blurring_the_edges_54_a_turn_for_the_worse birdmad Stepping off the plane on the way home from San Francisco was like dying and going to hell. The only good thing about landing at home was that, unlike the runway at the airport by the Bay, it looks as if the plane is going to come down in the water and yuor fear of heights became coupled with a fear of the plane ditching into the water. Monday was somewhat tense and quiet and tuesday was the same, maybe just a tiny bit less so. Leaving California, the temperature, according to the pilot, was a nice, cloudy, breezy and comfortable seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit. Landing back in Phoenix, the pilot reported one-hundred-fourteen with very low humidity and still. Picking up your car from the airport parking lot, you drop Teri off and carry her bags up to her apartment. "Call me," you tell her. "Okay." she says, seeming to have snapped out of whatever has been bothering her for the last couple of days now that you are back home. Your own drive home is quiet and boring, coping with the afternoon rush of people on their way home from work, You won't have to go to work again until tomorrow night, so you will try to get off of your feet and just putter around the house with your mom until then. Walking through the door, you are keenly aware of that strange smell your mom keeps wondering about and realise for the first time that in all likelihood, it is coming from her. The home care nurse is just leaving and after she gives your mom a glad-handing goodbye for now, you see a grim look come over her as she starts out. Aware that you might have noticed, she tries to fake a smile again as she gets to the door. "Hi, Mijo" (mi hijo - my son) "Hi mom..." "You two have fun?" "Yeah... I called a couple of times over here but nobody picked up." "I stayed at Delia's and helped take care of the baby." "Cool, how is the little monkey?" "Cute, as always." "Heh." Glancing over at her, you notice her color is looking alittle off, perhaps even a tiny bit jaundicced. "Have you eaten yet, mom?" you ask her, suddenly aware that yu are hungry again. "No, i wasn't feeling too good and i didn't know what to make" "Don't make anything, i'll pick something up. What sounds good to you." "One of those vegetable pizzas from that place over by Manzanita" The little bar across the street from the little redneck race-track, for being a total dive, makes some incredibly good pizza. In their current iteration they don't seem to have a name as they have just changed owners and the new guy can't settle on what to call his place. Thankfully, he kept the kitchen staff. You order the large vegetable pizza, which is eighteen inches across and thanks to the abundance of vegetables and cheese weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of three or dour pounds. you'll be taking leftover slices to work with you for lunch for the remainder of the week since this is the one pizza that has ever managed to fill you off of just one slice. It's not cheap, but it's damn good and worth every cent. After dinner, you decide to pre-empt any mention of it from your mom and mow the lawn. You pretty much only have to do the front as the backyard is becoming increasingly arid and dead in spite of your best efforts to re-grow a decent lawn. Finishing the yard work, you shower and go back to your room, unpacking and sorting your laundry. Tired, as is a frequent symptom of the anemia which has not abated even after she gave up the chemotherapy, your mom has gone back to her room and gone to sleep Going out to do your laundry, you come back in to hear the faint sound of your mom sobbing form the pain in her chest that has been with her since her first surgery almost four years ago. She medicates a little to keep it at bay, but as she gets sicker, it gets more intense. This is why your dad eventually had a sub-clavian plug installed for morphine dosing during his klast few weeks. It kills you that there is nothing you can do to aleviate it and noting you can do to stop the advancing deterioration that is slowly eating her from within. You know what that odd smell is now, and you understand that since she has stopped asking you that perhaps her sobbing isn't just from the pain but from understanding it herself. It's the first faint traces of something like decay. You smelled it in the hospital when she went in for her last surgery, yu smelled it hanging over your dad during his last few weeks and now you smell it slowly and faintly filling up the house at a level just perceptible enough to be a curiosity to anyone who doesn;t know better. You want to cry, but suddenly find yourself unable to. Sitting alone in your room, you turn on the nintendo and fire up your copy of Mortal Kombat II, channeling the boiling emotions into an aggression you take out on one animated opponent after another, secretly pretending tht each of them is either God or the doctor who ignored or underestimated the obvious until it was too late. (...) 041029 ... birdmad It is well past sunrise when you finally go to sleep, fingertips sore from having subjected your game console to such prolonged work. You do not dream of anything you can remember with any clarity when noon rolls around and you get up to have a bowl of cereal and a turkey sandwich for breakfast. You keep different hours from most of the world, but to you , even though everyone else would treat it as lunch, it's your first meal of the day, so you call it "breakfast". Packing two slices of the pizza in foil along with 2 cans of Mountain Dew from the case under the desk, you put your lunch for tonight ba back in the refrigerator and run off to take care of an errand for your mom. "And wash the car, cabron." "Mom, the dust storms are already starting this week, if i wash it today it's just gonna look like shit again by Sunday." "You always have to argue." "What? Nevermind. I'll be back real quick. OK, So just to make sure i've got it right: i drop off the big bag with the knitting stuff over at aunt Marta's and then go to grandma's and pick up the toolbox that Tio Tomas left there last week, right?" "Yes." "Got it." Pulling out of the driveway, you hear a strange creaking sound coming from your suspension. It's faint, but you know it doesn't sound good at all. You just had the tie-rods and the CV joints and boots replaced, even going as far as to replace the most affected piece of the Escort's front axle a brand new half-shaft. Needing to get a new car couldn't possibly come at a more inconvenientn time eitehr. You've been good at paying all of your bills on time and ahve barely touched those credit cards you got, but you've been tracking it and for some reason, your credit rating is just barely good enough not to get you completely fucked at a car dealership. The drive to run the errands is uneventful, you pause for a little bit at your grandmother's house, the remainder of