Chapter 4 - Brielle
I’ve entered the double-wide trailer, which has been my home since I was six, with a sense of dread. My Momma’s hospital bed barely fits into the back room, and ever since we had that installed everything else had to be moved around and put into every crevice throughout the house it would fit in. Clothes and boxes and shoes and magazines are everywhere. Now that Momma’s not working at the bar, I have to work twice as many hours just to make the same amount of money. And it’s never enough.
She has to take more and more pills, and the prices are constantly changing. Last month, one of her pills costs $40 for a week supply, and now it’s $325 for the same amount, without much of explanation as to why. I empty my pockets. The tips from the regulars after an 8-hour shift are a little over $12. I don’t blame them. They don’t have much to spare themselves. But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough.
I reach into my other pocket and pull out a crisp $100 bill. Wyatt left it before I could come back and stop him. He left me a $100 tip yesterday, too. I’m eternally grateful. These $200 will go a long way in paying this month’s rent and the rest of the bills. Might even let me get some of my mom’s jewelry from that pawn shop. No, I can’t think like that. Medication is more important than heirlooms.
“Is that you, Brielle?” I hate how faint my Momma’s voice is. She used to be such a tough and strong woman. She never took shit from anyone, especially not the men. I’m much shyer and unsure of myself than she is. Not as confident. Not as strong. But now, my Momma is weak and tired.
“Don’t come in yet,” she says when I approach the door.
“Momma, it’s okay,” I say through the door. I hear her moving around in the bed and making a ruckus. Things are falling over and a glass shatters.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she says. I’m about to open the door.
“Don’t you dare open that door, Brielle Elizabeth Cole.”
When Momma uses my full name, I know she really means it.
After a couple more minutes, she shouts,“Okay, I’m ready.”
I walk in. She’s looking into her compact and adjusting her wig. Her face is made up to the ten. Her eyebrows are penciled in, and she’s even wearing fake eyelashes. She finishes off the look with a generous slather of lipstick and smiles at me.
“You look beautiful,” I say trying to hold back tears.
“Oh, C’mon, don’t start now. If you cry, you’ll make me cry, and then all this work will go to hell.”
I smile. I love my Momma’s soft Southern accent. She was born in Kentucky and moved to California when she was sixteen with her first husband, but her accent never went away.
“What would you like for dinner?” I ask, trying to change the subject. Momma looks like she’s ready to go to a ball, but all we will be doing is sitting around the television with tray tables and eating whatever concoction I dream up.
“Macaroni and cheese?” she asks.
“Again?” We’ve had it for a week straight.
“I’m afraid it’s the only thing I can keep down nowadays.”
I nod and head to the kitchen. When I get the butter out, tears are flowing out of my eyes uncontrollably, and I can’t stop them.
Momma worked hard all of her life. She’s worked since the age of fourteen, and she deserves better than this. She’s only 44 years old, for goodness sake! And now she’s dying a slow and horrible death. She can’t eat anything without throwing it up again. The chemo is poisoning her, and we can’t even afford the poison anymore. And there’s nothing I can do to stop any of this.
A week later
I am driving home from work on a beautiful, sunny day, thinking that the sky is so blue and there’s not a single cloud as far as the eye can see. My legs are cramping up, and I can’t wait to get home to climb into bed. I’m not much of a morning person, and these morning shifts are killing me.
I worked from 4 a.m. until noon, and this eight-hour shift was harder than the busy evenings shifts any day. Barely anyone comes in after ten, and breakfast customers don’t like to tip as much as dinner customers.
I finally pull onto our street and see the house in the distance. The paint is peeling on the side, and the porch is cluttered with junk, which we no longer have room for inside the house. I need to take care of that one of these days. Just don’t know how or when. Paint costs money. Putting junk away doesn’t, but I don’t know where to put it. A shed is close to $1000, and I’m not going to have that kind of money anytime soon. Cardboard boxes? Perhaps. But boxes full of junk are easier to steal than loose junk.
The street leading up to the house isn’t really a street, but a dirt road. When we first moved here and Momma’s second husband, my father, was still around, we would wash the car every week. Within a day, the desert’s dry climate and our dirt road would deposit a thin layer of dust on the car, making the exercise fruitless. My father insisted that we had to do it because of pride, but he left by the time I turned eight and took the car. I guess his pride extended only to the car, not to his family. We didn’t have another car for more than a year after that.
I pull up to the chain link gate and get out. The neighbor’s pit bull and Rottweiler are already going nuts. They welcome me home from work multiple times a day with the excitement of a full marching band and always put a smile on my face.
“Hey, Bella. Boomer,” I wave to them. “I’ll be right over.”
I put the car in park, get out and pull the gate open. I get back in the car, park and head over to the dogs. The other neighbors are afraid of them, but they are the sweetest dogs I’ve ever met. I stick my hands through the chain link fence and pet them each on their heads.
After the brief hello, which is honestly the highlight of my day, I try to pull the gate closed before heading in. Usually, this is barely a process at all. But today, the wheels on the bottom, which squeak so loudly they send shivers up my spine, get stuck. When I pull them harder, they take off and run over my foot.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I curse hopping on one foot. “Dammit.”
The gate needs to be oiled, but I don’t really have any extra money to spend on WD-40 or the time to drive out to Home Depot to get it.
“Stupid gate!” I kick it, instead. Not a great solution.
I’m about to head inside when, out of the corner of my eye, I see the mail truck. I am about to turn back, but something keeps me there. Getting the mail is not as exciting of an event as it once was. A long time ago, I remembered looking forward to getting cards in the mail from my grandparents and tearing through envelopes with the words “Sweepstakes” and “Winner” on the cover. Nowadays, the only thing that comes in the mail is medical bills.
