health? And is there anything we can do to make sure that you’re getting the best care available? We’re here to help, and we wish that you’d let us step in and….um…help you.”

That felt much more honest, much more sincere. But did it deliver the same message? Would it have the same impact as the lines that Amy had skillfully crafted? She decided to give it one more try. Her hands shook slightly against the steering wheel.

“Mom, you know that we love you a lot, right? And, well….ugh, Mom, this is hard to say…” now, Carol thought, she was speaking more like she would if she were actually talking to her mother “but, um…well, Mom, we know that you’re sick and you haven’t been honest with us about it and we want to help and make sure that you get the care you need.” She felt herself growing tense, even angry at her mothers hard-headedness.

“And, well, Mom, we just think it’s really shitty for you to hide something so big from us, when all we want to do is help you. I mean, really. What kind of a crazy, stubborn woman hides CANCER from her own children?” Carol was beginning to grow more and more frustrated as she spoke aloud the many things she’d been thinking privately for days.

“It’s really just ridiculous. Cancer? You can’t hide that kind of thing. I know you want to have your independence, but come on! If it’s the money you’re worried about, you know that Michael would write you a check in a heartbeat. You know he’d just whip out his organic paper checks and write you a big fucking check with ‘Cancer’ in the memo line. Why don’t you just ask? Do you really think we can’t handle it? Do you think we’re that useless?’

Carol had no way of knowing, because she’d never been to a counseling session, but what she was doing was a fairly common trick that psychiatrists use to get their patients to open up about issues that were troubling them. Carol was, in fact, having what a counselor may have called a “breakthrough.”

“Mom, you know, it’s just…yes. Yes, I’ve screwed up in my life. But so have you, mom! You trusted your 20-year-old daughter with house payments! You let us make all of our own mistakes! You left us to go trucking around the country! You didn’t even call us until like, almost a full day after Dad died! You’re not perfect, Mom, and you shouldn’t be surprised when your kids aren’t either. But that doesn’t mean we don’t love you, and that we don’t want to make you feel better and help you get healthy. You can’t fight cancer alone. And if you’re worried about all that pink ribbon bullshit, don’t! And if you’re worried about your Medicaid, don’t. We’re going to take care of it all with a fucking frown and a bad attitude because that’s how we deal with things. You taught me that. That’s how we deal with things, and we don’t back down to shit like cancer. And that’s what you’re doing, Mom. You’re backing down like a giant coward and it’s just fucking stupid. And I hate it. And I wish you’d stop because….” Carol had begun to cry out of anger at this point “…because we love you and we want you to live a little while longer and you can’t just give up.”

Carol sighed. She felt better, and more prepared for the conversation she was about to have. In fact, she felt quite a bit better. As her SUV send her lumbering down the freeway, humming in perfect working order, she decided that she definitely felt better, and was definitely ready to have the dreaded conversation.

Amy had emailed Carol the next day–the subject line was “What to do about mom”, because, while Amy had wanted Carol not to ignore the email, which she had a terrible habit of doing, Amy also did not want the giant “C” word in print where Sean, or the children, or anyone else might see it–asking her how she’d like to approach their mother. They’d both had some time to think, Amy rationalized, and she wanted very much to confront her mother before it became too late for adequate treatment. This wasn’t something they could wait on, she tried to impress upon her sister.

Carol seemed to be on the same page, and responded surprisingly quickly with a plan of action, which she thought would both give them a chance to speak with their mother frankly and openly, and would not invite unwanted opinions or discussion, chiefly, from their brother, who would likely just try to cure the cancer with a check for $30,000 and a promise to visit once a year.

“I think,” Carol wrote in the email “it would probably be best if you do a little research tonight about the kind of cancer she has and what the treatment options are. You know if we come at her swinging without an actual plan, she’ll just shut us down. You’re better at looking stuff up online than me. Can you do that tonight?”

Amy was more than competent at looking things up online. In fact, in their family, she was known as the best at sniffing out interesting information from the annals of the internet. She was known, that is, by everyone other than Michael, who thought he was the best, in spite of actually not understanding search engines in any way. She immediately agreed that this was a good plan.

Carol had also wrote that she believed that talking to their mother in person, together, would be the best way to get her to listen, and that doing it under the guise of helping with the barn project (which Carol called the Hoard In 2011), even though Magdalene had made it clear that she didn’t really want Carol’s help–especially since the recovery of the box (which Carol called The Box of Shame, or also, Kristallbox) full of glass and ruined photos. Carol volunteered to ask her mother if she would maybe be allowed to come up and help, and Amy agreed that this was a good, subtle way to get together in person.

And so, the plan to confront their mother was in motion, and was set to begin that evening, with Amy looking up information, and Carol calling their mother.

During “Phase 1″ of the plan, which entailed a somewhat-frantic, mildly-intoxicated Google session for any and all information about cancer that she could possibly find, Amy, with a knot in her stomach and a glass in her hand, found a lot of health studies touting various diets and food items that either caused or cured cancer, depending on who you read. Cornell said that blueberries were a “superfood”, which could somehow purify the body, and yet, Johns Hopkins decried the myth, stating that only a raw food diet could thoroughly reduce the risk of cancer.

And of course, there were plenty of conspiracy theorists, some with more actual medical or scientific backing than others, who opined about the various cancer-causing agents in everything from shampoo to dog food, who advised against the use of microwaves, cell phones, laptops, and even laser pointers. Laser pointers! Because surely, every English professor at a second-rate state school had developed a complex form of finger cancer from instructing students on how to diagram a sentence? Amy thought that most of the information on the internet was crap–but she was still glad that her mother, who would believe anything rattled off by any pseudo-scientist with an opposing view point, would surely fall head first, like Narcissus into the abyss of abysmal blogs and journal articles that had hardly been peer-reviewed.

But Amy’s skillful search-engine combing did turn up something of note–boatloads of information from the many pharmaceutical companies, all advertising how excellent their treatments and products were for extending the average life expectancy of cancer patients. And yet, the actual language, Amy noticed, was all extremely cloak-and-dagger: “Ask your doctor before beginning any kind of laser treatment”, “this treatment may not be suitable for patients with certain kinds of cancer”, “it’s advised that patients always speak with their doctors about the potential risk for additional symptoms and side-effects which may make this treatment less safe.”

What were these drugs, Amy wondered. What could they be filling already toxic patients full of that required so much delicate, complex, covering-their-asses language? Had her mother already experienced all of this, and now, was unwilling to do it again?

It didn’t matter, Amy decided. Her mother was sick and she, a woman who had once gotten out of her car to yell at a man at least two feet taller for stealing a parking space that she had clearly been signaling for, was not one to roll over dead. And this time, it would be quite literally rolling over dead if she did not put up a fight.

And so, in the final stages of Phase 1, Amy printed out close to 20 pages of medical information, all of which she was sure her mother would entirely glaze over without so much as a courtesy glance, and drank her final glass of wine.

—

Phase 2 of the plan was Carol’s responsibility, but she also had at least two drinks before daring to call her mother. Not because she believed that her mother wouldn’t be, at least to Carol, hospitable and welcoming of the help, but because the reality of the situation–that her mother was possibly, probably dying–was beginning to settle in, and it made Carol afraid and sad. But she called anyway, from her perch in the back yard, while Sean and the kids made pizzas for dinner.

“Hello?” Magdalene answered the phone as if she’d been interrupted from something very important.

“Hi Mom, it’s Carol…are you busy? I can call back.” Carol immediately saw a loophole–a way out of this dreaded, falsified conversation.

“No, it’s fine. I was on the other line, but I just hung up because who gives a shit?” She was irritated, having been on the phone with yet another idiot doctor. But she’d be damned if she told her daughter any of that. “What?” she added, realizing she hadn’t actually asked why Carol was calling.

“Oh, you were on the other line? Who were you talking to?” Carol was genuinely curious–she had no way of knowing that the person who had been on the other line was, in fact, the person who knew what Magdalene believed that Carol did not.

“No one. Really, no one. Someone who is a no one. Anyway, what? Why are you calling me?” Magdalene’s irritation was now spreading from her phone call with that shitty doctor to her phone call with her daughter, who clearly wanted something. But what was it?

“Ah, nothing really…just that, well, Amy told me about the boxes you found in the bar, and I’m really sorry about all the broken stuff, and I know that the last thing you wanted to be reminded of while looking through all the mementos and stuff was how much I’d screwed up and I just feel terrible and…I want to come out and help. Like, help finish up clearing out all those boxes. Will you let me help?” Carol had spoken very quickly, out of nervousness and mild drunkenness, and when her mother didn’t answer immediately, she became concerned that the old woman may not have understood. “So can I? Come out and help in the barn? Please?”

“Carol, I don’t give a shit if you come out and help or not,” her mother said in a tired voice. “Yes, you were a shit when you were 20 and you broke some shit, but Jesus, let’s just move past it. Most of the photos were fine, and you didn’t exactly have the leisure of hiring a couple of Manuals to come help you move out. I don’t blame you for it anymore. It’s just not important. But if coming out and sorting through some moldy old boxes of Christmas ornaments is what it takes, then Jesus Christ, come on out tomorrow with Amy and you all can be absolved through the miracle of old junk.”

Carol laughed. “Manuals” was an old family joke that, near as she could tell, was started by her grandfather, the prototypical self-hating Mexican man, who referred to any and all day laborers and “Manual”, which was both a play on the popular Hispanic name, and the “manual” labor that they performed. It was terribly politically incorrect, but, as Magdalene had told her overly-polite and outwardly-white daughters, “everyone else hates Mexicans, so Mexicans might as well join in.”

