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“Miriam. Nice to see you.”
“Oh,Deenie,” as she called him, a name he hated. She yelled to the rest of the bevy who had gathered in the kitchen. His father poked his head around the corner.
“Son! What a surprise!”
His father gave him a quick hug, enough so Dimitri could feel every disc in his spine, every gap between bone and muscle where more muscle should have been. He could smell the chewing tobacco Dad had taken up again, after he’d promised his mother he’d quit.
That probably meant she was too sick to notice.
“You’re looking good, Dad. Mind if I stay for a little visit? I’m overdue.”
“Sure, the house is yours,” he said in front of the army of three sisters who stood behind him with their arms crossed.
He wondered which one he was going to have to wrestle to get his own bedroom, but he put it aside until later.
“How long are you staying,Deenie,” asked the heaviest one, Andrea.
“I took a week off work. Just a few days, if it isn’t an imposition.”
“You should have called ahead. I’ve got a bad back,” said Eludia, the middle sister of the three. “I can’t move things out of my room.”
“Now stop it right now, you three. This isn’t your house. It’s my house and your sister’s house, and he’ll stay as our guest for as long as he wants and one of you will move. I don’t want to get involved, so just fix it, or we’ll do it at random and then everyonewill be miserable and complain about it for the whole time he’s here. So stop it, I tell you!”
Dimitri leaned into his dad and whispered, “Way to go.”
“You think? Won’t do any good. These old biddies are just bags of wind. Thank God they cook, or I’d be fueling their pieholes and costing me a small fortune, especially the water bill. They argue, but they’re useful. And your mom likes having them around. They don’t argue when they tend to her, so there’s that.”
Dimitri soaked it all in, noting how nothing had changed. It was the same as when he was growing up, his dad complaining about the “spinsters” visiting every year and draining his bank account with tales of woe and his mother giving them little loans that never got repaid. His favorite answer to everything was, “What are you going to do? It is what it is.”
“Come on. Let’s see your mother. If she’s sleeping, I don’t want to wake her, if you don’t mind. She doesn’t sleep comfortably much anymore.”
In the hallway was an alcove, originally built for a telephone, but now held a charging station. His dad’s phone was there, with another cracked screen despite the one he’d replaced the last time he was here.
He didn’t reveal he’d noted this and kept walking.
The bedroom smelled of death. She wasn’t in their king bed, but she rested in a hospital bed that could be lowered and adjusted, which made bathing and sitting to eat easier. Beside the bed was a walker, with tennis balls glued and duct taped to the legs to keep it from slipping when she put weight on it.
Her head was covered in a scarf with tufts of grey hair sticking out here and there. Not much, though. She had opened her eyes and gave him a warm smile, holding out her arms, one attached to the slow drip.
“Dimitri, my son. I knew you’d come visit. Wasn’t I saying that, Constantino?”
“You did. I can testify to that. You say it every day, Maria.”
He ran to the bed and hugged her bony frame. She smelled of sickness and resignation, that place between the living and the truly dead, biding her time, waiting for the final curtain to fall. He always felt when they got like this, and he’d seen it in even younger men, teammates who’d suffered for years with their injuries, it was almost a relief when they passed. And then everyone around them afterwards felt guilty for feeling that way.
That’s what funerals were for, he thought.
He released her and helped her settle back into the pillows as she squealed a tiny groan of pain.
“I’m having a good day, son. Even better now that you’re here.”
“Thanks, Mom. You look better, I think.”
“You could never lie well. This is the last drug, son. After this, I’m just going to let nature take its course.”
“Don’t say that, Maria, Goddammit. He just said you looked good. Take the compliment for once, will you?” His cheerful father piped out at her.
But she probably didn’t hear him. She was still staring blissfully at his face, checking his features, no doubt trying to discern whether or not he was happy. She was always good about digging that out of him.