Despite that, something is holding me back. I wait for the mail truck to pull next to the house. The mailman is a sweet old man who has been delivering mail for close to thirty years or so. Whenever we are short on money, and I have to say that the check is in the mail, even though it isn’t, I’ve always felt bad about it, because I know that I’m blaming it on him.
“How’s your mom?” he asks. There’s no way to really answer that question. Throwing up every morning, afternoon, and night. Staying in bed all day long. People don’t want to hear these things.
“Hanging in there,” I say. It’s the best way to describe the teetering that she’s doing between this world and the next.
The mailman hands me a thick stack of envelopes. All are approximately the same size, and I know they’re all bills. I sigh and head to the house.
I don’t have any money to pay any of the bills. I will have to spend days in the coming week on the phone talking with various administrators at the hospital and Momma’s different doctors’ offices, all with the hopes of getting some of the bills reduced.
I toss the pile of bills on the kitchen table and open the refrigerator door looking for something to eat. I’ve been up since 3:30 a.m, so a simple grilled cheese sandwich is a no-brainer. While the skillet is heating up, I check on Momma, who’s fast asleep with the blinds still down.
When I sit down at the kitchen table, I reach for the remote to flip on the TV and accidentally knock the stack of bills onto the floor.
“Dammit,” I say. I gather all the envelopes, but one stands out. It’s different than the rest, and my name is written on it in a beautiful cursive script.
Ms. Brielle Elizabeth Cole
I look at the envelope closer. The paper is fancier than the others, and the stamp is unusual not the standard issue stamps that they sell at the post office. It has a detailed painting of a buffalo in a field of grass.
There’s no return address in the upper left-hand corner. When I turn the envelope around, I see that it’s from The Wild Foundation. Something about that name sounds familiar. Wild. What’s Wild? Is it Wild International, the pharmaceutical company?
Instead of tearing the envelope open like I usually do, I get a knife and carefully slice open the top.
Dear Ms. Brielle Elizabeth Cole,
It has come to our attention that your mother is gravely ill. Please use the following check to pay for her treatment.
There’s more to the letter, but that’s the only part I see. I read it over and over, not believing my eyes. I look into the envelope again and pull out a check.
$250,000
The check is for a quarter of a million dollars! I don’t believe it. This must be some sort of fake. A joke. But why? Who would do this? Why would someone play a joke on me like this?
When Momma wakes up, I show her the check and the letter.
“I’ve seen this on Dr. Phil, Brielle. Don’t cash it. It’s from some scammer. A love scam.”
“But you gotta be talking to someone for them to send you a check like this, don’t you?”
“Who have you been talking to?” she asks furrowing her brows.
“No one! All I do is go to work and take you to doctors appointments. I don’t have any time to waste talking to strangers.”
Momma tells me to throw the check away, but I don’t listen. Instead, I stay up late after my evening shift and go online. I look up Wild International. It’s a big pharmaceutical company, which has just gone public. It’s owned by some cute young guy named Gatsby Wild. Why the hell his parents would name him after someone so tragic is beyond me!
The next morning, I look up the Wild Foundation on my phone and call them. A pleasant young woman answers and confirms that the foundation does indeed exist, and they’re located in Los Angeles.
“So are you in the habit of mailing out large checks to strangers?” I ask. I don’t mean to be rude or direct, but I don’t know how else to go about finding out if this is indeed a real check.
“Ms. Cole, that’s primarily all we do,” she says.
I’m dumbfounded. I explain my situation to her and wait for her to laugh at me in my face. But she doesn’t.
“I can always check your name in our database, and make sure that this is a legitimate check that came from us.”
“Yes, please, do that.”
She asks me to wait on the phone and puts me on hold. I don’t wait too long, but the few minutes that do pass feels like it takes a century to expire.
I put on the teapot to pass the time. I also find one of the last tea bags at the back of the cupboard and make a note to buy more.
“Ms. Cole?” she says. I can barely hear her over the boiling water in the teapot, and I quickly shut it off.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“I’ve got good news for you. Your name is on the list of approved donations, and I also double checked whether a check was actually issued to you, and I see that it was issued five days ago.”
I can’t respond. I’ve lost the ability to speak.
“Ms. Cole? Are you there?” she asks. Louder this time.
“Yes, yes, I’m here,” I mumble. “So it’s okay? I can cash the check?”
“Yes, please do. And if the bank gives you any trouble, just tell them to call this number.”
She dictates the number of her boss, and I write it down on the back of the envelope.
When I get off the phone, I don’t know if I’m going to cry or laugh. I feel like I could do either. Tears start streaming down my face, and I call for Momma. She’s still asleep, but I don’t care. We have the money to pay for her treatment. Whatever treatment she needs. My whole body begins to shake, and both my hands and feet go numb.
“Oh my god, Brielle? What’s wrong?” Momma comes out of her room and slowly makes her way to me.
“What happened? What’s wrong?”
She wraps her arms around me and begins to rock me from side to side. Tears continue to run down my face, but they are not tears of sorrow. I just can’t catch my breath long enough to tell her.
“It’s going to be okay, baby girl. Whatever it is, we’ll get through it.”
Suddenly, I start to laugh. “Yes, yes, it is,” I say hugging her back. “It’s going to be more than okay, Momma.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I just got off the phone with the Wild Foundation, and the check’s legit. They’re paying for your treatment. You’re going to get some real help now, Momma. And we’re going to be okay.”
“What are you talking about?” Momma stares at me. I explain, but she just keeps asking me that same question over and over again. Eventually, it sinks in, and I get up and jump around the house shaking it so hard it feels like it’s going to fall over. Momma’s too weak to jump around, but she does nod along.