The Last Word

“I don’t understand why you felt the need to come”

“To make sure you’re alright.”

It was opportunistic, really, a chance to get the last word.

“I’m alright.”

He sighed, and reclined further into my mother’s chair, where she sat most of the time, watching baseball on max volume and more often that not falling asleep as the long games dragged on.

“How long are you going to stay?”

“A few days, to clean and pack, I told the realtor I would have it empty and clean by the weekend.”

“Do you have someone helping you?”

“For the furniture yes.”

He wouldn’t offer to help, his brief appearance, he must think, should suffice.

“How’s work?”

“Fine. How’s the farm?”

“Well you know, I’m not a farmer…”

He opened a flask, taking a drink of it. I wonder if he was taking the time to reflect on his failing farm, or whether-

“It’s okay. It’s a learning process.”

He and his new wife bought a farm, a place to retire, live off the land. I hadn’t visited, I hadn’t been invited.

“Are you keeping anything?”

“Of moms?”

“Yeah, she wasn’t one for…the finer things but, that’s my couch.”

“So take it.”

He sighed again, staring at the grey screen, most likely hoping it would turn on, a miraculous poltergeist moment to break the tension.

It wasn’t that I hated him, I’m sure part of me loved him dearly and more that that wanted to be kind to him, kinder than he could be, if only to impart some sort of paternal softness from him. We had never raised our voices at one another, my childhood a sunny memory of a goofy father and anxious, but fiercely loving mother. Then adulthood, and the divorce, and the separating of material things and delegation of cruel words and labels onto mother and father. Cheat, psycho, freeloader, drunk etc. My father was furious at her for leaving him, and she was furious he didn’t change enough for her to stay. It wasn’t a particularly original story of marital erosion, but the hurt was very specific to each of them. They stretched themselves towards the corners of the people they couldn’t be with one another, each embodying the most irksome traits a partner would bring up, only slightly joking, at a dinner party.

My mother, became more aggressive in her search for peace, an oxymoron? My father leaned into his most indulgent habits, his charm and affability poured down the throats of previous shared friends and community, now solely his. He lived in a condo across from mine, my condo, a penance for being witness to their malice, a privilege of a child with parents desperate to monetarily bandaid any traumatic situation, in place of conversation.

“Seeing anyone?”

“Not really, which is good I guess…the situation being what it is.”

“Dead mothers are not great pillow talk.”

I nodded. I really didn’t understand why he felt the need to come.

We had dinner at least once a week, my father and I, we would drink expensive wine paid for with my mother’s alimony, and mock her. He had 23 pairs of leather dress shoes, he had wrought iron shelves and industrial style lighting. I was a young woman, only 18, alone and desperate for male validation (something I lacked entirely in my high school career), and he was the epitome of cool. I was his best friend and confidante, knowing the inner workings of my mother and picking them apart, justifying his rage, this was love between a father and daughter. This would be the blueprint for future relationships, men requiring my enabling of their turbulent emotions. Men, through copious drink telling me I’m funny and smart and all together “good.” We were a team. We were the “winning” team.

After 5 years, I stopped drinking, I stopped spending evenings with men who embodied my father. I stopped mocking my mother during our weekly dinners, instead playing possum, shrugging my shoulders when asked for updates on her life, the most passive protection, at the time, I could provide.

I visited my mother more often, in her small, colourful house. I made amends for being vocally embarrassed by her fight for equality, (because how unfeminine I thought to scream loudly for respect and demand it in the streets.) I indulged her, at first, when she brought up essays by Toni Morrison and Joan Didion. I tried very hard, to understand the more academic prose I wasn’t used to. Then I respected her, and in a humiliating moment told her so, feeling such immense shame that for a moment, I felt like that was the right thing to say and shouldn’t just be inherent. She hugged me and cried, and though I had learned through habit that to emote so freely was off putting, I allowed myself to cry into her breast like a child.

“Do you have animals?”

“We have the cat.”

“But you don’t have animals on the farm?”

“It’s not a livestock situation.”

“Not even chickens?”

“Maybe in a bit, maybe we’ll get some chickens. Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“Well.”

“I could get a pizza.”

“Sure. I have some cash, and this is for you.”

He handed me a twenty dollar bill and cheque for twenty thousand dollars.

“What is this?”

“It’s uhh…you know. For you. Your mother was still, well she was paying me but that’s…that’s what the lawyers ended up with, it was legal and of course your mother….she didn’t want to pay anymore and she was uh…quite, adamant you know, we support our child, you, even being an adult, and she fought me on this…a lot.”