“Ok. Amy and I are coming out tomorrow. I want to help and I think it’ll be good for all of us.”

“Sure, whatever. I’ll be out there all day. I’m about halfway through, and so far, the most interesting thing I’ve found is a photo of Michael in a goddamned bow-tie when he was going through his dandy phase.”

“Oh, right. Does he have a pocket watch?”

“You bet your ass. He looks like Winston Churchill with a mustache. It’s really a sight. But other than that, it’s just a lot of junk that an old woman’s collected over her life. Pretty boring. But come on out, I don’t care.”

“Ok, Mom. I love you.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

Carol had always thought it interesting that people on TV never said goodbye–in spite of the fact that she couldn’t, for the life of her, end a conversation without some kind of closing remark. But then, neither could her mother. Magdalene had always found the absence of a conversation-ender to be terrible rude. If you just stopped speaking and hung up the phone, wasn’t that the same as just hanging up? And hanging up was a pastime of Magdalene’s that she truly treasured–it was her favorite way to end an unwanted conversation, and passive aggressively show the part on the other line that she really didn’t have any regard for them whatsoever, and she was going to show it by ringing their ears and tersely terminating the conversation.

Carol remembered watching her mother smartly hang up on a teacher who had once accused Carol of plagiarizing a paper. Which, to be fair, Carol had plagiarized–she had a friend in the grade above her who had had to write on a similar, but not identical topic and Carol, in her youthful naivete, hadn’t realized that the assignments were different enough for the paper to be entirely incorrect–but her mother was so indignant at the idea that any one of her children would ever cheat, let alone get caught for it, that she had immediately picked up the phone and called the school. And once the teacher had actually been put through and asserted that the paper was so unbelievably off-topic (and yet…so very close, Carol thought, from what she’d thought the assignment had been) and so familiar-sounding that it must have been stolen.

Magdalene had demanded that the teacher show evidence before giving Carol a failing grade which, of course, the teacher could not–because Carol had the evidence, the initial paper, stored safely in a folder labeled “Biology” in her locker at school. And, in the absence of evidence and with a demand that the teacher give Carol the grade she deserved (which the teacher then said was a D, because the paper was off the given prompt), Magdalene had hung up in such a triumphant way that Carol had never forgotten, and had, herself, frequently tried to emulate.

And so, as Carol pondered the necessity of a “goodbye” to indicate the difference between hanging up and actually politely ending a conversation, she slowly grew more nervous about asking her mother whether or not she was dying, and if she would please, for the sake of her children and grandchildren, please do the sane thing and seek medical treatment.

—-

Phase 3 of the plan, of course, involved not telling Michael, which wasn’t hard at all. Both Carol and Amy had been skeptical of Michael’s response to Carol’s discovery. But what neither Carol not Amy knew, or could have known, was what Michael was already fairly sure that Magdalene had cancer.

Unlike Carol, he hadn’t found out by snooping or trying to hide anything. In fact, he’d have been happier not knowing anything about it. But he’d been forced, against his will, to know about it, by a friend of his who worked in an oncology practice whom he’d seen at Whole Foods.

It seemed that, despite living 45 minutes outside of town, the nearest practice to his mother was also the one where Michael’s friend was currently a resident.

“I’m sorry to hear about your mom!” he’d said to Michael. “I know I shouldn’t say anything, but she’d not really my patient, and I saw her just a few days ago. She seemed like she was doing really well, but…you know. I just…my heart goes out to you, man.” They’d shared an awkward friend-hug, which humiliated Michael to no end–particularly because he’d had no idea his mother even had a reason to be at a clinic for cancer care.

He’d mumbled out an answer, and been stuck contemplating the ramifications. That was 6 months ago, and he had yet to say anything at all. At this point, he figured, it had gone on too long, and his sisters would never stop judging him.

Carol rarely called Amy–she’d usually just text when she had a note or anything like that–so Amy was intrigued. However, Amy was also busy. First, she’d had to catch up on a few very delayed emails. Then, she’d had to run more errands than a nearly-empty-nester should ever have to.

Then, she had to take Richard’s car into the shop for its routine oil change, which required corralling her eldest daughter and the family’s second car into the same place, at the same time. Richard knew precisely nothing about automotive mechanics, and he wasn’t a religious man, but if you’d asked him to swear on a Chilton guide that an oil change every 2 months was necessary, he’d have gladly placed his hand over his heart and taken the Pledge of Castrol.

It had made for a long day, and Amy wasn’t sure that she was ready for Carol yet. And yet, there she was calling. Perhaps she was wondering why she hadn’t yet been invite out to the barn, Amy thought, and cringed, thinking of the concrete evidence she and her mother had uncovered from the barn–the hastily-packed boxes, the shattered family photos, the crumpled papers. It was too much for Amy and, to be honest, she just didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with it.

And yet, something nagged at her, as her phone vibrated for the fourth time, and displayed her sister’s name across the screen. Amy sighed.

“Hi, Carol. What’s going on?” There was silence, and some soft breathing. Was Carol drunk? Prank calling her own sister in the middle of the afternoon? Was she, Amy realized, crying quietly and trying to gain her composure? Carol had a terrible habit of calling Amy while crying, and Amy had frequently answered her phone, only to hear Carol’s voice, breaking and throaty, saying her name like a pathetic weeping child begging for its mother. These calls were usually prompted, way back when, but a fight or disagreement with her turd of an ex-husband, of whom Amy had grown entirely sick of speaking. But that was before Amy had had a cell phone, so she’d had to take every single sloppy call her sister placed.

“Carol, come on. You’re an adult. When you call a person, say ‘hello.’ Are you autistic or something? Jesus, just be normal. What the hell is it?” Amy was more frustrated at the silence and everything is may have meant than anything else. Carol could have been shaken because, Amy realized, one of her children was dead or something.

“Carol, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just…we’ve talked about this. You can’t call me just to make weepy noises. If you’re crying, cry, and then call me back when you have actual telephone-ready words prepared.”

“I don’t know how to tell you.”

Amy’s stomach dropped and her body flooded with dread. She felt sick. It was bad news. Everyone in their family was, somehow, terrible at delivering bad news. Her mother had once told her that her great grandfather, a man Amy had only met a few times on trips “down south” to visit the extended family but had felt a special closeness to, had died–in the middle of a yarn store after the two had been shopping together for hours. Her father had told her that her childhood cat had died over dinner, as casual as can be. He’d just slipped it in, like it was nothing at all. “Amy, can you pass me the salt? Oh, by the way, Boots got hit by a car today so I buried what was left of him. Mom says she’s got some Popsicle sticks saved if you wanna make a little cross for the yard.”

And so, none of the family members knew how to deal with actual bad-news situations. Beat around the bush? Get very drunk before having to divulge a piece of information that wasn’t favorable? Text it to each other (thank God for text messaging, the preferred communication method of awkward families and those who refuse to get in touch with their feelings)?

Amy knew there was only one way to actually deal with a situation that involved bad news.

“Carol, spit it out. You weeping and dangling it over me isn’t helping either one of us figure out a solution. Is it one of the kids? Your marriage? Is Sean OK? Is Sally’s father suing for sole custody? He’ll never get it, you know.”

“No,” Carol sniffed quietly “Sally’s going to be coming home pretty soon and I’m really glad. I’ve missed her just a ton.”

“Ok…so…” Amy started, knowing that she both had to and did not want to hear what Carol had to offer. It was in no way going to be good…an yet the waiting was as close to water-boarding as Amy thought she’d ever get without joining the armed forces her own damned self. “What is it? Let’s just have out with it, OK? So I don’t have to sit here and sweat fucking bullets because you and everyone else in this goddamned family is terrible at communicating?”

“Well…so…the other night, when Mom started talking about the garage, I got really nervous because there were some things out there that I knew you’d and she and Michael would be angry about….so…”

“What, all those broken photos in the boxes? Carol, we know you were in a hurry to pack up the house, so it’s not that surprising. Sure, it sucks that you ruined like, all of our family photos even worse than they would have been otherwise, but like, Mom’s not THAT mad. We found them and were pissed at first, but I think she’s probably over it. It was mostly just a reminder of how irresponsible you were and how much it losing the house was so heartbreaking, but it was also, I think, something that reminded Mom of how much you’ve grown…” Amy kept rambling, desperately hoping that that was the extent of Carol’s news. That she was worried about Amy and Magdalene uncovering something embarrassing of hers–something that picked at an old scab. But it wasn’t.

“No, not that…but I was worried about those boxes,” Carol admitted “because I knew that you and Mom would see them and think about how irresponsible I was, and I didn’t want you guys to spend the whole day thinking about what a screw-up I was.”

“We didn’t. Just half the day. The rest of it we spent going through the books Michael had demanded that we all buy him during his classy stage. You probably remember that, right? When he suddenly wanted to be all hoity-toity, and like, asked for books about wine and cheese when he was in high school? He was obsessed with becoming “better than the rest of us.” Not much has changed, huh? So, is that it? Is that all you wanted to talk about? Because we’re all over it. Honest. Promise.” Amy was trying to wrap it up quickly, getting frantic and a bit shrill as she hoped that her sister had told her all that she’d needed to, and prayed that it wasn’t anything more serious.

