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Grinning on the Way to See Mom Die

by Brian D. Hinson

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Aunt Sara doesn’t like phone calls, so I get a text that Mom’s dying, hospital address included. I sigh a long one. A weird mix of emotions wrestle in my gut. I reply: Ok thx.

I know how this went down. Mom got really sick, delayed telling anyone because she doesn’t like doctors or medical bills. But she likes alcohol and self-medicates. A doctor had warned her a few years ago that her liver was about to give out. Aunt Sara didn’t say what was wrong with mom. She figures I know. If I were a betting man, I’d lay $100 on cirrhosis of the liver. Easy bet. She’s already had hepatitis and edema in her leg. So, the end has come.

I call Mom’s cell and no answer. Must be the real deal. I call up Lil’ Bro. He’s my older brother Ollie but he’s shorter than me by a foot. He’s four eleven but if you ask, he’s “five fucking one.”

“I’m a little busy,” he answers.

“Did you hear from Aunt Sara?”

“Is this important?”

“Mom’s dying in the hospital.”

Pause. “Good. Thanks for the word, though.”

Neither of us got along with Mom. “I’m thinking of driving down. Saying goodbye.”

“Gas prices are fucked right now, it’s like three and a half hours of road, and I’m on deadline. But good luck.”

“That was me inviting you along. Gas on me. And you’re lying about the deadline.”

“Life ain’t one of your kiddie books, Lucas. Ain’t no happy ending.”

I write middle school novels. “Never said it was. Sometimes, maybe it should be. I’m glad it’s not all tits exploding and dicks getting sawed off.” Ollie writes and illustrates violent erotica comics. Incidentally, we make about the same money. I live in a ghetto studio, he in a shit trailer. “You coming?”

Another pause. “When you leaving?”

“How’s tomorrow morning? I can roll by around—”

“Noon?”

“Sure. Noon.”

---

A lot to process. I’d check in on Mom about every other month by phone. More out of duty than love, since I’d admitted to myself long ago there really wasn’t any love remaining. Ollie and her stopped speaking years ago. Mom had tried to get me to get him to come around, and I’d call him and ask, “You coming around yet?” and he’d just laugh and say, “Sure, yeah, now fuck off.” See, he was the first born and she was busy on meth at the time and he got a little malnourished. Stunted his growth. On her third rehab run, funded by Aunt Sara, she had found Jesus and ditched meth for good. Then she was fucking the deacon in charge of the collection and they started stealing and boozing together and got kicked out of church. Also: thirty days in jail, ninety probation. And back on meth eventually. We spent a lot of time with Aunt Sara growing up. Me and Lil’ Bro showing up at the hospital will be a shock for Mom. Might do her in.

I get a few things to make sure this four-hour roadie will run smooth. I’m good with the decision. If I say my goodbyes, there’d be no guilt. That’s how life works. Wrap a bow on this chapter and move the hell on.

Next day at about 12:30 (he’s always late so why should I be on time?) I honk the horn outside his trailer. Ollie really should paint that peeling trim. But his flowerboxes and pots look nice with red azaleas. Always red azaleas. We’re in the high desert of Albuquerque, but these flowers get watered on the daily, a conservation sin. And they always look perfect.

He comes down the steps, his dark hair flopped over the shaved sides, black leather jacket, his round tortoise shell glasses fashioning at maximum artist level, his black and red leather duffle bag slung about his shoulder. I pop the trunk and feel the thunk of him plopping it in there followed by the slam. He gets in and first thing, “Got any weed?”

I hand him the blunt I rolled last night.

He sparks.

“Roll down the window some,” I ask.

Ollie rolls down his window as he rolls up his eyes. Sure, what a pain, Lil’ Bro.

I pluck my phone from the vent mount, battered and six years old. As long as it functions…that’s my philosophy about most things. “Pre-roadie selfie.”

Ollie nods, ashes the blunt (already?), chomps it between his teeth, grins, leans in.

Pic one, two, three. In case someone blinked.

I do a check: He looks great, like Hunter Thompson with cooler clothes and lush hair. Me: toothy smile, pointy nose, receding hairline, noon five o’clock shadow, and a small stripe of a white stain on the neck my black T. Yogurt, I think. I hope.

Ollie takes the phone and we head out. He laughs at our pic. “Maybe Mom’ll wanna frame it.”

“I’ll tell her that’s us grinning on the way to see her die.”