the once formidable pack of toy mutts that lived here now down to one of the originals and two replacements. Brownie, the chihuahua dachsund mix whose breed traits make him look like a slightly pudgy, deluxe stretch model chihuahua comes trotting out from under his cool, damp spot beneath the old juniper tree and Pacho, the old black and white terrier mutt who hates everybody but you and grandma, and your cousin Teresa's dog Miller the white spitz come out from under the tree as you pull up. Old Pancho is looking slow lately, but then again, the old bastard is almost as old as you, and that's a pretty impressive achievement for a dog. Walking into your grandma's house, you can smell the mixed scents of different foods. She comes up to you, gives you a big hug, asks you how you are doing and you tell her, in your best spanish that you just got back from a trip to San Francisco with Teri, whom all parties have been content to believe, with Teri's complicity, is your "girlfriend." Before you can stop her, she shuffles her house-slippered feet over to the counter and grabs a glass, pours you some milk and hands you some of the fresh pan_dulce she made earlier in the morning. You eat it slowly, enjoying it and listening to your grandmother as she talks about everything that has gone on with some of the extended family over the last week or so. Sometimes she rambles and gets sidetracked, but that is a privilege that a woman of 87 has earned by sheer longevity, other times your graps of Spanish fails you and you lose the thread of what she is saying. (...) 041101 ... birdmad After a while you finish your errands and then you go back home, watch a little TV and then get your stuff packed in and go to work. The rest of the night and the following weeks are pretty much the same with little variation. You occasionally hang out with Jared and Colin on the weekends, but you have ben losing some of your taste for going clubbing on Friday and sturday nights. Teri has neither called you since you've been back nor has she returned the two or three messages you've left on her machine. You can't figure out what that is about and if she isn't going to answer you than you might as well just give up on her. The only thing that does seem to change as the weeks progress is that your mom is slowly becoming weaker and more tired and drawn as time slips by. You offload your car for something newer, a red 1990 Nissan Sentra on which you are getting just slightly fucked on the monthly payments as you feared you might. Teh car is neither worth anything newar what you are paying per month nor what you are having to pay in the insurance costs but it is still just barely within the realm of the affordable. Looking at the slow erosion of your savings as time passes, between a few home repairs, a few last repairs on the Escort to make it saleable and a few other minor emergencies in the family that have required you to occasionally loan out money, you start wishing to yourself that you hadn't washed your hands of the majority of Tripod Billy's cash pile. "Crime doesn't pay?" you umble to yourself after mailing off a round of bills, "Bullshit. crime pays pretty goddamn well, if you ask me." Gradually more medicated than she ws at the start of the summer, your mother is asleep and dopesn't hear you grumbling. You are grateful in some guilt-ridden way for the small favor that she will die most likely without ever having to learn about what a monster you have sometimes been when not firmly tucked under her wing. She is too tired and weak to go to Church very often anymore and with you it is just as well because it si all you can do anymore not to stare holes through the rotating line up of priests who have been saying mass since fatehr Jim was re-assigned and the Diocese felt that it was no longer in their interests to keep a regular priest in your parish. You watch your mother deteriorate and you feel a raging contempt toward God even though she clings to her faith. Frankly, you wonder how. Kind of ironic, isn't it, ALex? You wonder how your mother can keep her faith even as she is ravaged by terminal disease, though there ahve been asny number of times when you have clung to your own little hopes and delusions even when the reality of the situation was that you were pretty well screwed, and not necessarily in the way you might prefer to be. Don't knock the sad comfort of self-deception, man. Shit, some days, if you haven't noticed, it's all YOU'RE cruising on. By the time September comes along, there is always someone staying with you and your mom, mostly Delia. A week or so into the month, the family agrees that perhaps it is for the best if your mom stays at Delia's since, with everyone;s working hours in that house, there is always someone there to take care of her. You had tried to negotiate some family leave time from work, but the personnel office has been dragging their feet about it and so you agree to it, stopping by every morning after work before you go home to see her. The first night in the house by yourself knowing that she will not be back is strange and empty. You have had the house to yourself for short periods of time before, but this one is for good and you know it. You want to burst into tears, but they are interrupted before they well up by this collapsing black numbness that leaves you sitting on the couch in the dark on the Sunday afternoon after it happens. Your attitude blackens and it is getting harder to hide it. Jamal at work makes an iognorant remark at you, and you level him with one punch. It is only because the boss knows the score that he doesn't fire you on the spot, even though it would be well within the bounds of company policy for him to do so. Colin explains the situation to Jamal, who doesn't apologize for pushing your buttons, but behaves more politely around you and figures out that just right now, pissing you off is not any sort of good idea. For the next couple of weeks, you work faster and harder than you have in quite some time, occasionally finishing whole batches of product by yourself in a singkle night. When you aren't at work or visiting your mom at Delia's, you keep a slight distance from the rest of the family because they know what you know about what's coming and everyone else's collective grief is too much for you to absorb without wanting to crash your car into something afterwards. When the priest form Delia's church comes one afternoon to bring Communion, you walk outside into the backyard and light up one of the black-wrappered clove cigarettes that you have started smoking again lately. It is less noticed that you have walked out on the arrival of the priest than it is that you are smoking openly in front of the rest of the family for the first time. Time is getting short, Alex, and more and more, you are a walking vacancy where there used to be a soul. 041103 what's it to you? who go blather from