“Well, ok…good?” Carol was obviously quite hesitant to tell Amy what it was she was really calling about. It was clear that Amy didn’t really want to hear any bad news–and yet, there Carol had it in her hand, and she simply had to share it with her older sister. She had to. It was there, on paper, rattling like a sad leaf on a tree that was having a seizure. Carol couldn’t keep her hand still enough. She was sure Amy could hear the note from the doctor rustling through the phone. “But, um, actually what I’m calling about…” Carol cursed the fact that telephones no longer had long, curly cables that you could twirl around your finger or play with in some other way to distract you from the terrible phone conversation you were in the midst of having. Why, Verizon? Why hadn’t you created the busy-hands cellular phone attachment, which would make it so much easier to pace nervously like she had when she’d been in calling every number she knew to try to get another bag of cocaine and forget that her home was days from being foreclosed on.

“It’s that…um…well, I really wanted to get some paperwork that I knew was in one of those boxes and so I went looking–”

“You went snooping, you mean?” Amy was trying anything to deflect away from whatever horrible thing she was sure Carol was about to unveil. A paternity test stating that Carol had, in fact, been a real mistake–the product of another man? A photo of a fourth sibling that Magdalene had murdered and thrown in a gully because she couldn’t handle another baby? A secret fortune that would tear the family apart? Amy’s mind raced.

“Amy! Shut up for a second! What I did was I went and got a box that I thought had the papers I want–papers that were mine that I’d packed into one of those boxes that I kind of didn’t want mom to see, but not because they were anything earth-shattering–and instead I grabbed the wrong goddamed box and it has some of Mom’s papers and um, they’re, um, they’re not good. She’d been hiding something pretty major from us and I don’t know how to tell you or what to do and I’m just really scared. I’m out in the yard now because I haven’t even told Sean yet, and I wanted to tell you first. Ok? So can you just listen?”

Amy was ready to hear it now, she thought. Or, at least, her curiosity was taking over. What had Magdalene been hiding?

“Yes” Amy breathed “I’m listening. What did you find?”

“Mom has cancer. She had it once before, and she went on got it treated without any of us knowing, right after Dad died, and now it’s back and she’s refusing treatment.”

“Wait, what?” Amy felt slightly relieved. Cancer was more treatable than some other deeply-embedded familial lie that would tear at the very seams of their circus-like brood. “What kind of cancer? Where is it? How long has she had it? What’s the treatment that she’s refusing? Is it because she doesn’t have money? We can pay for treatment!” She was in crisis mode, trying to assess everything and figure out a game plan.

“It was breast cancer before–according to the papers, she removed a little piece of breast tissue around her lymph node and also tried some kind of experimental laser thing. Now, it’s more advanced breast cancer that has possibly spread to her brain, but she won’t let them give her an MRI for whatever reason. Also, it looks like she hasn’t been paying any of Dad’s medical bills.”

“What? Why hasn’t she asked for help with those? Any one of us gladly would have helped her. Michael’s practically throwing money at her to make her go away and stop asking him for things. I mean, Jesus, why would she stop paying? What’s the matter with her?”

“The matter might be” Carol said, calmly “that she thinks she’s dying of cancer and has given up on making the payments.”

“Oh shit, you’re right.” Amy gasped. She couldn’t believe how perceptive her sister was. How long had she had these papers? How much had she been thinking about this? It couldn’t have been more than a few days, because they’d just started talking about the barn four days before. Amy had only been out to the barn that one time.

“Well,” Amy started cautiously “I wasn’t going to go out and help with the barn today, but maybe I will, so I can talk to her about it?”

“NO.” Carol shouted. “Sorry…I….no. Don’t tell her, because then she’ll know I snooped. I’m going to call and go out to the barn with the box and try to sneak it back out there and then pretend find it and then ask her about it and then I can bring it up without her knowing. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I wasn’t going to tell you, but it’s been practically rotting a hole in my gut and I couldn’t keep it to myself anymore. Is it ok that I told you? Please don’t tell Mom I snooped. I’m already upset about her finding all the shit I packed into those boxes when we were trying to move out of the house. I know how stupid it was, and I know how no one in the family will ever forgive me for that whole thing, and those boxes of shattered glass were, I’m sure, just a reminder that no one needed. Believe me, I’ve been nervous about that, too.”

“You sound like Nancy Drew with your plan to sneak the box back. Why don’t you just tell her?”

“Because she’ll want to know what I was actually looking for, and then she’ll know that I had something else I wanted to hide, and she’ll ask, and I don’t want to goddamned deal with it.”

Of course, what neither of them knew was that Magdalene, trying to find her medical records so that she could ceremoniously burn them in the burn barrel in the back yard that frequently got the Fire Marshal called on her, had been unable to locate them. She’d found some other box of Carol’s bills, which she hadn’t had any interest in opening and had set aside for her daughter, but that was the only shoebox in the lot. Where had she put her medical records, she’d wondered? Had one of the girls gotten them by accident? Magdalene intended to ask Amy about it when next she came over. But neither Amy, nor Carol knew about this.

“Ok, find. Fair enough. I won’t ask about that. Jesus, Mom has cancer? How are we going to get her to go to treatment? Do you think if we offer to pay she’ll go? Why wouldn’t she want to get healthy and like, live forever like she’s always threatened?”

“Maybe living forever isn’t as awesome as she’s always thought. Getting old alone out on that farm can’t be pleasant. I imagine she’s probably realized she’s staring Death down the barrel of a shotgun and wondering when he’s going to pull the trigger.” Carol was breathy and relieved and also newly nervous about her mother’s health. It was the first time she’d had a chance to worry about the cancer instead of the incriminating box or the difficult conversation with her sister.

“Are you drunk?” Amy asked. “You’re so poetic.”

“Yes.” Carol answered flatly. “Wouldn’t you get drunk if you had to call yourself, or me, or Michael, and say, out loud, that Mom has cancer and that you found out by trying to steal a box of humiliating old papers out of the barn?”

“Yes, probably.” Amy agreed, pouring herself a healthy glass of white wine. She’d considered using an actual wine glass, but decided that a tumbler of the old bottle she had in the refrigerator would do just fine. “And you know,” she added “we have to call Michael.”

“Do we?” Carol asked, swallowing another mouthful of rye out of her own tumbler, which she’d cleverly brought into the back yard with her so that she could call her sister. Sean was used to her sneaking off to call Amy, because Sean got irritated with the high-pitched tone she often took when on the phone with her sister, and because she’d usually smoke a mostly-forbidden cigarette while she was out there. So he wasn’t at all suspicious when she, stomach-in-a-knot, had taken her cell and a glass on rye outside with her.

“Serious family business. Michael is being a real dick again.” She’d told her husband, who nodded understandingly. He tried his hardest never to insult Michael, but knew that he was one of the family’s sore spots, when it came to relations and tension.

“But really.” Carol said, afraid that Amy might actually call Michael. “We don’t have to tell Michael just yet, do we? Say we don’t. We don’t, right? He’s just going to try to throw money at the problem or, like, be a jerk about it. Let’s talk to Mom first.” Carol was practically begging at this point.

“You’re right,” Amy agreed, “let’s not tell him until we find out more information. You know how he is.”

—

Michael didn’t remember very much from his childhood, and not because it was bad. He just, for some reason, didn’t have very many, or at least, very many clear memories from when he was a boy. He wasn’t sure why, but he knew that, where other people had very definitely impressions or actual memories about events, people, and places, he had none.

He had blurred, half-filled-in, possibly imaginary flashes of memory from his earliest (his mother in a peachy blouse, smelling like powder and cleaning products, scrubbing the bathroom sink while he sat in an empty bathtub playing, with his dry bath toys. It was both his first memory, and his first memory of something feeling wrong and unnatural.) to his most recent before the age of 18 (the trousers he simply had to have for high school, which, upon finally debuting proudly, had gotten him called a “queer” for about 2 weeks. He had decided at that time to cultivate a higher palate and better taste than all of the Redding rubes he’d gone to school with, and had immediately begun checking out library books about wines and cheeses–things neither of his parents knew diddly about–to educate himself.).

But other than that, it was mostly a flurry of dream-like images of the dark, small home in Tahoe, where they’d bought their groceries from a tourist store because it was close and the owner gave the kids candy. But looking back, he couldn’t figure out why his cheapskate of a father, who had, he swore, once pinched a penny so hard it had melted like a Junior Mint, would have let them shop for cheese and turkey and bread in such a place. But then, maybe it was the only store for miles of hard road, and with two toddlers in tow, Magdalene had put up a good fight. Michael really couldn’t say–because he really couldn’t remember.

So when his sisters would laugh about things in their childhood–Carol’s much more recent than his and Amy’s–he would just sort of roll with it. Sure, he had impressions of his mother and father before they were all adults, but not many. Not like Amy, who had complex memories about the songs her mother sang her to go to sleep (“Silent Night” all year long, a number of popular songs from the 1950s, including “La Bamba” which, Magdalene as a Spanish speaker, could actually sing perfectly, unlike so many others who knew little more than “Soy capitan, soy capitan“), the couch that had been in the living room of that mildewy little house in Tahoe (brown, Amy was fairly sure, with orange flowers and some kind of a hideous dust ruffle), and the many needlepoint or embroidered projects of Magdalene’s, which had covered the walls in cheap frames in the stead of actual art.

Michael was intensely occupied by trimming his impeccable, short, just-almost-salt-and-pepper beard when his phone range, and it showed his sister on the caller ID. He wasn’t sure why she was calling, but he was sure it was about some stupid memory or another that she’d dug up from the boxes of mold and ruin that she and their mother had spent the previous day exploring through like a couple of kids playing Harriet the Spy in an abandoned junk yard.

