I TAKE THE MONEY from the floorboards and lay it out in rows. There are piles of hundreds and twenties. I separate them and begin counting. My mother was a rich woman. Rich by anyone’s standards in the Bone. Seventy thousand dollars. Her whole life amounted to a rickety old house, a daughter she never spoke to, and seventy thousand dollars.
“Bravo Mama,” I say. I lean against my bedroom wall and stare at the money for a long time. Then I gather it all up and wrap it in her red bathrobe before stuffing it back under the floorboards.
Two gentlemen callers come that night. I send them away. Tell them my mama’s dead, and unless they have a taste for necrophilia, they need to get the fuck off my porch. The news haunts them. I see it in the whites of their eyes. They’ll be in a stupor tonight, going home to their wives with the knowledge that their whore is dead. Their wives will ask them if they’re okay, and they’ll make up some excuse about not feeling well, retreating to their offices or their bedrooms to ponder over my mother’s death.
The next morning I dress in one of her old flannel shirts. I’m shorter than she was, so it hangs mid-thigh like a dress. I pull on her Docs and catch the bus to the funeral home to pay for her cremation. I pay with a wad of twenties, and the lady behind the desk looks at me like I stole it.
“What?” I say. “Haven’t you seen a working girl’s money before?”
Her eyes get big, but she reaches for the money with her age-spotted hands and stashes it somewhere I can’t see. I can hear the clicks of disapproval she makes in the back of her throat.
“You get to choose her urn,” she says, motioning to a shelf behind her. There are prices printed on paper and taped beneath each jar.
“I don’t want her ashes,” I say quickly. The thought of being in charge of her burned remains alarms me. Too great a responsibility.
“Well, neither do we,” says the lady. “You’re the next of kin. Unless you want to pay monthly for a storage cubby, you have to take the ashes with you.” I sigh, glance at the urns again. I can’t just leave her here.
“The green one,” I say. It reminds me of the leaves she used to touch, before she became someone else.
The leaves and their varicose veins…
I squeeze her voice out of my brain.
“$78.21,” she says. I hand her all dollar bills this time. I wander around after that, searching the eyes of the people I pass, looking for answers.
When it starts to rain, I catch the bus that Nevaeh and I used to ride together, and sit in the back staring out the window. I’m not ready to go back to the eating house and all of her ghosts—the bodies of babies and mothers filling her mouth. The bus driver asks me to leave or pay more fare when it gets dark. I haven’t brought any more money, so I reluctantly climb off. I walk slowly, dread building.
When I get back, it’s dark. Judah is waiting on the sidewalk in front of the house, his chair angled so he can see me walking down the scythe of Wessex.
“Nice legs,” he says. I look down at my legs—so white they’re practically glowing in the dark. I don’t usually show them. Suddenly I’m self-conscious.
“You know…” he says, sensing my discomfort. “Because they work and all…”
I shake my head. “So inappropriate,” I say.
“Yeah, I guess…” He rubs the back of his head, his mouth cocked up on one side. It looks like he’s getting ready to say something that’s going to make both of us uncomfortable.
“So, your mom—” he begins.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I start walking past him, up the sidewalk to the front door.
“First Neveah, now your mom,” he calls after me. I stop, but don’t turn around.
‘Yeah?”
“It’s just strange,” he says. “Like death is everywhere.”
I don’t know what he’s getting at. I don’t like the tone of his voice, the way I can feel his eyes on my spine.
“Night, Margo.” I hear the wheels of his chair rolling over the sidewalk, back up the scythe.
Damn the Bone, damn my mother, damn Judah.
Three hundred dollars a night, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. She never left the house, never bought anything. Had she purposefully left the seventy thousand under my floor for me? Fuck her for not leaving a letter. You’d think if you ignored your kid for half her life, then overdosed, knowing she was the only one who would find you, you’d at least have the decency to leave her a note. I go to her room, find stationery in her nightstand, with birds of paradise in the margins. It is so old, the paper brittle and yellowing, water stained in some parts, like she’d been crying over the pages. I sit down at the kitchen table to write her suicide note.
Dear Margo,
I’m sorry. First, for just ceasing to be your mom when you were eight and needed me most.
I saw you desperately trying to get my attention, and I just didn’t know how to come out of the fog I was in … for ten years. I don’t know if you’ve ever kissed a boy, been in love, or what GPA you graduated high school with. I guess I don’t even know if you graduated.
I’m a prostitute and a drug addict. My heart broke, first when my dad left, then your dad left, then when everything in life kept leaving. I should have fought harder for you.
You were worth the fight. I left you some money. Do something with it. Get out of the Bone!
Don’t look back, Margo. GO!
Mom
In reality, my mother would never have written such an encouraging note. Even before she changed, she was a pessimist. Back then she would have told me to pray, but now she would have told me that there was no God, and we were doomed. Might as well strap in for the long haul of a miserable life.
I go to her room. It smells thickly of blood and flowers, and it makes me dizzy. There are dark stains on the wood where their bodies lay. They’ll never come out, no matter how hard I scrub them; they’ve simply been absorbed into the eating house. I shiver. She was so hungry; she took two lives this time.
There is a box in the corner, the one the mailman delivered just a few days ago. It feels like more time has passed between then and now. I open it and look inside, but it’s empty. I start putting her things inside of it. Bottles, books, slippers. I strip her bed and take down the pictures from the walls. Then I carry her things to the attic. The place where she stored her own mother’s things when she died. The Irony. An attic full of dead mother things. I laugh, but it gets stuck in my throat, and I end up crying instead. It’s just me and the eating house now.