Nonfiction

At last call, she leaned over. I regret leaving, she said. I always have. You nodded, vision blurring with tears, scribbling ink on a napkin: Maybe leaving is a kind of loving.

He hadn’t needed to handcuff her, but he wouldn’t have been able to anyway: the cuffs would have slipped over her hands.

“It’s Gram, Bud. Gram died.” 

His eyes open. He looks into me.

“You did so good, Mom.”

I think part of what I liked about math was simply that it seemed like a sure thing, as sure as a thing could be, a solid mass of true and rigorous and irreproachable knowledge that I could grab like a pole on a bus.

I felt as if I were glimpsing the making of a movie I had seen a thousand times before—the boom microphone crowding into the frame for an instant, the wide canvas of blue sky suddenly wheeled into the wings. I peered through the doorway to the living room and found Mario seated on his reclining chair, absorbed in the copy of Clarín splayed before him, his glasses clinging to the tip of his nose.

Oh, we went to the movies every Saturday afternoon and devoured Modern Screen Magazine, but how could you compare a Debbie Reynolds with a Julie Harris? We belonged to the legitimate theater and we would never sell out. We were Performing Artists.

What bubbles there were that floated and shimmered wet and oily and then blipped out of existence under the funeral parlor’s fluorescent lights were really quite something to behold. I’m even tempted to go for the cliché here and say you couldn’t have written it better, so well did the scene appear to encapsulate the end.

Somewhere there is a cat, a mother readying the world for the arrival of her babies. The kittens—slick and blind creatures—slip from her body. They blink and blink, little voices crooning high-pitched cries of I’m ready.