Serving Spoon

Adults look silly eating watermelon. But aren't funeral receptions inherently awkward? Fretful.

Surely Aunt Rachel should have cut them into sticks (more dignified) rather than triangles. Instead of a feel-good summer snack, there's an air of humiliation in dripping rinds and wet chins. She should have known better.

"Maryann!" Mom Fawn lumbers closer to me - a gargantuan hand-beaded necklace propped high on her chest. Her tanned wrists jingle with Pandora charm bracelets. One of the little silver icons - a teapot - drags lightly against my shoulder, accompanied by a squeeze for moral support.

"You look pale, dear. Are you eating anything or just serving the masses?"

I don't attempt to answer because Fawn is already fixing a plate. She's been generously nudging me around for as long as I can remember. Holding my head steady, spoon-feeding reality and distraction in equal doses to make growing up a little more palatable.

Fawn is not actually my mother. Though, she filled the essential, doting, instructive role most daughters expect. She taught me how to French braid and how to use a tampon. She picked out my first bra and, better yet, she let me buy lace underwear at the rebellious age of 13. Dad never found out.

In our world of shared secrets, there was boy talk and Reiki healing in her sun room, thrift shopping and endless event planning in the center of town. Years and years of what I'd now call mentorship rather than mothering. What's the difference, anyways?

Regardless of relation, half the town called Fawn "Mom" as you would "Doctor" or "Mayor." However, I always had a special place stolen away from her itinerary. Fawn's time was precious, and I was allowed to soak up more of it than anyone else. I was family, after all.

She went through great care to make me feel special. Even her pink-themed guest room was fitted for me from infancy. All quilts and dreamcatchers and gemstones. When I slept over, she'd play records with all the windows open late into the night.

//

Fawn's powerful status in Earlville was only eclipsed by that of my late father: James Covino Morah. He and Fawn were cousins raised side by side along Craine Lake in Central New York.

My father's older sister, Rachel, was the odd girl out in their childhood wonderland. Replaced, in a way. Contempt for their sibling-esque bond did anything but fizzle out over the years. Rachel was always surly and cold toward the inseparable pair (and later, to me).

A competitive academic, she completed her undergrad at Columbia, followed by nursing school in Rhode Island. Now she only returned home when called. Like a beaten dog with a skewed sense of loyalty, Rachel rolled into town in her white Ford Explorer to make her baby brother's funeral. She hugged me loosely on the doorstep of Dad's cape - the only house in town with a red door.

"Smells like rot," she said, glancing down the drive toward Main Street. Then, she went inside and cut up the watermelon wrong.

//

In the shadow of my father and Mom Fawn, I spent the last 30 years coasting on a pleasant wave of residual fame. Allowed to feel well-known and well-loved in small-town America without all the pressure and expectation.

"Fawn has this incomparable gift of making everyone she encounters feel young," Dad once said. "Mine is to make everyone feel old."

You make me feel both, I thought, as I held his hand and watched the IV drip.

//

Fawn had made a business out of helping sick women throughout the Northeast. I say 'business' because of the breadth of her services and operation. She was many things to many people: a doula, an herbalist, an LPC, an energy healer. Despite lacking a concrete professional title, she was, to all the town, deemed indispensable. The guiding light for a life well lived.

As a child, I sat on a step ladder in her kitchen for a free haircut every three months and marveled at her well-stocked cabinet of oils, herbs, and tonics. She had remedies for every minor malady of my formative years. Poultices for my phlegmy winter cough, teas for period cramps, castor oil for nasty bug bites.

There was this radiant trustworthiness to Mom Fawn and her healing ways - an aura of wisdom - that always made me a willing subject. At least, until I miscarried at 19.

To dispel small-town gossip, the pregnancy was a carefully concealed secret. My boyfriend at the time planned to go into the army, and we were going to give long-distance a try. Yet, my gut feeling insinuated that if I told him about a prospective child, he'd feel forced to stay. Things would spiral and sputter and stagnate.