In spite of the fact that he remembered none of the whimsical, story-book moments of his childhood like his sisters did, he did have a few vague memories…and a lot of recent ones. Actually, mostly what he had were his adult impressions of his parents to keep him company. When he thought of his mother, he thought of her in her middle age and older years. He remembered when she and his father had showed up announced one Christmas season when he was with his first wife and incredibly frustrated about their inability to conceive. He’d come home from a long day of work to find an eighteen-wheeler parked along their suburban street, and his first thought had been, in all actuality, “Oh shit. There goes the neighborhood.”

Of course, it hadn’t been some teashy new neighbor who had bought the property with a ridiculously dangerous mortgage that banked on a future lottery win. It had been his parents, during what he thought to be perhaps the most juvenile period of their adult lives. Driving around in a long-haul trucker like a couple of speed-addled trailer park refugees, living out of roach-infested motels in the middle of God-knows-where, giggling like teenagers and eating beans out of a can, heated over the cigarette lighters.

And there they were, on the front stoop of his manicured home, reeking like an Interstate Indian casino. They smelled like a pair of unwashed ash-trays, and they couldn’t have been more pleased with themselves.

This was how he remembered his parents.

He also remembered them as the two pathetic parents who had somehow been so deluded as to be able to turn a blind eye to Carol’s very obvious, very trendy 1980s addiction to cocaine, which led to the very predictable, and very tragic repossession of a home which had been owned by the family for almost long enough to actually own it. As much as he blamed the then-young Carol and her horrible, idiotic, worm of a husband, he blamed his parents, too, for not stepping in sooner. He blamed his parents for actually believing Carol when she said that the bank had simply never mailed the notices, for believing that she’d actually been making the payments.

He’d told them at the time, and still to this day held, that if she’d just payed rent to them, which they then could have used toward the mortgage, that the family would still be in possession of the home that Carol had been born in, that himself and Amy had all but grown up in, that he’d someday have liked to have as an asset. At least that way, he’d rationalized to his parents, they would never have to rely on her to make the actual payments. Which, it turned out, they could not.

Michael was, he thought, the most forgiving of his siblings. He knew that Amy still held deep resentment toward Carol about the house (because, mistakenly he was sure, Amy had always had a notion that her father would have liked for her to have had the house, in spite of the fact that he was not only older, but more likely to renovate the place because he was the only member of the family with taste), and that Carol has resented both himself and Amy for being born first, and also, she thought, being wanted. Carol had always believed, perhaps rightfully, that she was a mistake, and for that, she harbored quite a bit of anger and tension.

And so, Michael had mostly forgiven Carol for a particularly unfortunate youthful mistake. He could not, however, forgive his parents, who were adults, and who had let their own home slip through their fingers by just a few years–and then have the audacity to believe that going “on the road” like a couple of middle-aged Beats would redeem them and fulfill them. They’d missed much of Michael’s first (disastrous) marriage, which was fine, but he may have liked a little more of his father’s advice on the subject. They’d also missed much of Amy and Richard’s early courtship, which Michael had to advise about, which made him, in turn, feel put-upon.

Actually, when Michael really thought about it, “put-upon” was about the best way that he could describe the way that his family made him feel.

Michael had made the mistake of moving the closest to his mother, which, he was fairly sure, was the entire reason that he’d become her go-to for help around the house. But of course, he knew, it wasn’t his job to bail his mother out when she was too cheap to get an actual oil change, or too dim to figure out how to fax something to the VA. And yet, there he was, bringing her to the nearest Kinko’s (nearly 20 minutes down the road from her home), showing her how to request that a document be faxed. He deserved an award, he thought, for his patience with a woman who had decided not only to never progress past the 60s, but had barely even managed to reach that time. The invention of the telephone practically still bewildered his mother, he thought.

And yet, in spite of his own well-tempered nature, he thought, as he trimmed his beard in blissful ignorance, he couldn’t understand why he was always the last to know about the things that happened between his mother, his sisters, and the rest of the world. But perhaps, he mused, that was for the best.

After lying with her face pressed to the cool tiles of the bathroom floor for what felt like days, she finally peeled herself up and wobbled into the living room. She’d had a few drinks, but what was impairing her judgement now was what she had found in her own attic.

She wasn’t sure which disturbed her more: the fact that her own shoebox of personal demons was still out in her mother’s barn, settling in for another warm summer evening under a tarp in some decades-unpacked, probably-rotten cardboard; the fact that her mother may have already found the aforementioned box, opened it, and found out that it was less that the bank had been unfair to Carol and more that Carol hadn’t taken the letters labeled “final foreclosure notification” seriously enough to actually make the house payments prior to foreclosure; or the fact that, in her slowly-darkening attic, Carol had papers that said that her mother had cancer–again.

It was probably, Carol rationalized, the last part. If she was most upset about her mother’s illness, she was a.) a less selfish person and b.) not at fault. In fact, she thought to herself as she lay prone on her sofa with her home growing dim around her, she was not only not at fault, she was the victim of her mother’s lies. Why hadn’t her mother told any of her children that she was sick? Why hadn’t she asked for help? How had she been getting to and from surgeries? How was she paying for it?

Carol knew that her mother was on a fixed income, and that she still had some of Big Bill’s medical payments from the cancer that had killed him. And his VA stuff had all be such a disaster–Carol remembered Amy relating a story about trying to get her mother to into the VA office when Big Bill had initially gotten the diagnosis, to see what kind of benefits they may have been entitled to. Decades after he had left the military, which was really just a means to an end to make a little bit of money and get some life experience other than the back of his father’s hand and leading horses around in a circle. Big Bill and Magdalene had never known how to actually get the many services that, in theory, were available to them in return for his service.

Both were tragically poor at paperwork (Amy never forgave her mother for not enrolling in a food stamps program when Big Bill was between work–she was convinced that’s why the three children hadn’t been healthier, taller, more attractive, or more in good at sports), and frequently had to have someone else explain what they were signing and why. Later in Amy’s life it had always been her. Carol was glad that she’d never been a candidate for the position, even if it was likely because she was something of an accident.

And so, Amy had told her sister, she took them the 160 miles down to the VA office, in Sacramento, in person, because Magdalene refused to do it over the internet.

“I don’t trust putting that much of Bill’s personal information online. It seems risky. They’d know where we were then.” Magdalene had explained, as if it were perfectly rational, to Amy. “If you let them in like that, it’s like they’re living with you.”

“How do you know, mother? You’ve never opened an email in your life. You don’t even know what AOL is. We can do it only and save ourselves, like, 3 hours in the car.”

“Let your father drive. He can make that trip in 2 hours.”

“Oh, sure. He can totally drive 160 miles in 2 hours.”

“You watch. It’ll take less time than it would take for you to log on or dial up or whatever you’re going to do on the computer. Trust me, with this kind of thing, you need an actual person. In actual person.”

“Sure, mother. Yes. Let’s do that.”

Or at least, that’s how Carol remembered Amy telling it.

Amy and the parents had arrived in Sacramento long before the VA office itself closed, but Magdalene had insisted that they go straight there, immediately upon pulling off the road. Angry from the long drive, and probably a little dehydrated, the small woman had marched up the first receptionist she saw and demanded to know what sort of benefits her husband, a veteran, was entitled to.

Amy had told Carol that it was mortifying, but not at all surprising. Magdalene was never particularly good at social interactions where she felt threatened–though why the VA, a place that was really only there to serve people like her, was threatening was unclear–and tended to begin simply shouting and making demands at anyone with ears and eyes.

The point was was that, like with every service offered rightfully to her, Magdalene didn’t trust the VA benefits. She was sure that nothing, like Medicaid or Social Security, could just be offered. That someone would always want something in return. That handouts were for the very, very poor.

Which, of course, later in life, Magdalene was. But she’d been so conditioned by what was said on TV and what her father and the other gauchos had told her, that she truly believed that there was some other group of people out there, some kind of destitute rube, who those services were for. Everyone else–people like her, people with no income, no assets, and little in savings–was just supposed to muddle along.

And so, Magdalene was hesitant to even accept the help that Big Bill’s service had earned for the two of them, including help with medical bills and assistance with paying for housing and things. In fact, she’d seemed decidedly against taking assistance of any kind, with the exception of Medicaid and Social Security, both of which she’d been strong-armed into by her children because, at her age, she couldn’t work, and without Bill around, she’d have had no income, no support, and no way to get anything she needed. She was precisely who those services were for.

Which wasn’t to say that Magdalene had been dependent on Bill, or that, like the Good Doctor had recommended to her, that she couldn’t have gotten a job. She’d had serveral jobs when the kids were younger, including tending a bar and working in a drugstore. She could have gone and gotten some horrible job that they give to ancient women with paper-and-vein hands and shaking fingers and red eyes, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to.

And of course, once they got the VA stuff figured out, she didn’t have to. And while she’d never, ever dream of thanking her daughter for helping her figure it out, it had gotten Magdalene something she desperately, in her hold age, had needed. With the VA’s help. she and Big Bill had had health care for the first time in years upon years.

But now, she had little to no VA assistance, she still had some of Bill’s medical bills, and, on top of it all, she, herself had been visiting a doctor. For cancer. She’d been secretly seeing a doctor for cancer.