---

By the time we hit the outskirts of Las Cruces I have an undesired second-hand weed buzz and Ollie’s pointing out a liquor store so we pull into the cracked lot. He drinks when stressed. He smokes weed for every other moment. He pops out of the car before me, heading into the run-down place with posters on the windows screaming about deals on beer and some peanut-butter liquor that sounds damned dreadful. I assume he has money since he power-walked in before I closed and locked the car, but that’s never a fair assumption.

Inside: bright lights and dirty tile floors. And rows upon rows of alcohol. Three walls of coolers stocked with cheap beer. Clientele in line looking both happy and sad. Mostly folks getting off work, I’d say. I catch Ollie perusing the whiskeys. “You recently got a nice royalty, right?” he asks.

I sigh. I’d told him. I couldn’t deny it. And by “nice” he meant floating expenses a couple weeks. I nod.

He picks up the Four Roses. “Split the cost? Hard times call for hard (and quality) liquor.”

I didn’t plan on drinking. But I couldn’t argue with the logic. I hand him forty cash and he marches to the counter, his swagger thickened by the two blunts on the drive.

I head for the door and Ollie’s edged voice comes hard, “The fuck you say?”

Shit. Not now. Every damn time. “I need to check your ID, sir.”

I turn around figure skater quick and interject, “It’s standard procedure, Oll, not anything else.”

“What else could it be? I’m forty-fucking-four.”

Short as a gnome with a huge chip on his little shoulder for the rest of his life about it. “Just give the man ID and let’s get on before visiting hours close. Or she croaks.”

He scowls that scowl he’s had since before I was born and slaps his drivers license on the counter. It gets scanned, payment is made and I take all the change and we hit the door as a skinny guy in the Harley T whispers, a little too loudly, to the beleaguered cashier, “He needs blocks on the pedals, don’t he?”

Me and Ollie stop mid-step. Oh. Hell. There’s no holding him back. Ollie pushes the bagged bottle to my hands and strides to the guy whose mouth makes an “O” like damn-I-done-fucked-up-he-wasn’t-spose-to-hear. “I’m sorry dude, bad joke. Bad joke.” His hand up and palm-out in the universal gesture of surrender, his other hand occupied with a bottle of cheap vodka. Ollie gets toe-to-toe with him, looks up at the guy who really does look sorry. And drunk, back in the store with his last dollars for a second go. Ollie curtly nods, turns around, takes a step, then whips back around on his heel and uppercuts the guy in the belly, doubling him over. The bottle drops and breaks.

“I’m callin’ the cops!” announces the cashier.

A security guard comes clomping up from the back.

“Let’s go, Oll!”

We burst through the doors, I have the fob out and the doors open and we chuck our asses in like we robbed the joint. Ollie grabs the bottle, I crank the Toyota on the first try. New battery a month ago. The security guard pops out as I squeal rubber in reverse. We hit the highway. In the rearview the renta-cop stands with his hands on his hips nodding in smug victory, like he chased away a couple of armed and dangerous Most Wanteds.

I glance at Lil’ Bro. Like nothing happened, he’s working on getting the top off of that bottle. With the wrap peeled back, he uncorks it and swigs about two shots and wheezes. “We late for visiting hours?”

---

At the hospital front desk Ollie leans on the laminate, doing his finest not-drunk impression as he chomps on spearmint gum sounding like a panda with bamboo.

The hospital front desk person (what are they called? Hell, I had a few drinks, too, but just to calm nerves but I’m not quite calm yet) looks up at me through her glasses, adjusts said glasses on her nose, and says, “She’s been discharged.”

Ollie stops his chomping. “We missed her? She’s dead?”

“No!” both me and this desk employee say at the same time.

“She was released,” she emphasizes. “Sent home.”

Ollie and I share a bewildered look. Then Ollie sneers. “That cunt.”

---

Back in the car we seethe. We argue over whether to visit Aunt Sara or Mom. Aunt Sara was always honest, we conclude, therefore Mom must’ve tricked her. After more inebriated debate, and more liquid inebriant, we drive to Mom’s in the growing darkness. We decided to say our goodbyes now, say anything that needs to be said, leave and never return, never call. It’s all over.

“Fuck this and fuck her,” mutters Ollie.

I pull into her drive, headlights glinting off the bumper of her old silver Ford pickup. Years ago some boyfriend dumped it on her. She managed to keep it running ever since. The only thing she ever consistently cared for.

“One more,” says Ollie as he swigs from the bottle.

“Sure.” I take it and hit it. It’s half done.