And so, it was solely in Fawn that I confided that summer of 2009. I broke down like a tired toddler on her front stoop - staring at a flattened, sun-bleached worm on the concrete. She ushered me inside like an elementary school teacher, smelling of rosemary from her garden.

In the coming weeks, my fraught emotional state prompted Fawn to prescribe me a slew of different herbal teas and tonics. The most significant of which was an unmarked bottle - a mixture made for purging "nervous energy," dispelling agitation and anxiety during a "confusing time."

She said to do a dropper-full in the evenings - that I could add it to a warm beverage if I preferred. "Whatever feels the most calming." Fawn believed very strongly in daily rituals - the power of mindful monotony.

Perhaps that's where I went wrong. I was operating mindlessly. With swollen eyes and belly, I downed a dropper of the bitter herbal tonic before bed for a string of days (I don't remember how many).

Then, I had a miscarriage. August 9th, that was. I would have named him/her Casey.

//

Cloud of grief aside, you can't help but question the timing of a loss like that. For centuries, women have been wracked by this culpability in housing creation and destruction. It's damning. All the self-contempt and anger. You're left bone tired and rotted.

When I went to confront Fawn, she was out on her porch, veiled by a brown sun hat. There were fresh blackberries in a ceramic bowl by her feet. She took one look at me and, reading my expression, brought her hat to her chest - as a pedestrian might do in recognition of a passing hearse. She generated a miraculous, bulbous tear that all but absolved my swirling terrible suspicions.

Still, a lingering accusation throbbed in my throat as my heart thudded. I felt wobbly on my feet under the August sun. Fawn all but caught me by the door.

"My Maryannie... My Mary," she sang. "Let's get you out of the heat."

//

"You got a little Rachel in you, kiddo," my Dad told me that fall when I stopped frequenting Fawn's house. "Your Aunt always sneered at that, you know, energy talk. Of course, she works in the medical field, and that's a whole world of its own. Very draining. Harsh."

My father would live another decade after his first heart attack. Where Fawn wanted to step in holistically, Aunt Rachel fought back. She insisted he work with a top cardiologist and made him promise to manage his medications with a licensed professional. The latter carried the implicit command to keep this far away from Fawn's hands.

Though jokingly skeptical of most "hippie shit," Dad still would let his dear cousin fuss over his 'energy.' She tried to convince him to start doing Qigong with her at least once a week. He may have obliged once, but it certainly didn't stick.

My dear father was, quite frankly, the poster child for heart disease. He got short of breath just keeping up a conversation - gut spilling out far over a well-worn belt buckle. He insisted on keeping Red Bulls stocked up in the fridge. Every Friday morning, he ate the same meat lovers' special with a large Pepsi at the diner, surrounded by his fishing buddies.

All the while, I never really grasped that my dad was indeed "sick." Whatever that means. I knew plenty of unhealthy people but never saw them keeling over in pain. If they faltered, they got better. If they fell down, they got back up.

Most of us inherit this very simple understanding of "sickness" as a state that you merely pass through every once and a while. Sick like the flu or strep. Chickenpox. But now I'm sick with grief, and I'm beginning to drop these naive associations. Sickness is more often silent and sinister, a hidden thing. A build-up of brushed-off unpleasantries. Sickness without recovery; the inescapable state of the human condition.

//

When I first started working at Earlville Grove in 2017, I still carried a rather childish and oversimplified outlook on health and disease. However, after hours of setting up Bingo and pushing wheelchairs for "sick" old people, I saw how fine the line was, how complicated human beings and their unruly bodies truly are.

As the Activities Director (I prefer the title Life Enrichment Director), I held a very profound responsibility: to provide distraction to the elderly until they died. A job I took very seriously. Seated balloon volleyball, craft night, themed movie showings, and guest musicians. I tried to one-up my efforts each year on the administration's ever-limited budget.

Yet, I realized that most of the time, my logistical feats were tempered by one universal demand: a listening ear. And so I committed to a steady stream of conversation at mealtimes and over hours of Rummikub or Scrabble.

