kill them. That’s what she’d do. She wouldn’t stand for this bullshit for five minutes. And she supposed that’s what made her rich and poor people so hopelessly stupid.
For a moment, Mrs. Collins fantasized about the people on the gurneys standing up and marching into the cafeteria and tearing her husband’s tongue out of his mouth. God, Mrs. Collins wanted it to happen. She quietly prayed for them to get up and just kill this man already, so she could stop humoring him that the world was out to screw him even though a casual glance at the facts and his numerous bank accounts would prove the opposite was 100 percent the case.
Then, when the mob was done with him, it could go into her mother’s comfortable private room and rip her mother out of that bed with the thousand-thread-count sheets and hang her with them. Hang her for losing the memories that Mrs. Collins could never forget. The water bottle filled with vodka. The debt and the poverty. The brutal man who doused his own daughter with a hose and threw her in the backyard in December. And the mousy little mother who never did anything to stop it despite being given the opportunity dozens of times.
“If you want to be a dog, you’ll stay out there like a dog,” he’d say.
And from her mother? Nothing.
Thanks for the memories.
For eight years, Mrs. Collins watched each of her mother’s memories follow the last down the rabbit hole. For eight years, Mrs. Collins worked that nursing home to give her mother a level of care that her mother never gave her. Why? Because that’s what a Collins does. Not a Keizer. Keizers rot on gurneys in the hallway while the Collins family basks in private rooms. Keizers drink themselves to death with vodka while the Collins family gets rich selling it to them. She was a Collins now. So, for eight years, Mrs. Collins did everything for her mother, and all she asked in return was for the old woman to just die already. Just die so that she could stop remembering everything for her. Just die so that she could stop sitting next to her mother in the parlor, watching endless daytime talk shows with endless parades of victims being interviewed by every sex, color, or creed of talk-show host about their abuse while studio audience psychologists babbled on about how their parents must have been abused themselves. Just die so she could stop watching silly tears spilling from silly people.
If these yokels had done three months of hard time being Kathy Keizer, they would have something to cry about. Try being your father’s ashtray for a day. Try being called ugly every day. Try being called fat when you’re anorexic. Try standing wet in the freezing cold, staring at the aluminum siding of the back of your little house every night. Then, see if you can bend your mind to turn that aluminum siding into a beautiful future.
See the house, Kathy. You’re going to live in a bigger house someday.
The biggest house in town, Kathy. With a diamond necklace.
And a powerful husband. See the good husband. See the beautiful son.
You try digging your nails into your hands every night to keep from freezing to death in the backyard. You watch your father drinking in his warm kitchen. And then tell me about how that drunk bastard was abused himself. Because guess what? Some parents abused their kids who weren’t abused themselves. Even in the grand design of chickens and eggs, not everyone has an excuse. Somebody had to be first. And just once. Just one time in the last eight years, she would have given a million dollars if one of those endlessly pointless talk shows had an honest father on the couch.
“I woke up and said, ‘I’m going to burn her with cigarettes.’”
“Why? Because you were abused?” the talk-show host would ask.
“No. Because I was bored.”
Mrs. Collins would send a check to that man to thank him for his honesty and another check to his children because they might understand what Kathy Keizer’s life was really like. Everyone else, go ahead and try being Kathy Keizer for a day. And you see if by the end of it, you aren’t a puddle on the God damn floor.
“Kathleen? What the hell is wrong with you?” her husband asked.
Mrs. Collins checked the clock on the cafeteria wall. Somehow, ten minutes had passed.