The daughter took care of her mother, as daughters are good to do. She had tended to her well-being for many years, driving her to doctor appointments, buying her beer and making sure it always stayed cold in a mini-fridge on the back porch, keeping her stocked with books of crossword puzzles. At night they watched westerns, movies and shows, until the mother, exhausted and under threat of becoming sober, dropped her head, her dentures hanging precariously from her slightly parted lips.
“They called them Indians dirt worshippers on the show there uh minute ago,” the mother said as she pulled a blanket around her shoulders. She had slept on the couch for the last three years though she had a bed in the guestroom. The daughter never asked why.
“Nowadays neither one’s right,” the daughter replied.
“Whatta ya mean, ain’t right, neither of ’em?”
“It’s affirmative action an’all that. You can’t call ’em Indians no more. And I ain’t never heard of dirt worshippers. That’s a new one on me.”
“Fine then,” the mother said.
In no time she was asleep with one foot sticking a touch off the side of the couch. The daughter turned the living room light off and muted the television. Her mother didn’t like a dark room. She woke a few times in the night and smoked on the back porch and would notice the television off then. The daughter would hear about it the next morning without fail.
“I don’t like uh dark, you know that.”
“I know it. I’m sorry. I forgot is all.”
“You know uh dark puts me in a bad awful place about Nancy,” the mother continued.
“I know it.” The daughter pulled a string of hairs through her fingers and twirled them, dropped it, and pulled again to keep twirling. She always did when her mother found her reasons to bring up Nancy. It would be a New York-minute until she disappeared into a conversation she had practically memorized since the death of her first daughter more than fifty years ago.
The daughter tried to divert her attention by suggesting they play horseshoes since it was pretty outside and shaded over in the back yard. She took a small cooler, lined the bottom with four cans of beer, and dumped a bag of ice over them. There was enough bologna left to make three sandwiches so she made those and put them on one plate covered with paper towels. She thought she might have a beer herself later. Normal people drank a beer now and then, too.
Because the mother was in her mid-seventies, the daughter placed the stakes much closer together than they usually did at the family reunion. Still, the mother had trouble heaving the horseshoes little more than half the distance. But she didn’t seem to mind. She tossed and then sat in her lawn chair to open a beer and light a cigarette, legs spread wide like a man would sit, elbows on her knees. The daughter opened a beer and sat on the ground beside her.
“What’re you doin’? Girl, are you drankin’?”
“Yes, I am, Alma. Other people drink a beer ever now and then, too.”
“What if I gotta go to the hospital? Whatta we do then? I can’t drive myself, doddamit.”
Since her last big sickness, the mother had started altering her swearing. She never admitted there might be growing thoughts of the afterlife, but she had stopped mentioning at least once a month that she didn’t want a preacher at her deathbed. Doddamnit was her go-to.
“Freddie is four houses down. I believe we’ll be okay.”
The mother seemed appeased, and the daughter was, for the first time that day, at ease. The moment she had opened the beer she made the decision to get as drunk as possible. She hadn’t done so in a long time. She needed a break from reality, a break from her mother.
~
Nancy was five when she died of leukemia. The daughter only knew her through stories from her brother. The year Nancy died, he said their mother often sent her with him to play outside. She was swollen, was his clearest memory. Her face, arms, and, most disturbingly, her stomach. Symptoms for leukemia wasn’t anything he later looked up. After Nancy died no one talked about her, he said. He had three or four memories, each one only slightly different than the other, he and Nancy walking around the yard, Nancy wobbling with her arms out, smiling.
The mother put Nancy’s dress in a trunk and then started drinking. She drank every day from then until now, leaning forward in her lawn chair, head dropped as usual, dentures escaping her mouth like bad memories.
~
The daughter managed to get a blanket over the mother. She took the opportunity while she was passed out to get her into bed. Having the living room to herself would be nice. She didn’t get as drunk as she had planned, but the buzz was nice, and she looked forward to watching something besides The Rifleman. She looked forward to not having conversations about who called Indians dirt worshippers and holding her tongue, desperate to say why couldn’t it be that people called people people. The mother spent her time in a world fifty years ago, before the daughter was born. Whatever memories she lived in, she lived there alone. Her brother didn’t seem to care, but he had been the one to tell her about the dress in the trunk. He had never seen it, he said. But the daughter liked to imagine he had seen it, that Nancy had worn it playing in the yard, that each day it grew tighter and tighter as Nancy’s body swelled to replace her spirit.
The bedroom was actually the mother’s, as was the house. She gave up the room when the daughter moved in a couple years earlier, but said nothing could be changed. Not so much as a pillow case. It didn’t bother the daughter. It was a place to sleep that was warm and dry and free.
The closet door was open. She quietly closed it and stepped into the kitchen, but turned back. She could hear a slow, rhythmic breathing from the bed. Still she coughed, testing how asleep the mother might be. She didn’t stir from the middle of the bed, flat on her back.
The daughter pulled the closet door open. Inside was dark enough she couldn’t see the shelves lining the top. She took the mother’s lighter from the kitchen table and returned, flicked it, and saw in the back left corner the trunk. She coughed again, louder this time. Still no movement, and the breathing had slowed, became louder.
It was lighter than she thought it would be, and getting it into the living room was easy. She began to suspect there might be nothing in the trunk other than her sister’s dress. She wasn’t surprised to find she was right.
It was a dazzling pink that hadn’t faded, a carnation grown in darkness, a pleated skirt with a nipped-in waistline and puffed sleeves with a print of lavender polka dots. She held it to her chest and went to the bathroom to stand at the mirror. At first, she couldn’t help but smile. Then, the longer she stood, the less she smiled. It seemed to recoil from her face, dismissive of how she wanted to feel.
Suddenly, it didn’t matter. Someone was in the living room. She knew it in that odd way you can sometimes feel a person staring at you, a weightiness across the shoulders. The daughter didn’t want to, but started through the house. At first she lowered the dress and then put it back against her chest before she turned the corner.
The mother sat on the couch with an unlit cigarette between her lips. The daughter stood silent. She pressed the dress more firmly against her chest and refused to look away. She hoped she gleamed, radiated. She hoped she was blinding and unmistakable. She puffed out her chest and pulled her shoulders back. She stood on tiptoe. She wanted to fill the doorway, balloon beyond the walls of the house and through the windows into the yard, one big hillside of bright pink and lavender, a shining world to adore, impossible to forget.
~
Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His novel, Oblivion Angels, is currently nominated for the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing and the Independent Fiction Alliance named his novel, Alice, a best book of the year. He lives in Pike County, Kentucky.