her head. The rest of it has gotten long and is stringy or frizzy depending on when she has washed it last. She dyes it red except when she forgets to, and then it’s gray and red. She has bad skin and what looks like a rash on her face. Almost always she has this. She puts one black line on each eyelid that’s meant to be at her eyelashes but it drifts upward at the edges. Shakily. All of my life she’s worn terrible clothes that no one has worn since the 80s and she has never let herself be helped in this department, believe me I have tried. And she has two tattoos on her, a honeybee on her arm and a fucking electric guitar, an electric guitar with a long and snakelike cord that goes down her back and comes over her shoulder. She wears a bathing suit—she used to wear a bathing suit—without a back to show it off. She loves her tattoos. She’s proud of them.
I give her a nudge with my foot rougher than I should. Then I stomp up the stairs feeling every wooden thud completely. I go to my own room and toss myself onto my bed hoping it will break.
I hear her wailing at me from downstairs. Keeeeeeel, she is saying, help me, help me.
But I can’t.
• • •
Monday morning I walk downstairs and she’s up. She’s sitting at the table. She’s bleary eyed and baggy faced. She’s wearing a giant T-shirt and that red bathrobe over it. The T-shirt says, IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE. The bathrobe is red plaid and smelly. She smells like rum and Coke and, deeper than that, underneath it someplace, she smells sour, like curdled milk, like something rotting. She’s smiling at me because she wants to apologize or because she can’t remember last night.
Game day? she says.
I’m wearing my regular clothes today and if she knew anything she would know that on game days we wear other shit to school, our uniforms, green and gold stripes on our faces.
Not talking? she says. She has a half smile on as if to tell me she’s willing to be patient, that she’ll be very very patient with me.
I think of saying, What’s in your mug?
I don’t say it but I should. Someday I should say it. We’ve been pretending for several years that I don’t notice all the things that I notice.
Good news, she says, Jan Howard called.
Jan Howard is our social worker. It’s never good news when she calls.
I got the disability extension, she says.
Cool, I say.
She pauses. She holds the mug up to her face.
Kelly, she says. I have a friend I want you to meet. I called him on the phone.
I think, She’s crazy all the way now. She has no friends. She does not go out.
Cool, I say.
He can help you with colleges, she says. He’s very smart. We talked on the phone.
Cool, I say again.
Kelly, she says, and for a moment I think she is going to tell me something important, it’s the worry in her eyes. But all she says is Have a good day.
I leave without anything, no goodbye.
She thinks she’s dying. She is, probably, but she’s doing it to herself. One time I came home very late from Trevor’s and she had passed out on the couch with a pad of paper on her lap.
Dear Kel.
Do not read this until I am dead. If I am dead there are a couple things you should know. One is that I love you so much honey. Your a good kid always have been. Sometimes I can’t believe your mine. If
It was terrible. I was embarrassed for her and I flipped the whole thing over and knocked it roughly out of her hands and onto the floor. The yellow pad she dug up God knows where. She didn’t budge.
She drops little things into our conversations. I’ll say something about next summer and she’ll say We’ll see . . . very dramatically, as if to say If I’m around . . .
Another time she made me write down her will for her, which was a pathetic undertaking because everything she had went to me. And she had nothing. Her parents are dead. She has no siblings. My dad left when I was four. Since then, since forever and ever, it’s been the two of us alone.
• • •
Every day I drive half an hour from Yonkers to Pells Landing. I went to school