We head up the porch steps and Ollie knocks. The doorbell hasn’t worked in ten years. The screen door’s holes tell of its age as well.

After a minute and Ollie rapping another time, the door squeaks open on rusty hinges. The TV noise of a car chase grows loud. There’s Mom, blonde-dyed hair in a Karen coif, perpetually tired eyes that brighten a smidge, her face more wrinkled now than the last time I saw her.

She starts to open her mouth and Ollie pipes up with, “Aunt Sara said you were almost dead!”

Mom opens the decrepit storm door. “Hate to make you drive all this way. I thought I was dying. Ambulance ride and all. Legs swelled up like about to pop. Get in here.” She frowns. “Were you celebrating? You two smell like a distillery.”

We freeze. Was that what we were doing?

“If there’s anything left in the bottle, bring it in,” she says.

“No, you got that liver…thing.” I could never spell cirrhosis but when drunk I couldn’t even say it.

“Fine. Come in and sit down. Whether or not I die today I was told my days are short. Let me look at yas, let’s pretend for a minute we’re a Disney family. You won’t suffer too much. Sleep here tonight if you like. I know it’s a long drive and I’m sorry it was a burden.”

Mom sits herself on a recliner I’d not seen before. Vinyl. Fuchsia. A garage sale monstrosity. The once tired sofa is now completely exhausted, the same green thing since we were kids. It was old then. We sit. Mom flicks off the TV by remote and turns to us.

“You boys look fine. I’m flattered you drove out here.”

Ollie hops up. He’s both drunk and agitated. I hate when he paces, and there’s only three steps in either direction to release his bad energy. His hands curl into claws as he speaks, “Mom, I got things to say.”

Mom runs a hand through her hair. Nods. Slight downturn at the corners of her mouth. “I already know I was a bad—”

“You’re a shit Mom. That’s why we never come around. We came out here to make some peace with you before you croak, and this feels like we been tricked.” More pacing. “Tricked. Like for attention or something.”

“Ollie, I called an ambulance! I told your Aunt Sara what the doctors told me.”

Ollie pulls a skeptical look. “So, the doctors said you were dying? One the verge of death?”

“Well, not in so many words.”

“Dammit, Mom.” Ollie shakes his head.

“Look, I know I was a substandard mother. You remind me every chance you get.”

“I wonder why?” says Ollie, shaking his head and appealing to the ceiling.

“It’s not like I meant to make you short—”

“Fucking fuck!” Ollie swipes at the glass vase on the battered console table by the bay window, a heavy glass vase with serious heft. Life slows. It hurtles past me in a straight line and strikes Mom on the forehead and cracks before dropping to the floor damaged, but not shattered. There’s spattering blood and Mom is tossed back like…a frail old woman smacked in the head with something heavy and glass.

She slumps, bleeding. A lot.

Me and Ollie freeze. And stare. Blood droplets dot the wall. She’s not moving. I hear the patter of blood droplets on the wood floor.

“Mom?” Ollie whispers.

I stand. “Get a towel or something,” I tell Ollie. He runs down the hall as I approach Mom. She’s collapsed over the arm of the recliner, blood dripping from a gash to the wood floor, drizzling down the chair. Her mouth is stuck in a weird grin, showing her meth teeth that she always hid by smiling toothlessly. “Hell,” I whisper. I lean in, peering closely at the river flowing from her skull.

Ollie returns with a forest green bath towel. “What do I do?”

I don’t know how to feel for a pulse. I don’t know how to feel, either, as nausea and fear twist in my belly. I touch her neck like I know what I’m doing. I detect nothing but my shaking hand. Placing my palm on her chest through her beige sweater, I should find, and pretty damned directly, her heartbeat, right? I wait. Nothing. I grab a framed picture from the coffee table (me and Ollie, shirtless kids, me missing two front teeth) and hold it to her slightly open lips. I wait (hope?) for the fog.

Nothing.

“I should stop the bleeding, right?” says Ollie.

I shake my head. “She’s dead.”

Ollie stands there with the towel in both hands. “I didn’t get to say what I had to say.”

“What do we do?”

Pause. “We call 911.”

I turn away from Mom and look down at Lil’ Bro as he fumbles for his phone in his jacket pocket. Towel still in his other hand. “That’s not a good idea.”

“She might not be dead! You’re no fucking doctor!” Ollie shoves me aside and applies that bath towel to her bleeding skull. That towel staunches the river of leaking blood. It soaks through to Ollie’s hands. “Mom?”