“I didn’t think you talked.”

“It wasn’t talking, your mom, but…so, I didn’t know if she was going to sue or back payments yada yada yada you know-“

He took another drink from his flask.

“But either way I didn’t spend it on shoes and wine like she said I did. Pissing away your future house funds or, whatever. I’m just honouring the dead.”

He kept his eyes glued on the grey screen. I wasn’t sure if I should say thank you, there didn’t seem to be room for gratuity in the space between us, already thick with tension that death and unresolved or unrequited feelings of love and entitlement.

“I found something.”

He didn’t move his eyes from the screen, so I repeated myself.

“I found something.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah gimme a sec.”

I lifted myself off my mother’s couch, heaving my body like she used to, retreating to her bedroom. I returned moments later, my father had not moved, and I presented with a small black book, well worn, but still smelling of leather and ink.

“What’s this?”

“It’s like a diary of sorts, or, notes, a lot of it shorthand. Mom said she kept notes of when I was a kid. She hated cameras and…she said it’s nice to have stories of yourself a child, so when everyone who knew you as a child is gone, or…gone, I dunno. She said the embarrassment of hearing childhood stories fades and as you get older it’s to have, a record. And you’re in this one a lot, and it’s a lot of nice things so I thought…”

“I think it’s probably better if you just keep it all.”

“You don’t want to read it?”

“I was there wasn’t I?”

I opened the book, my last attempt at reconciliation, even in death, as if I was a small petulant child from a T.V. movie trying to trick her parents back into marriage.

“Wayne surprised you with the whole deal, tutu, shiny little plastic tiara, and wand with a puffy little star on the end. You screamed you were magic. He lifted you up and up and swung you around so your tutu would fill the living room in an umbrella of tulle. You screamed all evening to go again, that you were a flying princess. I listed to you sing ad libbed songs of princess dreams in bed, and in the morning you told me you dreamt of flying, and asked again if your dad really was given a magic tiara, to which we both whole heartedly agreed, yes, magic. Later I asked your father if his arms were tired, and he replied, ‘I can’t even hold my dick to piss.’ Which is an embarrassing thing to hear from your father, but in his goofy way, a testament to his adoration of you and your princess fantasies.”

He nodded, and provided a quick embarrassed smile, then back to the lifeless T.V. I wanted to apologize for embarrassing him, but again, he didn’t provide the space to do so.

“Are you going to order pizza?” He asked me.

“Can you just be kind? Just for a moment?”

“I just gave you twenty thousand dollars.”

“Out of guilt for…her. Like, to be absolved of that guilt-“

“I don’t feel guilty…about any of it.” He finally looked at me, and any magic I thought I could conjure up from nostalgic childhood memories was gone.

“Okay. Then don’t feel guilty but just…I’m not asking for a declaration of love or any type of…paternal affection I’m just asking you to be kind. To be…I don’t understand why you’re here.”

“For you.”

“But you know, you know I’m more her than you and that doesn’t mean I hate you but it’s like…I hurt you. But…I mean I’m not either one of you of course I’m the product of two stubborn people but you won’t let me have it both ways.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying. Do you want me to leave?”

“I want you to be kind! I want you to stay and say one nice thing about her, one nice thing about me that even if it’s more reflective of her you can still love it…and me, wholly. But I don’t want to beg you to say that.”

“Do you wish it was me?”

“See now you’re mean.”

“Do you wish it was me that died?”

“I just wish I knew why you’re here. Do you need to see it? How she lived beyond you? What she left? Don’t say for me, because you’re not here for me you’re sitting there, as far as possible from me! Why are you here?”

“I don’t know.”

I wanted to apologize, because I could see he was moments from tears, and he, the aging man, who was usually so charming, with all of his shoes and all of his jokes and barbs, look terrified. But he left no space in between his next sentence.

“I didn’t hate her. I was just, mad. I’m still mad.”

“You want your money back?”

“I’m not mad at you.”

Maybe that was the closest he would get to saying he loved me, saying I was forgiven for loving my mother, more than he thought I loved him, that at this point, he accepted it.

“She would want the game on.”

He went to the T.V. to turn it on and we let the sounds of the commentators drown out any more ‘feelings’ we may have finally had the guts to acknowledge. The electric light was like a fire, and all at once I realized the cyclical practise of parent taking care of child and child then taking care of parent had been lost in the flames.

“Are you going to order pizza?” He asked me.

“Yes.”