When Dad and I used to drive by the Grove, he'd speak of it with a certain sanctity. His grandfather had spent some years there. "Frankie's old stomping grounds," he'd chide. "Let me know if he's haunting the halls, and I'll come give him a proper talking to. Go toward the light, you old geezer!"

Dad was proud that the Grove was where I ended up, professionally speaking. It was worthy work to him, a career nestled deep into the heart of the town that loved him back. I surmise that my profession in senior living also shaped a more assuaging vision of his own future. One day, he'd move into the Grove in relief that his daughter would be a fixed part of the landscape. If he had lived, I would have hovered.

"You know, Mary, If you want to get to know a town, find the nearest nursing home, and strike up a conversation," he said to me over a decade ago when the possibility of my leaving home arose. I was a decent student - enough to have a glance at colleges and scholarships - and a heavy sort of excitement characterized my eighteenth birthday. It weighed on Dad, though, all those possibilities. How to support me, how to advise, how to let go.

The abyss of restless uncertainty that subsequently defined my 20s took a toll on us both, but, in the end, I remained by my father's side. I know self-proclaimed "free spirit" Fawn would have backed me if I had hopped in my car and driven off for some unknown adventure. Arizona. California. Washington.

Aunt Rachel, too, for that matter, would have supported me leaving Earlville and ditching Dad. She considered herself a small-town escapee, a self-made career woman. Sometimes, when she looked at me, I got the sense that we could be closer if I chose to emulate her, to trace her steps into middle-aged stability.

But I couldn't. Especially today. No heartwarming spirit of familial affection struck me, and I sat through the funeral service taciturn. The gulf between us remained as stark as ever. When forced, our awkward banter could only carry us so far - just about to the cusp of friendliness. We always worked better together in silence.

Though, I admit, it was rather lulling to spend the funeral reception noiselessly mirroring her motions - refilling coolers and collecting trash, shooing flies and stacking plates. We brushed elbows like line workers while Fawn did the socializing. I could hear her talking about Dad and the house, talking about me. I tried to act unaware of the pitying glances piercing my head as well as the frosty stares directed at my Aunt and her white knuckles, serving messy splatters of storebought pie.

//

When the house finally emptied, I spent a few hours moving furniture back into place, pretending I was setting up for the residents' pizza night up at the Grove. Then, I went to Fawn's to crash again.

It was oddly comforting to be back in her spare bedroom - which hadn't been updated since I was twelve. Things smelled mustier, sure, but Fawn still made the same orange poppyseed pancakes in the morning for us. She still poured tea into the same matching mugs with handpainted foxes on them.

"Don't let Rachel ransack the house," she said over shared sips of chamomile, "I have a feeling she'll want to strip that place clean. But it's your home, Maryann. She's just passing through."

"I won't let her touch anything important."

"And I'm more than happy to help, I really am. But that is at your discretion, dear. You're the inheritor. The heiress," she smiled, "of your father's life."

"I might wait a decade or two before I touch any of his things," I replied with squinted eyes, picturing my father's collection of local take-out menus and bulletin board of business cards - an homage to his wide circle of connections rather than for reference. He already knew everyone's phone number.

"Let me know what you find, though. Who knows what your father might have hidden away? I mean, you might even be able to scrounge up something on..." she paused, waiting for me to bite, for permission to continue.

"On what?" I caved. My tongue was burnt.

Fawn's spine straightened. Three grey wisps of hair lingered by her damp forehead. August had returned with death-numbing heat.

"I think it's time we talk about your mother," she sighed, reaching into her pocket, "at least, before Rachel spins a tall tale on a touchy subject just for kicks."

Demurely, she pulled out a business card bearing an unfamiliar name:

Cassandra (Sandy) Waclawski / psychic medium / Bristol, Vermont.

Once free from Fawn's fingers, the ceiling fan sent the cardstock skidding into the center of her yellow kitchen floor. I approached it apprehensively, as you would a foreign insect about to take flight.