Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,80

the fact that the men who come to excavate my house upon receiving complaints from the neighbors will find a fat old corpse who has no relations and nothing but a pile of papers to tell them: this was a human being and this was a man with a story.

What Yolanda brought back out was two pieces of chocolate cake that she had found in my refrigerator and two tall glasses of whole milk. She had put all of these things on a tray & she was balancing the tray on her stomach and grinning.

“Look at this,” she said. “Built-in shelf.”

I ate the cake as daintily as I could, but she had brought out dessert forks, and they always look ridiculous in my paws.

Her eyes were heavy by the time she finished.

“Goodnight again,” she said, yawning, and again I told her goodnight, & then I got up and paced for a moment, which for me meant once to the door and once back.

• • •

When I wake up the flashlight’s batteries have died and I have a plan. It is seven in the morning. I crawl out from under the bed and my spine is as stiff as a broom handle and I’m covered in dust bunnies. In daylight the house looks even worse, blue and abandoned.

I keep the blanket tight around me. I walk into the hallway and confront the closed door to her room. At least the note is gone. A scrap of it is stuck to a piece of tape, and I take it off very gently before turning the door handle.

I have to be very brave to do this. In my mind she will still be there, my mother, turned away from me on the bed, and in my mind I will fall to my knees and shout again. It happens in my mind.

But when I open the door nothing happens. The bedcovers are only a little messed up from where she was lying on top of it, but the bed is made. I see the little bit of vomit on her pillow and look away. I see the Cuba libre, partially frozen in its glass.

She’s gone.

I haven’t really been in here since I was a kid. I stopped coming in here when she got sick. She mostly didn’t come in here either: she mostly stayed on the couch. It used to be a nice room, the only room in the house with a view of the Hudson over the tops of some roofs, but she let it get messy over the years, piles of shit everywhere, laundry everywhere. There’s a little white desk against a wall where she used to sit to pay the bills. I sit down at her chair—it has a crocheted blue cushion on it that her mother made—and open each of the drawers in turn. In the first one there is garbage, mostly. Receipts and stuff. Pen caps, loose paper clips. One picture of her and Dee’s mother Rhonda when they were in their early teens. They are wearing bright red lipstick and pretending to sing into spoons.

In the second drawer, files. I look through all of them, every one in turn, but all they have in them is tax returns from every year up to 2007. In 2007 she made 38,000 dollars total.

In the bottom drawer is a shoebox. Here we go, I think. I take it out. It’s heavier than I thought it would be. I take the lid off. There’s a brochure for the University of Phoenix, An Online Learning Community! Another for the Community College of Yonkers. Another for the Continuing Education programs of the CUNY system. Most of them look pretty new. I take them out and put them on the desk. Deeper into the box there are older ones. A 2003–2004 course catalogue for the New School. Flipping through it I see that she circled, in pencil, certain courses. Contemporary Irish Literature. World Literature I. Introduction to Psychology.

My whole life these things have been coming for her in the mail. College catalogues, brochures, envelopes with purple writing on them encouraging her to get an accelerated degree in 2.5 years! She went to college for one semester. I can’t remember which college, which at this moment makes me very upset. I did not pay attention to her because she talked about it so much, her time at school—she would say it like that, school, as if she were so familiar with college that she could afford