How am I going to tell anyone that I know about this? Carol wondered. If she admitted to having the shoe box, she’d have to also tell whomever she told why she had it. Unless she lied and said she thought it contained photos, which was plausible. But even still, she’d have to explain how she’d gotten the box in the first place. Her mother obviously knew it was out in the barn, didn’t she?

Though how she found out, she realized, didn’t matter nearly as much as what she had found out.

Carol couldn’t believe it. Well, she could believe it, coming from her mother, who accepted no one’s help–not even when she had been given a diagnosis that, without treatment, would probably, Carol though, prove fatal. And, from what Carol had read in the paperwork, Magdalene had decided not to see treatment. Carol was feeling entirely lost, when she heard her husband’s truck pull into the driveway.

The doors slammed, and immediately, the street and walkway to their house was filled with the high voices of her three children, singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and clapping. Unsure of what else to do, Carol sat up, smoothed her hair and blouse, and stationed herself in the kitchen as if she had been trying to decide what to make for dinner.

If she had learned anything from her mother, it was that concealing one’s own emotions was the best way to make them go away altogether.

—-

By the time that Amy came out to help Magdalene in the barn, Magdalene had already gotten a letter in the mail and a phone call, and neither was good. But she’d done her best to shake them off, so that she could focus fully on the task at hand. Besides, what help would dwelling be?

The phone call had been only slightly more unwelcome than the letter, in the same way that the bubonic plague was only slightly more unwelcome than tuberculosis.

“Hello, ma’am, this Mary Anne from Dr. Nguyen’s. I was calling to talk to you about your meeting earlier this week with the doctor. He wanted me to call you because he is concerned that you didn’t quite understand the severity of the diagnosis that he gave you.”

“I’d hardly call it a meeting. Why are you calling me? I told him already, I’m not going to let you stick me full of needles and fill me with drugs. Just let the damned thing run its course. And I don’t buy for one shittin’ minute that he’s concerned. He just sees my tits as two big dollar signs. What does he need, honey? An addition to his 5-car garage?”

“Ma’am, there is no ‘run it’s course.’ The doctor wanted me to tell you that if you leave this cancer untreated, it will probably kill you.”

“Then it kills me. I’m too damned old, my Medicaid probably won’t cover the treatment amount, and I don’t want to deal with what you’re going to do to me. I don’t consider having a mouth that tastes like tin and no tits “surviving”, sweetie. Don’t call me again.”

“It’s just that…are you sure? Don’t you have children?”

“None of your damned business, honey. I’m older than your mother, and I don’t really give a shit what you or that doctor thinks. If I want help, I’ll go somewhere else.”

“Alright, well, we just wanted to make sure that the diagnosis had been accurately explained, because in the event that later on, you know, you decide we should have advised you to get the treatment, that you can’t…you know…” the girl on the other end of the phone lowered her voice to a whisper “sue us.”

“Sue you?” Magdalene snorted loudly “Honey, I barely have two goddamned nickels to rub together, and the only people who are bigger crooks than doctors are lawyers. I’m not going to sue you, just because I’d have to deal with even more pious assholes like your little bossman. So don’t call me again. I won’t be suing you, you can count on that.”

“Great!” the receptionist was notably perkier when the threat of a lawsuit had been neutralized. “Well, let us know if you do see someone else, because we can fax over your medical records. Of course, we’re one of the few cancer-specific practices in the area that accepts Medicaid, so, unless you’re going to be paying for all of your care out of pocket, should you decide to seek care, we’ll probably be the ones you see, anyway. Have a good one!”

Shit, Magdalene thought as the idiot on the other end of the phone hung up. She had had to hunt for a very long time to find a doctor’s office that was approved by AARP for cancer care, as well as accepting of Medicaid. But it didn’t matter anyway, because she wasn’t “seeking care.” There was nothing caring about what the doctor had proposed.

The letter was, of course, not much better. After a leisurely morning of sorting through a box she had brought inside (which contained kitchen tools and old cosmetics by companies that were no longer making cosmetics) and, occasionally, glancing in the mirror at her left breast to see if she could see anything wrong with it (she could not, which made her feel much better), Magdalene had slipped on her favorite pair of kitchen shoes and walked down her long dirt driveway to the mailbox.

Inside her mailbox, she had several catalogs (which she would read cover-to-cover, because she liked to see how much they were charging for flannel housecoats and other useful items for the over-70 crowd), as well an envelope that unmistakably contained a bill of some sort. And it was yellow, which wasn’t extremely high-alert, but was important (or late) enough to merit a different color of paper.

She opened the envelope as she walked, making sure to look up occasionally for large rocks or anything else that may be in her path.

Sure enough, it was one of Big Bill’s medical bills, which she had decided to stop paying about two months ago. She wasn’t sure exactly how long they would give her until they, say, showed up at her house, but she was willing to wait. They had her address, which meant that, she figured, if they really wanted her money, they could damn well come and get it.

As she was walking back up her driveway, Magdalene heard a cry of agony from behind a truck that was parked in the neighbor’s yard. Magdalene lived on a panhandle, of sorts, which was a popular model out where she lived, because it meant that there could be fields in front of and behind houses, and it meant that some people (like her) got very long driveways, which she enjoyed.

The neighbor who lived on the front lot was one of the rich new people who had just moved into the neighborhood about a year before, with his little wife and no children. He was the same on who had asked about helping shoe a horse. His property was right against the street, and included about 10 acres to the side and up around her piece of land in an “L” shape. She hated having to walk by his house to get to their shared bank of mailboxes, because it almost always met running into the overly-friendly man. And despite how short she ever was with him, he still wanted to talk.

But this time, on her way back to the barn where she was sure her daughter would be coming to join her any minute, with an incriminating piece of mail in her hand, she’d had to stop, because the man had sounded like he’d been injured.

Magdalene walked to the fence nearest the large truck, but couldn’t see around or under it well enough to know what was the matter.

“Are you ok back there?” She asked, loud enough for him to hear, but not so loud that she was yelling.

A head appeared from around the nose of the truck.

“Huh? Yeah. Just trying to get this paint lid back on and bashed my own finger with a hammer. Pretty stupid, huh?”

“Yeah, kind of. You need a mallet for that kind of thing. That teeny tin hammer you have is going to bounce 8 ways ’til Sunday and is sure to clobber you in the finger at least once. Don’t you have a solid wooden mallet to get it on firmly?” She tried not to roll her eyes, because she didn’t want to quite literally ad insult to injury. But really, where did this kid come from? Out playing Little House on the Goddamned Shittin’ Prairie.

“No, I guess I probably don’t.” The young man rubbed his finger. She couldn’t remember his name. She realized she was still holding the letter from the medical bill collectors and slid it into the back pocket of her denim shorts.

“You know,” he said “when the bills turn yellow, it’s usually a good idea to pay them.”

She couldn’t believe how rude this little shit was! Spying on her mail, now. Making comments about her not paying her bills. Probably thinking about what a poor old lady she must be. She stared at him with wide eyes, turned on her heels (as best she could, in her platform foam flip-flops) and started marching back up to her house, the yellow envelope flapping behind her proudly like a tiny UN flag.

“Hey, I’m sorry. I’ve heard it’s rude to talk about, like, money.” He called after her.

She kept walking.

It wasn’t that Magdalene didn’t want to be a good neighbor. She did. She liked being neighbors with the old man whose lot backed up to hers. She liked being a good neighbor to the woman on the other side of her lot, who was also a widow and who had goats that would do a smart job of trimming the blackberry bushes up and down the road so that they wouldn’t whip your windshield. It was just those fancy folks who were moving out here. They knew nothing–which was exactly what Magdalene had always thought about fancy folks, since she’d first figured them out.

They were the kind of people, Magdalene thought, who would just go along with any old thing a doctor would tell them to do, and pay any price for it. A million dollars for three more weeks of your elderly father’s miserable life? Oh, he’ll have to be on dialysis the whole time? Let’s do it, she thought. That’s exactly how those people were.

It was them and their expensive, name-brand anti-cholesterol medicine and erection medicine. Leave it to men to spend thousands on their own dicks, she thought. While the rest of us can barely afford enough aspirin to make it through the day. No wonder doctors and pharmaceutical companies charged so much, when suckers in shiny spurs like that were just lining up to pay it.

On the walk back up the long driveway, Magdalene had grown irrationally angry. It was time, she thought, to get back to the barn, so that she wouldn’t have to think about medical bills or the health care industry any more that day.

And she wouldn’t have to. Her daughter was on her way over, and she’d already gotten her head start on the barn. Sure, she’d have to confront the box of photos and junk that Carol had broken. And she’d have to look through her old sewing box, with would still, somehow, smell like her mother, which would be both difficult and wonderfully nostalgic.

But it wouldn’t be until the next day, when Amy was over again, that she would have to think about the Medicaid and bills. Because the next day, when Amy was over sorting through a box of her old childhood items, that she would receive a call from her younger sister, who had made a discovery.

But Magdalene didn’t know that her daughter knew it because, Magdalene thought, the shoebox with the papers that Carol had accidentally secreted away in the back of her car before her husband drove her home on the night of Magdalene’s birthday party was still in the bar, in the television box where she’d hid it.

Since she was a child, Magdalene had a bad habit of hiding things. Maybe it came from growing up with brothers who pried, or maybe it was because she thought that it was something that classy people did–after all, poor folks never did have anything to hide, and rich people did, so if you had something worth hiding, you were at least a tiny bit rich. Or so her childhood self though.

