Studio Audience

As they lower your mother into the ground your attention is caught by something else. You shouldn’t allow this to happen. Your mother, barely elderly has died suddenly in a way that still leaves you with questions. But you are drawn to the sight of your wife at the corner of your eye. She stands beside you in a flowing gray dress that is almost nearly white. You watch her toss a rose onto your mother’s coffin with the same grace she does everything else. You can picture her pushing a metal cart down the aisles of the local grocery store wearing that same dress. You wonder why of all things she chose to wear it. Finally, you stop wondering only to begin fixating. On her, the dress, the open-toed heels, the fact that she despised your mother—the sharp manicured nails that pinch your palm when she reaches for your hand. You take her hand because you don’t want to offend her. While you were beside yourself with grief, your wife, who scares you sometimes, organized your mother’s funeral in a heartbeat.

You find yourself amongst her things— she had many things— in the bedroom you offered her when she first came to stay with you and your wife. You are surrounded on all sides by the fancy glasswork of expensive perfume bottles and designer handbags. The closet is filled with clothes still in their dry cleaner’s plastic and shoes still in their boxes. That and her other myriad trinkets are all tokens of the affection your father held for her before running off with some other woman— a shrine to the luxurious life she had been promised when she had first stepped foot on American soil. Of course, your gifts of birthday cards and off-brand clothing were no match for your mother’s exquisite taste, though that was all you could afford while still drowning in mortgage and student loan debt. Last year though— it’s a strange feeling thinking about a time when she was still around— after an unexpectedly generous bonus check, you had bought your mother a necklace from Tiffany’s— a store she only knew about through romance comedies. The necklace doesn’t sit on the dresser next to the other jewelry because your wife without the warning of a bout of anger, returned the item and handed you back the receipt the very same day.

Your wife sometimes scares you. If you had to explain to someone why that is you’d fail because your wife isn’t a scary woman. She is slender, with deep brown skin and the roundest eyes; not physically intimidating in the slightest. She is frugal, doesn’t need you to buy her nice things if it’ll set the two of you back on your financial goals. She’s as mild-mannered as you are, except of course when it came to your mother who was vain and opinionated and downright despicable when she wanted to be. Your wife didn’t grow up with the woman; never had the chance to build the immunity.

You know she’s coming by the slap of her bare feet against the wooden floors. When she appears in the doorway she’s already in her house clothes, the bottoms of her feet filthy.

“Maybe it’s time we start cleaning up,” she suggests.

You choke on nothing and then scowl. Your mother’s body isn’t even cold. Then, you remember. Just weeks before your mother’s arrival, your wife had gotten the idea to turn this place into a nursery for the child the two of you have yet to conceive.

Your wife doesn’t react to this. She rolls a bucket and a mop into the room and your muscles ease. Before your mother had died she had left quite the mess. The fever had caused her to throw up everything she ate. The very bed you sat in smelled of must from the nightly cold sweats. You rarely had the chance to console her let alone break out the Lysol. Your mother was horrible in her final days. You remember it happening so fast and all at once.

“I’ll start in the bathroom,” she nods. You nod back. You watch the soles of her feet lift and fall until she’s standing on the cold tiled floor of the adjoining bathroom. You’ve seen your wife go as far as the mailbox out on the sidewalk with bare feet. In your neighborhood, people don’t clean up after their dogs and you can have a scavenger hunt with the number of broken beer bottles just lying around. But that's not a fear your wife has and you’ve quit trying to talk her out of it a long ago. You worry less now about the feet and more about her lack of concern. You live in a shitty neighborhood where rodents who are tired of the dead grass in your yard borrow into your faulty walls. They drive your wife crazy with their rustling and scratching. That is until she finally catches them and crushes their warm fleshy bodies under those bare feet.

Your wife shuts the bathroom door.

