Free Heft by Liz Moore Page A

reaches up very slowly and pats my face, then tucks her hands under her head and sort of nestles into the carpet.
    Night, she says.
    I smell it on her. The bitter backtone of half-digested rum. The stink of never showering. When I am feeling gentle sometimes I cut her hair for her and her toenails.
    After a very long moment she opens one eye again and says, Kel, Kelly, do you love me? Do you love me, honey?
    No, I say, and she does a little pout.
    I think, You don’t love me. But it’s a lie I tell myself because in fact I know she does. Love me.
    What are you doing, why are you doing this, I say.
    She closes her eyes again. She goes, Aahh. As if she were going to sleep in a comfortable bed.
    I watch her for longer than normal, until my back starts to hurt from crouching, until my knees throb.
    Get up, I whisper. Get the fuck up the stairs. Go to bed.
    When I was a baby she held me and kept me alive. This I tell myself at times to stop me from hitting her squarely in the jaw.
    I try to lift her but she won’t be moved. She has gotten steadily heavier in the last two years and now she might outweigh me even though I’m tall and strong. She eats crap mostly, Cheez Doodles and chocolate, except when I force-feed her microwaved frozen vegetables that I buy from the store. Sometimes when she’s very bad I feed her like a baby.
    She’s balding. Her hair’s falling out. It began when I was ten and was one of the first things that prevented me from bringing people around her. I remember being in the car with her and the sun hitting her scalp and thinking Oh my God, my God, she’s actually bald. Small fuzzy tufts of hair stand up from the top of her head. The rest of it has gotten long and is stringy or frizzy depending on when she has washed it last. She dyes it red except when she forgets to, and then it’s gray and red. She has bad skin and what looks like a rash on her face. Almost always she has this. She puts one black line on each eyelid that’s meant to be at her eyelashes but it drifts upward at the edges. Shakily. All of my life she’s worn terrible clothes that no one has worn since the 80s and she has never let herself be helped in this department, believe me I have tried. And she has two tattoos on her, a honeybee on her arm and a fucking electric guitar, an electric guitar with a long and snakelike cord that goes down her back and comes over her shoulder. She wears a bathing suit—she used to wear a bathing suit—without a back to show it off. She loves her tattoos. She’s proud of them.
    I give her a nudge with my foot rougher than I should. Then I stomp up the stairs feeling every wooden thud completely. I go to my own room and toss myself onto my bed hoping it will break.
    I hear her wailing at me from downstairs. Keeeeeeel, she is saying, help me, help me.
    But I can’t.

• • •
    M onday morning I walk downstairs and she’s up. She’s sitting at the table. She’s bleary eyed and baggy faced. She’s wearing a giant T-shirt and that red bathrobe over it. The T-shirt says, IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE . The bathrobe is red plaid and smelly. She smells like rum and Coke and, deeper than that, underneath it someplace, she smells sour, like curdled milk, like something rotting. She’s smiling at me because she wants to apologize or because she can’t remember last night.
    Game day? she says.
    I’m wearing my regular clothes today and if she knew anything she would know that on game days we wear other shit to school, our uniforms, green and gold stripes on our faces.
    Not talking? she says. She has a half smile on as if to tell me she’s willing to be patient, that she’ll be very very patient with me.
    I think of saying, What’s in your mug?
    I don’t say it but I should. Someday I should say it. We’ve been pretending for several years that I don’t notice all the things that I notice.
    Good news, she says, Jan Howard called.
    Jan Howard is our social worker. It’s never good news