It could have also been that Magdalene was, at least somewhat, a child of the Depression, when everything you had was subject to being turned upside-down by an unscrupulous banker or man from the Land Trust, who would suddenly, out of the dust and the dirt, come from nowhere to scoop your own property out from under you. Or at least, that’s what she’d always heard. And then, to be fair, it happened to her.

Or maybe Magdalene hid things because she wasn’t very trusting, of humans or the world or even God, much of the time. Despite the fact that, on more occasion than one, she actually, out loud, screamed at God and the Virgin Mary and whomever else might be listening, for the most part, she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him. And she had, on more than one occasion, thrown, not God, but figurines of his son, which was pretty close.

She didn’t trust God and she didn’t trust people. You never knew who might come looting through your home in the night, or when some tragic combination of a one-in-a-million malfunction of electrical wiring and a lack of careful dusting and vacuuming might result in a fire that would turn her tiny converted trailer into a wood-sided, doily-filled, canned-food-store-stocked tinderbox.

In fact, Magdalene had just recently yelled at God, on the day when she’d gotten back those pieces of paper that her youngest daughter had discovered, but that she didn’t know she’d discovered. Magdalene had yelled at God very loudly and with quite a bit of profanity that day. She’d also yelled at the doctor, a fat little Vietnamese man who, while she didn’t say any of them to his face, she had quite a few choice words that would have embarrassed her liberal, vegetarian grandchildren. But, as she would have told them, she was just too shittin’ old and mad to be politically correct. As if that was ever a concern for her.

“Ma’am, your Medicaid is probably not going to cover all of this, which means the government may garnish your wages.” he’d told her in what she believed to be a nearly impossible to understand accent.

“Good goddamned luck! I don’t have any wages, honey. I’m 77 shittin’ years old. I haven’t worked in decades, and I get by on social security. Which, and I’m no goddamned doctor, I am fairly sure the US government won’t take back if, say, I die with a million dollars in medical bills.”

“There are options. Surgical ones, and chemical ones.” His fake gentle tone made her even angrier. “We’ve had great success, and made survivors out of many women, just like you.”

She had been so exasperated with him. He seemed only to want to save her because it would be beneficial to him. Survivors. Women just like her. She hated all of that shit. She knew that then entire country was busy tying up the lies of the medical profession, the smugness of men, and the plight of impoverished, maimed women in a big pink goddamned bow. She didn’t buy it for a second, and she never had. Not when it was her mother, not when it was her aunt, not when it was her husband, and not when it was her own goddamned tits.

They were turning women’s bodies into science experiments, and then sticking them with the bill. She knew it, and she refused to be part of it. She wasn’t going to let him try his hand at fixing her, because she knew he’d never actually cure her. He’d just make her sick, ask her to pony up, and drive away in his fancy car.

“I tell you what, honey.” She’d told him, sighing. “I’ve seen those women with only one tit, limping around the tracks in purple t-shirts and baseball caps to cover up their bald heads. Those women are not “survivors”–they’re victims of your shittin’ medicine machine. You don’t want to “save” anyone–no one is getting healed by you. All you’re doing is sapping them dry and buying them a few shitty more years.”

The doctor hadn’t been sure how to respond. At her age, and within her tax bracket, of course, it was likely that she would never be able to pay for her medical treatments, and that the bills would either go away, be paid for by the taxpayers, or be transferred to her children.

Of course, she’d already been through the ringer with this kind of doctor before. Big Bill had been a strong and big man, until the doctors got their hands on him, and pumped him full of chemicals. And for what? He still died, sicker than he had been before. A shell of his former self, and more in debt than he, a lifelong gambler and man who couldn’t seem to catch a financial break, had ever been in his whole life.

Her mother and aunt, too, had both died. Of course, that was long ago, before all of the science and pink ribbons and survivor shit that they were trying to shake at her now. The treatments, the doctors. Only now it was more expensive, and somehow, more cheerful. Putting women who were dying in pink to make them into a symbol for what? The failure of men to cure them? Please.

Magdalene may not have been a college-educated woman, but she read the news. She knew how expensive medical costs were getting–and it wasn’t because more people were living. It was because more people were stupid and desperate enough to try just about any old thing to try to live forever. But no science, she knew, would ever make that happen. All it would do was make rich fat cats out of asshole doctors and businessmen, and poor mutants out of everyone else.

And she wasn’t getting any better, either, according to her doctor, who was telling her that her now that cutting the shit out hadn’t worked, that it had moved and spread. He’d already taken a chunk out of her armpit–what more did he want? The whole rack? To fill her to the brim with toxic shit that would make her hair fall out like some kind of goddamned sick person?

“Sweetie, I’m not going to bother. If this cancer kills me, it goddamned kills me. I’m a million years old, I have no money, and there’s no point in letting you stick me like a pincushion, try your hand at saving me, and then pay for the please. If I’m going to get stuck and pay for it, it’s going to be with a man who looks like Paul Newman, and I’m going to enjoy it. We’re done here.”

“You know, if it’s a financial problem” he had dared to venture, despite her clear dismissal and impressive ability to be sassy in a paper dress, “there are places that will hire older people. Places with health benefits. You could try Wal-Mart? They frequently hire people your age, and that way, some of the treatment will be covered.”

She couldn’t believe it. Was he telling her to get a goddamned job at Wal-Mart, a store that treated its employees like garbage, so that she could get cut up and spit out by a man who thought she was an illiterate Mexican, and then pay for it? Like hell.

“You are probably the stupidest son of a bitch in a white lab coat I have ever seen. I don’t know how you sleep at night, but I imagine it involves a lot of tequila and a powerful ability to convince yourself that you are God. But I’ve talked to God, and he doesn’t goddamned tell dying people get a job at Wal-Mart.”

She hadn’t been back to a doctor since, and she’d hidden the documents in the barn so that she wouldn’t have to think about it.

But Magdalene knew, when her family came over to celebrate her birthday, that it would likely be her last on this earth, which meant she had to deal with the goddamned shit in the barn before she was really sick. She wasn’t sure how she was going to tell her kids–she’d secretly hoped she never had to, and that she’d just die in her sleep like she used to pray about–but she knew it wasn’t going to be the time until they’d sorted out everything they needed to sort out.

She had not, however, planned on her youngest daughter, in an attempt to save her own pride and familial stature, finding the document which had her diagnosis, prognosis, and estimated cost of treatment. Nor did she expect her daughter to find her initial diagnosis, prognosis, course of treatment, and then later on, cost of treatment. Because while Magdalene had been pretending to be burdened by the cost of her husband’s medical bills (which she had been, too, to be fair), she was also struggling under the weight of her own. But she didn’t want them to know that.

Of course, she knew eventually she’d have to deal with it. There was something growing inside her body, and unlike a baby, there was never any hope that this something would ever become anything other than the thing that killed her. She may not have had a gun to her head, but with the diagnosis she’d been given (and the decision she’d made), she may as well have.

But, regardless of the fact that she knew all of these things about the sons of fancy ladies, it wasn’t until after she got into her first real fight that she no longer wanted to be one of them.

After school, she and her bother were walking down a dirt road. She was wearing his hand-me-downs, but had, with her mother’s help, sewn them so that they looked more tapered. Her parents could have purchased her a new pair that was more stylish, but neither one put much stock into looking fine, so she wore whatever was still “good enough.”

And on that particular day, one of the sons of a fancy woman rode up behind she and her brother on his bicycle, and shouted something about them being twins.

Magdalene had whipped around, saying that they weren’t twins–she was a girl. The fancy woman’s son had laughed at this, called her stupid, and spat at her.

So she shoved him, right off his bike, and kicked him in the stomach.

As she kicked him, the fancy woman’s son called out for his mother, and begged Magdalene to stop.

“Your mother can’t save you, cholo!” she had yelled. And it was at that moment that she realized that fancy people were utterly useless, and that tough people could do whatever they wanted.

——

Carol though it was strange that her mother hadn’t called her yet to help pick through the mildewed boxes that had spent so long being neglected in the barn. Hadn’t she said she’d be starting it soon? Was she deliberately not inviting Carol because she was angry? Had she already uncovered some of the broken items or old photos that Carol’s thoughtless 20-year-old self had left for her mother to clean up?

Carol wasn’t sure. What she was sure of was that she missed her daughter, who was still at her father’s house, and that her husband had taken their children to an afternoon minor league baseball game, leaving Carol alone to “decompress.”

“You look really pale.” Sean had said without looking up from his laptop, which was propped on a small stack of back issues of Popular Mechanics because it tended to overheat and he was too frugal to purchase a cooling mat for it. “I’ll take the kids to a baseball game this afternoon. The tickets are like, $5 if you buy them online. Ruthie can read the stats and do the odds while the boys twins put peanut shells on drunk guys. It’ll be great. You just stay here and decompress.”

“Oh, are you sure? Don’t you have something else to do today?” Carol asked, desperately hoping that he did not.

“Something to do other than spend a day off with my children? No, Carol, I can’t say that I do.” Except he apparently did, and it involved some article on the internet about how to introduce Creatine into one’s diet to help establish more muscle mass.

“Are you thinking of going on Creatine?” She inquired, looking over his shoulder.

“Um, no. I don’t know. In college I was so bulky, you know? Now I’ve got this…this dad-gut. It’s embarrassing. I mean, don’t you think I could boost my workout?” He was a little sheepish. She felt bad for hawking over his laptop after he’d offered to do something so nice, but she found it amusing that her former-college athlete husband was so concerned with his appearance.