There’s a little black book on the nightstand beside you. Letters in gold foil on its front cover read “Sunnyside Inn.” You needed to pacify the raging hurricane that was your mother. She was self-absorbed and ungrateful for the little you could offer her, but you knew ultimately she was only a hurt woman with no place to go; something your wife who is her parents’ pride and joy, could never understand. You had got into arranging for her to receive tickets to live shows in the city. It costed you so little since companies were desperate to fill the seats of their studio audience. Of course, you never told your mother this. For her, half of the fun of going to see a show once a week was believing it was some lavish and expensive activity she could brag about to her friends. For once in a long, while she was happy enough to stop insulting your wife, you had even caught them smiling at each other once. When you buy enough tickets, you get a complimentary stay at a hotel of your choice. Your mother had chosen the Sunnyside Inn and had come back the morning after with what you first thought was food poisoning. The stubborn woman your mother was, she didn’t let you take her to see a doctor. Your wife who was a nurse at the hospital up the road told you it didn’t seem emergent, and you believed her. After a few days, she seemed to be getting better anyways. When the fever came neither you nor your wife expected it. As her condition grew worse she spiraled into a dark and twisted version of herself that you’d never seen before. She lashed out at both of you, cursing your wife and calling you the spitting image of your wicked father. Her last words to you were that of pity for the child you and your wife would make together. After that, your wife who you hoped couldn’t possibly hate a woman while she was so deliriously ill promised you she’d take the reins. You were tired. All of this made you weak.

You let her.

If your wife was hurt by your mother’s words she didn’t show it. It was perhaps something she had learned from working in her field. Once patients become incredibly sick they stop being people, only a disturbance in the well-oiled machine that was any space your wife entered; their words and desires were meaningless. She was the tinkerer who fixed problems such as diseased people and uninvited vermin. And when patients died, which they sometimes did, at least then too, the disturbance had been dealt with.

You release a shaking breath. The smell of cleaning ammonia permeates the room, erasing the lingering scent of your mother. You leaf through the empty notebook absentmindedly until your eyes catch some scribbles of black ink against its white pages. You try to return to the note and as you do, water from under the bathroom door soaks the rug beneath your shoes. You move your feet and the water sloshes. You curse.

You call your wife but she doesn’t respond, not immediately.

“Come here,” she says. The last thing you want is to ruin your good shoes but there’s an urgency in her voice. You plod over the wet carpet and steady yourself when you reach the bathroom threshold. You open the door and find your wife, bare feet and all, standing in a pool near the toilet. The water is mostly clear but the sight still repulses you. She looks over her shoulder with concerned eyes and beckons you with the jerk of her head.

“Watch your step,” she adds.

You want to ask her what she needs. If it's about a clogged toilet she can certainly wait until you’re out of your dress suit. But she doesn’t seem worried about the water spilling from the toilet, rather she’s focused on something inside it. She plunges her arm into the bowl. Before you can ask her if she’s insane, she pulls something back up. She inspects it herself before turning around and showing it to you.

It’s a wad of cash. You don’t have any other words to describe it. You get closer to her, try not to slip on your ass and you take a closer look. It’s what, two, three dozen hundred dollar bills neatly rolled and secured by a rubber band. You don’t understand what you’re seeing.

“I think… she swallowed it.”

You gawk at your wife because what else can you really do?

Together you fish out twenty thousand dollars. To help dry out the money, you buy a second blow-drier— you can afford it and what you believe will be an outrageous electricity bill now. For days you had played with the idea that if your wife was a better nurse your mother would still be alive. Even worse you let yourself think that while you were away your wife let your mother die out of spite. You made yourself think that she was capable of such a thing and your stomach twists at the thought of your own disloyalty.

After you dry off the bills to a point a teller would accept them if not first give the wrinkled money a sidelong look, you and your wife retire to the living room couch. The money hangs on makeshift clotheslines all around you; you both smell like shit. Your wife reaches for the complimentary notebook from the Sunnyside Inn, open to the page you saw earlier with the scratches of your mother’s handwriting.

I find some money after the show, Andrew. I don’t know who it for or what it for. Was I supposed to ask these questions? I took it. No one can accuse me if they can’t find what been took. Not a word to that Nichelle of yours. Just between you and me.

Nichelle sighs, “Her stomach ruptured.” She isn’t speaking to you. She’s said this three times now, rolling the words over in her mind. “She was fighting an infection.” A realization. Something that she missed. You pull her closer so the top of her loc’d head is under your chin. You laugh. Nichelle’s body stiffens. She turns to face you as if to check whether something about this actually amuses you. You are amused. You know your mother better than anyone else. When she did this, she must have believed she was performing some great heroic act. Look at this amazing fearless thing that I have done for you, my son. You may now shower me in adoring praise! You hold your wife tightly and she offers you a careful grin. You sniffle as you laugh.