You Can Say You Knew Me When Read Free Page A

no. ” I was glad we’d left AJ behind with Nana.
    I straggled alongside Deirdre, who commandeered a shopping cart so large an average supermarket cart could have fit inside it. She loaded it up with restaurant-size packs of paper products, cases of carbonated soda, loaves of bread the sizes of roasting pans, boxes of shrink-wrapped guacamole, gallon jars of salsa and all manner of mass-produced snacks, each labeled to sound upscale: Mesquite Chips, Fancy Cookies, Four Cheese Tuscan Pizza.
    “Could we maybe buy something besides junk food?” I finally asked, watching another chunky ten-year-old gobble up samples of Turkey Jerky.
    “It’s just for people to nibble. Nana’s making a roast.” She handed me a laundry-detergent-size box of Gourmet Party Mix.
    “Do you even know what’s in this?”
    “AJ loves it. You gonna tell me how to feed my son?”
    I put on a Big Savers mom-voice and wagged my finger: “Deirdre, I said no. ”
    She paused a moment. Was I joking? Was this worth a fight? “Some fruit would be good,” she said finally, returning the offending snack food to the mile-high shelves.
     
     
    The quiet of the house started to spook me. I had moved my bags into a small room at the end of the upstairs hall that had once been where our mother sewed the clothes Dee and I wore as kids. I pictured Mom staring out the window into the backyard—the weedy lawn, overgrown bushes and tall evergreens—guiding inexpensive poly-cotton fabrics under the needle as she hummed one of the German songs of her childhood. Her Singer sewing machine, with its varnished wood table and brown-plastic foot pedal, was long gone, probably donated to the Salvation Army after her death.
    My mother’s death had been the inverse of my father’s: quick, shocking, unbearable. She’d gone into the hospital suffering sudden, debilitating chest pain and died a day later, after twelve hours on the operating table. The postmortem diagnosis blamed a defective heart valve that had gotten infected, flooding her bloodstream with toxic microorganisms. My father spent the rest of his life suing the hospital and various members of its staff for malpractice. He became a self-taught medical expert, obsessed with figuring out what had gone wrong in surgery, sure that this could have, should have, been averted, and it had made him as crazy as any single-minded crusader.
    I was seventeen when she died, a junior in high school, already a troublemaker—chain-smoking, breaking curfew, drinking until I puked. Mom’s death turned me into a sort of runaway, hopping between overnights with friends, piling up unexplained absences, infuriating my father. I could no longer stand to be in this house, which was, back then, so clearly hers. Not only had she been home more than the rest of us—she worked part-time as a lab technician in the same hospital where she died—but she kept our family in equilibrium, mediating arguments, offering compromises. I’d been identified as the problem child a decade earlier, a smarty-pants always talking back, and at the same time a confrontation avoider, a late sleeper, a dawdler. My mother had patience for my restlessness. One day you’ll outgrow this, she’d say, her English so perfect it revealed no trace of her German upbringing. My father was the pessimist. A wiseass never wins . We were two stubborn red-haired males, always at odds—though before my mother died we at least had someone to run interference for us.
    This was the most I’d thought about her in years.
    This sewing room was now a guest room, big enough for only an end table, a twin bed and an enormous wicker planter sporting a dusty bouquet of fake peacock feathers. The wallpaper had a leafy green, vaguely jungly pattern; the bedspread, in contrast, was midnight blue and swirled with stars and galaxies—the same one beneath which I’d agitated as a teenager. The mattress might have been my teenage mattress, too. It was so broken-in I couldn’t get