Read Online The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke - Free Book Online Page B

me. I hadn’t seen it as a choice. A few days before Thanksgiving, I found out that my divorce had been finalized; holding the official certificate, which had arrived in the mail, I went heavy with loneliness. I quickly filed it in a manila folder, so I didn’t have to look at it. I was counting the days until my mother would have the radiation surgery on her brain. I already missed her. I was irrevocably aware that the Person Who Loved Me Most in the World was about to be dead.
    Of course, I had my father, too. But fathers love in different ways than mothers do.
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    O N THANKSGIVING DAY, I drove to my parents’, where we were all going to have dinner with Diana and her husband, Josh, and their three boys. I had my mother’s car, which I’d borrowed a week earlier, to help me get to and from Connecticut. I was happy to be driving home, but I was wrung out. My relationship had come to a crashing halt. The night before, the man I was dating had called one final time, and we had fought, and he had enumerated my failings, and I had been up all night examining my motives. And because I had indeed told lies, and had kept secrets, I found truth in many of his accusations. I was losing my grip. My mother was dying, and the only person I wanted to talk to about my despair over it was her .
    After a long trip, I opened the door to the smell of turkey and pie and thought: I still have a home. “Hello!” I cried out. Inside, Diana and my mother were chopping vegetables. For a moment everything seemed comfortingly familiar.
    But my mother’s hair was messy and tangled and she waved hello absently. She was shuffling oddly, perhaps because of the pain from the tumors in her spine, and her pants drooped around her hips. When I gave her a kiss she only half responded, as if some part of her maternal brain were simply no longer present. My father, meanwhile, was stretched out on the couch, looking bleary-eyed and feverish. He didn’t even say hello. (The next day, we would discover that he had pneumonia and shingles, as if the universe wished to add insult to injury.)
    I busied myself unpacking groceries when I heard my mother shuffle toward me. “Meg,” she said, bitterly. “There’s bird shit on the car.” Diana shot me a glance—a sympathetic, oh-no glance.
    â€œOh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
    â€œThat is very bad for the car,” she said.
    â€œOK,” I said. “I’ll get it washed.”
    â€œIt eats away at the veneer, it’s very bad.”
    â€œMom!” I snapped, wheeling around. “I know. There is nothing I can do about it now—I’ll take it to be cleaned tomorrow.”
    She rolled her eyes and walked away. I joined Diana and, pretending nothing happened, began washing the apples for the pie; as we talked, my mother shuffled over to the kitchen sink. She picked up a sponge, dumped dish soap on it. Shuffle shuffle, toward the garage door. Diana raised an eyebrow.
    Exit cancer-riddled mother to wash car with sponge.
    It might have seemed amusing if it hadn’t been so damn awful.
    â€œMom!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”
    â€œI am cleaning the bird shit off the car,” she said acerbically. She meant clearly: You are favored no more, my daughter .
    I felt I was losing my mind.
    â€œDon’t do that,” I said. Shuffle shuffle.
    I followed her into the garage; she was bent over the car, fruitlessly swiping at the encrusted bird shit with the fucking sponge.
    â€œMom, don’t do that,” I snapped. “I’ll have it cleaned tomorrow.”
    Bending down, she muttered about the wax and the bird shit eating away at the wax; in confusion, I retreated to the kitchen. She came back in the house. “Are you upset with me?” she said. “Are you upset about something?”
    When I got angry as a kid I would hide in my bedroom and get under my quilt and cry till I