I look around the living room. It’s changed. The flatscreen TV, different stains on the carpet. But that old coffee table from the 70s and the sofa are the same. We played here with our garage sale hand-me-down toys, scratched matchbox cars and scuffed Star Wars figures, mostly stuff Aunt Sara got us. Mom would come from the kitchen and announce she’d fixed ketchup sandwiches. They were pretty good. We didn’t know any better. Any lunch was a good lunch. Sometimes there wasn’t any.

“Mom?” Ollie asks again.

“She’s gone,” I say.

“Call 911!” he shouts.

I close my eyes, breathe in the metallic scent of blood. And the mustiness of the old crackerbox house. “Everyone knows you hated her. We just left a liquor store that has footage of you punching some dude. You see what I’m getting at?”

“Mom?” he whispers.

---

Ollie finally wraps his head around the circumstance. We spend hours getting the blood off the recliner and the hardwood floor. We use bleach. It messes up the wood, but we had to be sure no blood remained. Mom spilled some bleach, right? Nothing suspicious. This cleanup had to be executed perfectly.

Mom had also shit herself. This was Ollie’s doing, unintended, sure, but I wasn’t driving with the shitty-assed corpse of Mom all the way back home. Besides unpleasant, what if a cop pulls us over and the car smells like we shit ourselves? Suspicious, that’s what. Ollie and I carry her to the bathtub and he cleans her up with the sprayer and shampoo. Ollie could be an asshole, but he knew he’d fucked up and took a little responsibility.

I move the car to the street and back it in. We load her body, wrapped in about twenty black garbage bags, from the side door. Only possible witness would be the next-door neighbors. And by now it was really late. Their place is dark. I close the trunk as quietly as I can.

We drive.

We get about a block away and Ollie hits the bottle.

“Are you serious right now?” I ask.

“Chill out. We made it. And mom just died. Like I need more of an excuse?”

I groan. It’s four in the morning. We’d make it back around eight. Rush hour. “We haven’t discussed where we’re taking her.”

“Right. Well, we stop by my place. I have a shovel. We drive out to the Manzanos, the national forest. Pick one of the trails by the last forest fire so no one will be out that way. We’ll be alone. We carry her like way off the trail and start digging.”

My eyebrows raise. That’s actually a decent plan. “You’ve been thinking about this.”

“I also write a lot of this shit. And draw it. You’d know if you were supportive and read my stuff.”

“Are we going to defile her corpse, too?”

“Man, fuck off.”

I grin for the first time since we’d left Albuquerque. “But, I mean, investigators go by teeth, right? If someone finds her, like, even twenty years later her teeth will still be good.”

Ollie took another shot from the bottle. “We can get a hammer if you’re up for breaking her teeth out.”

“No. You did this.”

“I have my fucking limits, man! Old lady shit is the worst!” He levels his voice out, and “Hard to bury someone deep out there. Rocky. Coyotes might dig her up. Scatter her bones and her skull. We’ll head back to the spot after a few weeks and look for her skull. Then take the teeth.”

That was stupid drunk talk. No use arguing that now.

“And there might not be any hikers but forest rangers still ride by,” he added. “Doing their thing. Watching shit.”

“Right. So we go there at night?”

“Dude, no. Headlights can be seen for a mile. And, they lock the gates. So, no. But we should stop by your place and grab your backpack and shit like we’re for real.”

That means more driving. With a body in the trunk. To my place in a big apartment complex. At rush hour. “Okay.”

The miles go by as we sit in silence, nothing but road noise. Calming. The hum of tires on pavement, the seventy-four miles-an-hour breeze rushing by. I had set the cruise control one increment below the speed limit. Was that suspicious? Or not suspicious? A cop wouldn’t blink at that, right? Not on a weeknight.

We’d be good. We could do this.

“I gotta pee,” announces Ollie.

“Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much. Not right now.”

“I ain’t driving.”

“That’s not the point! More stops for you pissing!”

“Mom just died! Cut me a little slack!”

I pound the steering wheel. “She’s my mom, too!”

“But you’re driving!”

“That’s not the goddamn point!”

“I can wait ‘til we hit a rest stop.”

“No! Those places have cameras. I’ll pull over and you’ll piss on the side of the road.” The urge hit me, too. “Now I need to piss.”

“Well, then, quit blaming me for everything.”

