Read Online Pieces of My Mother by Melissa Cistaro - Free Book Online Page B

West Indies looks different now that I take a second look at it. The ocean light is dirty, and my mom’s smile and the drink with the pink umbrella are both empty. There is a quiet hum inside me, a familiar feeling of standing alone in a house and waiting for someone or something to walk back through the door.

THEN
terry, our ninth live-in
    We’ve gone through at least eight live-ins since our mom left. They come and go like stray cats that show up on the porch of our yellow house and then move on. Sometimes they say we are more like wild animals than children. Jamie and Eden are often sent home from school—when they aren’t ditching. There are broken bones, burned skin, fistfights, and fires to contend with while looking after us.
    Right now, we have Terry. She’s our ninth. She tells me ghost stories. Not the make-believe kind, but the true kind—stories of her real-life personal encounters with ghosts. She said that she felt the presence of a ghost in our house the first time she stepped into my dad’s attic bedroom, but she took the job as a live-in anyway because she sensed that it was a good spirit. I like the idea of good spirit living in our house.
    Terry is a grandma type who dyes her hair bright orange and layers her whole face with powder as thick and white as the Duncan Hines cake mix we used to eat beneath our old house. She’s got eyes that crinkle up when she smiles, and she smells like roses.
    One day, she sits me down at the dining-room table with a handful of pretzels and says, “Honey, you need to know the truth about ghosts.”
    â€œOkay,” I say.
    She raises her red eyebrows to the top of her forehead, stares into my eyes, and tells me the true story about the time she came home to find a lit cigarette smoking itself over her bed.
    â€œThere it was, puffing and smoking and waving up and down without a person attached to it. I knew right away that my mother was smoking that cigarette. It had a tiny stain of Coral Reef right on the tip, and that was her lipstick. She wore that coral even though it was too much orange for her pale skin. You see, she had been denied cigarettes during the last days of her life while lying on her deathbed. You’ve got to understand something about spirits, my dear Melissa. They show up to tell you things. And my mother was telling me that she would not be denied her smokes, even in the afterlife. So there she rested on my own bed that day, smoking the life right out of that cigarette.”
    I lick all the sandy salt off the last pretzel.
    â€œGod bless her, she was stubborn,” Terry continues. “I never touched one of those deadly sticks, and I’ll tell you something else. I’m going straight to heaven because I have seen enough ghosts in my life and I don’t want to end up in their gang.”
    When Terry stops talking, I don’t ask her what happened next. I think for a long time about that cigarette floating in the air with its lipstick tip.
    A few days later, Terry takes me with her to do our grocery shopping. I count stop signs as we drive and wonder if she’s going to let me pick out a root beer at the market. I am still embarrassed about peeing in the back of our station wagon on the last trip to the Mayfair market. I kept saying I had to go, but Jamie and Eden were fighting and yelling so much that Terry couldn’t hear me.
    We pass stop sign number four, and Terry suddenly hits the brakes hard and pulls over to the side of the road. The wagon swerves back and forth, tossing me against the door.
    â€œMy God, did you see that!” she exclaims. She makes a U-turn in the middle of Novato Boulevard and pulls into the dusty corner lot where the town nativity scene is set up every Christmas. Today, a dozen paintings in fancy frames are propped up against wood crates.
    â€œWould you look at that,” she says, transfixed. She stares out the window at a painting directly in front of