“I think whatever you need to do to feel good about yourself you should do. Just not steroids, OK? They like, shrink your sack or whatever.”

“Gross. Please don’t say ‘sack’ to me. Ew. Anyway, yes, I’ll take the kids. I can buy tickets and print them right now and I’ll take them and you can have the house to yourself. You’ve been in…um…kind of a funk. So, you know. Do what you need to do. There’s plenty of booze in the cupboard.”

“Thanks, Dad.” She said, rolling her eyes. Like she needed to be told where the booze was.

Now, Sean was out of the house with all three of their children in tow, and her daughter was away, probably wearing some ludicrous dress that her father’s tacky girlfriend had bought for her. Carol, who’d already broken into the prescribed liquor in the cupboard, shuttered.

Alone in her own little California rambler, she felt a bit like a stranger. As she wandered from room to room, looking at the belongings of her children and her husband, she couldn’t believe her good fortune. How far she’d come since her first terrible marriage! Since the man who had only married her because he thought, mistakenly, that she’d had money and, double-mistakenly, that she’d been expecting.

She was expecting–that wasn’t a mistake–but, like her mother, she’d had a miscarriage. But it was too late, because her wedding to her daughter’s father had already been planned (and the pregnancy had not), so both she and him had entered into a sort of allegiance of silence, keeping the pregnancy to themselves and going through with the wedding.

Quite a love story indeed, she thought.

But it hadn’t taken too terribly long–just a few years–before they really did have a beautiful baby girl, who was the only good thing to come from their union.

Carol never did tell her mother about the pregnancy that was the reason for the wedding. Which was fair, objectively speaking, because Magdalene had never told Carol that she herself had had one long before Carol was even a consideration. It would have been, Magdalene thought, sad for no reason. Why bother bringing those sorts of things up, she’d always thought?

And in truth, Carol had thought the same. She never told her daughter, nor her sister, nor her brother about the child she didn’t have. Why bother? It had been so early when the pregnancy ended–just long enough to get engaged, but not long enough to really begin to show–so to share the terrible news would have helped nothing.

But it didn’t end so early that Carol didn’t start thinking about that first child as, well, a child. Carol finished her glass of bourbon and slowly paced, like a bride, into the kitchen, where she poured herself another. Then, laughing to herself with the alcohol and the thrill of being alone, she two-stepped her way back down the hallway toward the pull-down steps which lead into an attic.

Carol and Sean had chosen the house because it was affordable, in a good school district, and had a large fenced yard that the children could safely (and without supervision, really) play in. Also, she had chosen it for this feature, which her childhood home (the one that had been so unfortunately reclaimed by a heartless bank, she thought with a twinge of anger and anxiety) had also had. And on that day when the bank man came, the attic at the top of the secret staircase had been the place she had hidden to escape the awful truth.

When that pie-faced little man bearing the foreclosure notice had shown up at the door, Carol had been a little drunk. She was also, unbeknownst to her unobservant or possibly just naive family, also exceptionally high on cocaine, which her husband had purchased for her and divided up and held up to her face.

Of course she was on drugs when she lost the house. How could no one in her family have ever put that together? How could they have always just thought she was responsible?

Rubes, she thought, as she carefully ascended the rickety staircase with her tumbler between her teeth and both hands on the even less reliable hand rails.

But on that day when the man came, she had also been keenly aware of what was happening. She had asked her then-husband so many times if he was sure they still have another month to pay. Are you sure? She’d ask. Because the bills are changing colors? And I think they’re really going to foreclose? Isn’t that what this letter says? I don’t understand all of this banker talk but I think that’s what it says?

At that age, under those influences, burdened by a husband who was little more than a drug-addled child who had been given too much allowance, she hardly ever spoke in sentences. Everything that came from her lips was a question.

It was embarrassing to even think about, so Carol shook the thought from her head.

Once in the attic, her eyes adjusted to the dimness. She and Sean had not quite been together, nor come with enough belongings independently, to have nearly as many boxes as it would have taken to fill the large attic space. So instead, all of their old decorations, unused furniture, old photos, and relics from past lives were in a corner of the large space.

They had initially thought that the attic could have been finished to become a mother-in-law (ha! Certainly not for her mother, who wouldn’t, at her age or in her preferred footwear, climb those stairs, even if chased by the four horsemen of the apocalypse) space where one of their children could live if they needed more space. But instead, they had decided to leave it as storage until one of their children asked. That hadn’t happened yet–mostly because Sean had done a truly impressive job of convincing them that the attic was, in fact, haunted. Which kept the children from getting into any trouble up there, and kept him from having to do any kind of remodeling for at least 10 years.

But now, walking slowly through the dark space, it felt like a room Carol should spend more time in. The tiny window beamed light in, and it was very warm and dusty-smelling. Which others may have hated, but at that moment, she found its creakiness and heat compelling and comforting. Like a wonderful, ages-old cave.

Of course the house was not particularly old. Perhaps 40 years, she couldn’t remember exactly. The numbers escaped her. What had she come up here for, anyway? she wondered as she gazed out the window like, she thought, a model in a Victorian painting of a delicate soldier’s wife, waiting for her valiant husband to come sailing back from somewhere. She wasn’t even positive it any of that was historically correct, but then, like her mother was quick to remind her, Carol hadn’t gotten through life on her brains.

What had she come up the pull-down staircase for? She was getting more than a little tipsy as she polished off her drink.

Of course, she remembered. The one box that she had rescued from her mother’s barn.

Before she’d left Magdalene’s farm after the birthday party, in the dark, Carol had told her mother that what she needed was a measuring tape from her father’s old work bench to take some measurements, because Sally had wanted to hang some art or something. She couldn’t recall, but the specifics of the lie didn’t particularly matter.

What mattered was that she had stolen away into the barn as her husband was re-dressing her songs, and, by the light of one of her father’s old lighters, left in the drawer of his toolbox and miraculously still functional, had dug out one very important box which she knew to be among all the rest.

Small–just an old shoebox–it contained the papers that she had emptied from the drawers of the house she’d had a large roll in losing.

For years, Carol had been telling her mother that the bank hadn’t sent sufficient notice, which had made Magdalene both irate at those “asshole bankers” and also much more sympathetic toward her youngest daughter. If Magdalene had had any money, or been the kind of person who actually made things happen (instead of simple becoming furious and swearing about the), or believed in the sanctity of the law, she probably would have filed a lawsuit, which would have been thrown out. Which was lucky, truly, that she didn’t have the money. The fib did, however, buy Carol quite a bit of support from her mother in the face of what was otherwise a supreme tragedy. So Carol had stuck with it, despite the fact that the bank had, in fact, provided ample notice in the months leading up to the eventual foreclosure.

Carol had kept all of the notices in the drawer near the telephone. Which, in the days of the stationary telephone that was mounted to the wall, was a sacred drawer, full of a delightful mixture of both precious pieces of mail, necessary documents, and total and complete junk. She had loved that drawer to pieces, even if it contained one of her most incriminating piles of evidence.

And when the bank man had shown up, one of the things she had done was pile all of the pieces of mail, including the notices, into the shoebox. The box had then thoughtlessly been put inside of another, larger box, which Carol was fairly sure was a box that am old black-and-white television set had come in. And while she was afraid of her mother finding some of her more destructive packing tendencies, she was the most frightened that her mother would find the bank notices, and would know that Carol, for decades, had been lying to her.

And so, Carol had snuck out into the barn to reclaim the shoebox. It was dark, even with the lighter, so it was difficult to find the box that had held the shoebox. She wasn’t even sure if it was on top of the pile, or anywhere even remotely close enough to reach. But, indeed, she’d been quite fortunate–the television box she remembered was front and center, and easy to pop open. After digging blindly (which was really quite disgusting, but she had been, like so many other people trying to keep a lie from being exposed as a lie, a little drunk at the time and also desperate), she had extracted what she believed to be a shoebox. Then, ever so carefully, she had closed the box back up, and tucked the tarp down around over the pile.

She had then folded it underneath her jacket, which she hadn’t needed because the evening had simply refused to cool down, even out in the country. She was even able to squirrel it away into the trunk of her car without Sean noticing the new, strange item.

When they’d arrived home, as Sean had carried the children, one by one, from the car into their respective beds, Carol had unloaded the excessive amount of leftovers that Magdalene had sent her home with and, at the same time, brought the box into her bedroom. When Sean fell asleep early the next night, she was able to sneak it into the attic, where she knew he’d never look.

Now, she was preparing to sort through the box, which apparently required a considerate amount of alcohol and nearly giving herself a heat-stroke in an ventilated attic.

Carol felt a bit like Nancy Drew as she slid the lid off of the old shoebox to look inside. What else might she find? What else had been in that drawer? A 20-year-old calculator? An address book filled with the names and birthdates of friends long forgotten whom she could now look up and judge on Facebook?

With a mixture of nerves, glee, and intoxication, Carol peered into the box.

The top document was, she was surprised to see, entirely unfamiliar. It was a hospital or medical bill of some kind, with very serious writing on it. And it did not belong to either herself, or her former husband.

With a sinking stomach, Carol realized that she had grabbed the wrong box.

She threw the lid onto the shoebox, slid it into a dark corner of the attic, left her tumbler, and scurried quickly, gracelessly, down the pull-down stairs, and into the bathroom, where her stomach turned over just in time.