“Christ on a pinwheel crucifix!” I hit the steering wheel again, paining my palm. I grunt in frustration. No one is on the freeway ahead or behind us. We pull over on the shoulder. Ollie jumps out. I jump out. In the desert scrub we stream our streams in the night, puddling, the car idling behind, the wind feathering my thinning hair.

Thunk!

My piss stops mid-stream.

Ollie keeps going. He didn’t hear.

Thunk!

He stops pissing and his eyes widen in the moonlight. My piss resumes.

Ollie looks back to the car. “You told me she was dead.”

“No heartbeat. No breath.”

He zips up. My pee trickles to a stop.

He hits me in the shoulder. “She’s banging on the trunk! Wrapped up in trash bags!”

I tuck and zip. We stare at each other. Waiting for one other to say something. To come up with a plan. A solution.

Thunk! Thunk!

“What do we do here?” I ask.

“This is so fucked up,” he whispers.

Ollie stares off into the darkness. The car idles. Breeze raises gooseflesh. I swallow and it’s loud as it slithers over the lump in my throat.

Ollie smacks his own face four times, something he does to straighten out his thinking, walks back to the car, opens the passenger door, and returns with the whiskey. He takes a slug, passes it to me. I take a slug. We stare off into the night beside the freeway. A car speeds by.

Thunk! Thunk!

I look at Lil’ Bro: His jaw is set. He’s got a rage building up behind those eyes. It’s been a long day of blind alleys, of belched-up memories, and unexpected violence. He drinks. I drink.

“She might die on the rest of the drive,” I say.

Ollie shakes his head. “You wanna hear her knocking on the trunk door for a couple hours?” The bottom of that bottle goes up as he takes a long pull.

Not much left. He hands the bottle to me. I slosh the liquid around nervously. I used cash at the liquor store. That was a plus. No name left behind. Just a face. If anyone makes a connection between a missing old woman and some temperamental short dude punching a guy—that’s a longshot, right?

A feeble voice comes from the trunk, barely audible over the idling Toyota, above the gentle, cool night breeze. “Somebody help me.”

I finish off the bottle and drop it to the ground. Ollie picks it up. “That’s something stupid I’d do.” He puts the empty bottle in the back seat. He reaches to the driver’s door and punches the trunk release. The trunk unlatches but doesn’t raise.

“Help.” So weak.

Together we walk to the trunk. Ollie lifts the lid. In the wan light cast by the trunk bulb there’s Mom, most of her head free of the garbage bags along with her left arm. Her face is crusted with dried blood. A wet line of fresh blood streaks one cheek. One of her eyes is glued shut with blood and hair. The one eye squints, focuses. “Ollie? What’s going on? Lucas?”

Ollie opens the compartment for the jack.

Mom’s eyes focus on me. “Lucas?” she wheezes.

Ollie pulls out the tire iron. He grips it in both hands as he stares at Mom. The anger has drifted from his eyes and pity settles in.

“I’m sorry, you guys…” there’s some cry in her shaky voice. “I know I was a bad mother. Please…take me home…” A single track of tears streak down over her nose and across her blood-caked cheek.

Ollie licks his lips. Shakes his head. “Let’s…get her to a hospital. Just drop her and run.”

My heart hammers. Thing is, Ollie always got extra mad when he fell for Mom’s explanations for why she didn’t keep a promise to take us to the park, or use that money for food, or why she hocked the TV. Again. Man, his rage would burn and things would break. Like our crap second-hand toys. But he’d eventually fall for it again.

The blood in my head thrums louder than the idling Toyota. Mom never looked out for Ollie. I had to, once old enough to pay attention. I did that. For all these years now. I couldn’t—wouldn’t—stop.

Mom’s good eye, almost clean from her cry, goes from me to Ollie and back. “Come here, Mom,” I say as I reach in for her arm and I scootch her toward the rear bumper. Tangled in the garbage bags, mom feebly wriggles I move her as gently as possible.

She peels blood-crusted hair from her face. It sounds like removing tape. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

“I’m sorry, too, Mom,” says Ollie. Jesus, now he was on the edge of a cry. He never was the strong one. A little psycho, sure. But that’s different. I still had to look out for him. Even now. It was my duty. Look out for Lil’ Bro. He makes decisions with his temper and his heart.

“Give it here,” I say to Ollie and hold out my hands for the tire iron.

He hands it to me, wipes a tear. “Mom, let me help you sit up. We’ll get you out of there.”

Ollie takes her hand.

Perfect. Her arm’s out of the way. Gripping with both hands, I raise the tire iron high.