Ma didn’t go through chemo, but she chopped her hair short anyway because it kept getting matted against her pillow with all the time she was spending in bed. A pixie cut, is what she wanted. We used the kitchen scissors and the blank TV screen as a mirror. I eyeballed the length.
Her hair wasn’t like mine. Or, it looked like mine, almost exactly the same, but sift the strands through your fingers and the difference was obvious. Her hair was thin, wiry like string. Mine was thick and soft as fur. I always wondered if I got the texture from my father.
I said to her, Can I ask you something, Ma?
You just did.
The doctor said you don’t have much longer.
He’s said that a hundred times. I snipped, and a pat of blond fell to the floor. We both looked down at it. A broken clock might be right twice a day, bunny, but it’s wrong the other thousand minutes. Ma had never had short hair because men liked long hair. She sighed. I’m never getting laid again, she said.
The doctor said you’re running out of time.
These aren’t questions, bunny.
I don’t have any family, I said. Once you’re gone, I’ll have no one.
You’ll have Lacey.
Do you know who my dad is? Or do you know any of my grandparents? Are any of them still alive? Do I have anyone out there?
Ma took the scissors from my hand and started chopping, haphazardly, wild. Chunks of hair fell to the floor at random, all different lengths. Stop, I said, but she didn’t. She cut her hair all the way to her head, twice she nicked her scalp with the blades, twice she yelped before continuing to hack, hack, hack.
* * *
Hobbes didn’t have to pay Ma out when they fired her. They couldn’t have her working there bald, is what they told her. It was freaking the customers out. A bald lady in cosmetics. Some clause in our contract meant that they could fire us willy-nilly, no further obligation.
They did, in their defense, send a balloon to our house. There was a knock on our door, and by the time we got to it, the delivery person had gone. The balloon was full of helium, and it read Our Condolences in golden cursive. Thoughts and prayers.
We inhaled the helium, glug by glug, and took turns prank-calling the Hobbes service desk and laughing and laughing. Is your refrigerator running? Ma said in a squeak.
Have you checked on the children? I said.
I’m dying of cancer, she said.
* * *
She kept note of the commercials that promised to help her. A drug that claimed to soothe the burn of radiation. A herbal alternative to chemo. A doctor who thought he’d found the cure for cancer in the blood of the Amazon milk frog of the Maracanã River in Brazil. She didn’t seem to want to buy any of the items on the list, just wanted to note them. To want to want them.
Once, I said, Ma, we could see how much that herbal alternative costs, at least?
She said, I’m not paying for a bunch of hippies to give me a hundred-dollar yeast infection.
Then she doubled over in pain, and I rubbed her back in circles.
* * *
By the end of it, Ma was spending her days crying. I’d never really seen her cry. Not when one of her manfriends started shouting, nor when they started shoving. Not during The Notebook or Titanic or Sleepless in Seattle. Not when we couldn’t afford electricity for the month, nor when our dog, Lady, who we’d had for ten years, finally died.
Lady had been lying on the floor, eyes drooping, panting and wheezing, and Ma had said, It’s time.
I looked at Ma. Ma loved Lady.
Go get the shovel, she said.
What?
Ma sighed and took the wet dish towel from the shoulder of the kitchen sink. She wiped at her day’s makeup. She called it taking off her face, that smearing of lipstick into a red stain.
She’s in pain, bunny, said Ma. It’s the kindest thing we can do.
Kill her?
That’s right.
How is killing her kind?
Death is kind, bunny. It’s life that hurts like a bitch.
I got the shovel from the garage and handed it to her and closed my eyes. Just that week, the doctor had told us Ma was deteriorating quickly and he recommended stopping all treatment and just keeping her as comfortable as possible until—
I’d said no. I’d said we had to keep trying. But the doctor insisted and I’d relented and I couldn’t help but imagine myself with that shovel, raising it over Ma’s head as she lay on the floor, curled like Lady, waiting for the fall.
Ma led Lady outside, and the dog sat, obedient, then lay down. She looked up at Ma.
What if she doesn’t want to die, yet? I said.
Death’s the one thing you don’t get to say no to, bunny, said Ma. Death’s the one thing that has nothing to do with consent.
Ma lifted the shovel and swung it back down with such strength she could have been healthy. The sound was a dull thunk.
We buried Lady beneath our old apple tree with the very same shovel. I cried, Ma didn’t. She plucked an apple from a low-hanging branch and took a bite. They’re ripe, she said.
I found one that had fallen, picked it up. Right before I bit into its skin, I saw the little brown hole, the rot, the apple infested, being eaten alive from the inside out.
* * *
When the doctors gave Ma just days to live, she didn’t cry then, either. She held onto hope for a long time. In Grey’s Anatomy, she explained, patients often make unexpected recoveries. A kid covered in a thick layer of cement is excavated and lives. A woman with an inoperable tumor is dismantled like a doll and put back together, sans cancer. But doctors in real life were no Meredith Greys. They told Ma she was going to die, and their job was merely to monitor her as it happened.
She didn’t cry when they told her she was basically dead, but when we got home from the hospital, she flipped on the television to an infomercial for an electric dog collar. A white poodle galloped around a yard, panting with joy, then the dog stopped suddenly, leaped backward, shook his whole body to erase the electricity, and turned and ran in the other direction. Call now for a ten percent discount, the voiceover told us. Ma broke. She howled until she gasped for air. Grief always catches up to you.
* * *
The night she died, I’d made good money out of a bachelor party and I was giddy with cash and I picked up a container of fried rice from the Chinese restaurant that discounted its prices an hour before closing. When I got home, the house was dark and silent, and I knew what’d happened even before I saw the body. No room containing my ma had ever been quiet. But that night, the air was still as a corpse.