In the morning, she’d taken Charlie out driving. Actually, Charlie had taken her to, conveniently, run a few errands including (but not limited to) putting gas in the car, purchasing a new pair of gloves (in anticipation of cleaning out the barn), picking up some dry-cleaning (during which Charlie had to parallel park, which she did beautifully) and buying dog food for the family’s terrier mix. And while she did manage to kill 5 birds with one teenage-chauffeur stone, Amy was still, somehow, behind as she drove (herself) out to her mother’s house. Which meant that she was thinking of other things, rather than emotionally preparing herself for the potentially very arduous task of clearing out that stupid barn.

She did, however, manage to work herself into a decent lather at the notion that her mother had amassed so much shit that now it would take a small army at least a week to sort through it all. This was particularly irritating to Amy, though she refused to admit it to her mother, because it was all shit that the family had worked perfectly fine without–and now, for some reason, it had become highly important to her mother to deal with it right now, this week. The urgency with which her mother felt that it had to be done would have been concerning, Amy thought, if it were coming from someone else her age (who was, perhaps, finally facing her own mortality in a big way), but because her own mother had lived her entire life, it seemed, as though she were at gun-point.

Amy’s mother was also, Amy knew somewhat secretly, exceptional emotional. She was overly-nostalgic, at times, and attached extreme amounts of importance to items that other people may have passed over without thinking about or feeling for. Which seemed out of character for a small, mean little woman who had lived the last 5 years of her life nearly in solitude. And yet, everything was so very important to her. She just didn’t want anyone to know how important.

But Amy knew. When Amy was a child, she remembered, on more than one occasion, playing in her mother’s closet (which she wasn’t supposed to do, but did anyway) in their tiny starter home in Tahoe, and seeing her mother in a private moment. Amy would be burying her face in her mother’s powder-scented button-down blouses and putting on her pointed cowboy boots (“A good pair of boots,” her mother used to tell her “could kill a spider in the corner of a room.”), shrouded in a comfortable darkness that she’d spend her entire life attempting to recreate with artistic lighting and antique lamps, when her mother would come sweeping dramatically into the house.

It could have been bills, or Big Bill quitting another job, or Amy’s grandparents being overly demanding, or just one of Magdalene’s “dark” days (which Amy would later attribute to undiagnosed bi-polar disorder, which was’t even a thing that anyone would diagnosed with at that time)–but for whatever reason, Amy remembered several incidents of her mother crying, uncontrollably, while her small daughter tried to make herself even smaller on the closet floor.

Amy couldn’t go to her mother to comfort her–it would have outed her as a snoop and a rule-breaker–so she would sit, watching through the wooden slats of the closet, trying to breathe as silently as possible, hoping that her mother would either peel herself from the bed where she was spread like the statue that their neighbor had of Jesus on the cross, or fall asleep. To the young Amy, either would be better than weeping. Because grown-ups, Amy had thought, weren’t supposed to weep in that way. They were supposed to be strong. But there she was, watching her mother in an unguarded moment, helpless and young-feeling and afraid of what might happen next.

Maybe that was why Amy was so much less harsh with her mother than her siblings. It was entirely possible that neither one understood the depths of their mother’s secret pain. It was also why Amy had agreed to help her mother, who pretended to be bullet-proof but was very clearly not, to clean out the items in the barn. Not so much because Amy had wanted to see any of the stuff–she was fairly sure it would mostly be awkward and uncomfortably emotional for a family that really wasn’t great at emotions to begin with–but because she’d wanted to be there in case her mother needed someone who didn’t mind seeing her in that vulnerable state.

Amy also knew that her mother, if asked point-blank, would tell anyone that she wasn’t, herself, a very emotional person. Amy remembered going to a friends’ house after school once as a child and watching her friend’s mother scoop her up off the ground as soon as she’d gotten off the school bus. Amy was perhaps 6 at the time, but she remembered being both painfully embarrassed for the girl, whose mother showed such startling signs of emotion in public, and also, suddenly, desperately homesick and overwhelmed with the desire to give her own mother a long and comforting hug. Because, she realized, she didn’t remember the last time she had hugged her mother.

No, they weren’t an emotional family–and maybe that’s why so many emotional items were hidden out in the barn, getting ruined with every passing year. Because somehow, accidentally, everyone manages to accumulate things that they aren’t equipped with the emotions to deal with. Tiny artifacts which seem too important to throw away, and yet, too insignificant to keep. So you put them in boxes, and you put the boxes in the barn, and you forget about them until suddenly, on your birthday at a barbecue, you decide to dig them all up, sort them all out, and finally deal with them so that you can live your final years with the peace of mind that comes with knowing that every single thing you own is accounted for, and everything you don’t own isn’t important.

So Amy drove to her mother’s house, but all the while, she thought about other things. About work, about Richard, about Margot going back to school. If she had been thinking about her childhood and her mother’s secret (and strange) sorrow, and her childhood, and all of the unsolved dark days that she still wasn’t sure she understood, she may have been better prepared for what she found when she finally parked her station wagon, pulled on her stiff new gloves, and went out to meet her mother in the barn.

Magdalene was sitting, again, at Big Bill’s work bench, with photographs spread out before her. The boxes, which had been stacked, were all in one neat row, opened and airing out, against the back wall of the barn. Some, Amy saw, had even been labeled already. She felt a wave of relief to realize that her mother had already done some of the work for her, and that it might not be so terrible traumatic and difficult after all.

And yet, there was her mother, marker in hand, photos before her, looking as if everything terrible in the world had suddenly landed in her lap.

“Mom? Are you ok?” Amy asked, as she slid open the barn door. Her mother squinted into the mid-day sunlight.

“I would be, if you’d just use the little door. I don’t want a draft to come in and blow all these away. I’m putting them in order so I can eventually put them in an album. I went first thing this morning and bought a few from the Dollar Store.” She gestured toward a pile of very nondescript-looking photo albums with the price tags (sure enough, they’d only been one dollar) still on them.

“Did you start on these this morning? You’ve gotten a lot done already.”

“Well, I did a little bit yesterday but then I got bored and stopped.”

“You got bored? This project is a lot of things, but I don’t think boring is one of them.”

“Amy, are you here to help, or are you here to bitch?” Her mother looked up from the photos with exhausted eyes. This had already taken a lot out of her, Amy could see.

“Here to help. Where do I start?” she asked, pulling the sliding door closed. The horse was back inside, watching Magdalene with concern in its impossibly old and tired-looking face. The two had grown old together, and now, they were both there, in the barn, sorting things out. It was sort of touching, Amy thought.

“Well, I’m putting these photos in order and I have already looked in and sorted the boxes that are labeled, so start opening and sorting the boxes that aren’t labeled.” Magdalene was back to dating and stacking the photos. Some of them, Amy saw, had been damaged by water or moisture leaking into the boxes.

“Are you going to throw away the damaged ones?” Amy asked tentatively.

“Of course not. Once they’re in the album and inside the house, they’ll be fine. Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t just throw out photographs because of a little water stain.” Her mother was incensed at the idea. Maybe even asking Amy was the wrong idea, Magdalene thought. Probably none of the children would understand the gravity of the situation. She sighed.

“Fine.” Amy answered, walking past her mother and turning her attention to one of the unlabeled boxes. She popped it open and peered inside. There were some frames, some books…and a lot of dangerous-looking shards.

“Mom, there’s a bunch of broken glass in this one. What happened?”

“The hell if I know, I haven’t looked in it yet. Pull some shit out and see what broke.”

Amy was glad she had bought new gloves. She had an idea that there would be something potentially dangerous in one of the boxes.

As she gingerly pulled one framed photo or picture at a time from the box and laid them out, she saw that more than one of the glass panes protecting the images had be shattered, and that, in all the moving, the glass had been shaken loose and fallen to the bottom of the box.

One was a photo of her grandparents that Amy recognized from their family’s old house in Redding.

“Wow, I haven’t see in this photo in ages. It looks like the glass didn’t hurt it at all. Should I take it out of the frame so we can re-frame it?” Amy asked over her shoulder.

“How the hell did the glass get broken? What kind of a dumbshit just threw all of those old pictures into a box like that?” Magdalene asked, puzzled for a minute.

Amy and her mother looked at each other for a quick second before they both came to the same conclusion: it was Carol, when she’d been forced out of the old house by the bank, who had only given her a few hours to pack an several decades of items into whatever boxes she could find.

She was the one who had quickly and urgently run through the narrow hallways of the house she was born in, yanking things off walls without regard for their condition.

“Goddamnit.” Magdalene breathed. “Goddamn that kid.”

This was the exact sort of thing that she’d been afraid to see in all of the boxes. Sure, the photos of pregnancies that never came to term or relatives who had died in Vietnam or of their own assassination of their lungs and livers was difficult, but confronting that particular years-old sadness was something else entirely.

If you’d asked either one of the women in that barn on that summer afternoon what they thought the biggest tragedy of their lives were, they’d both have thought for minute, and would maybe consider a few other instances. But in the end, both would conclude that the saddest thing that had ever happened to them was the result of one 20-year-old’s irresponsibility.

Amy brushed the broken glass away from every photo and frame, and systematically removed the pictures. She laid them flat, ensuring that there was no glass left to scratch them. Then, she took the box, which was now just filled with glass, and brought it out to her mother’s large recyclable bin. When she re-entered the barn, it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimness.

“That’s why I didn’t ask your sister to come out here.” Magdalene said. “I was afraid there might be a gun in one of those boxes, and I don’t think I could have stopped myself from just shittin’ killing her.”

—