Jack pines crowded the property in all but a tiny sliver carved out a long time ago to make room for a house. The old pine plank cabin Mama lived in had always sat at an angle just right enough to hold off folding in a strong wind. The house was truly unfit for any sort of long-term living, but she’d been there most of my life. Boards once pitched dark had lightened with years and rotted with rainwater that held this place damp year-round. Transparent plastic I’d put over the windows to keep her from freezing a few winters back hung loose and torn from the frames, the plastic now opaque and dotted with mildew.
I wasn’t old enough to remember the day Daddy sent her there. The way he told it, she was stealing crank and spent most of her time climbing around the peter tree. So he sent her to this place. Loved her too much to give her nothing, but giving her anything at all squared things so he’d never have to love her again.
I don’t recall going over there much when I was a kid. I don’t remember seeing her but once or twice a year when those I’m-going-to-set-this-right moods hit her. It was always just me and Daddy, but I was older now, old enough to take the good and the bad for what it was worth and never any more. Besides, I just needed a place to kill a few hours and a safe spot to dodge the law while I got stoned.
The front screen door was propped open with a tin bucket half filled with blackened sand and smashed-out cigarette butts, and I could see straight through the house. I heard her before I saw her: yelling profanities, breathing heavy, snorting and sniffing. From the sounds of her, a line of dope had just lit her afire, and, while it may have seemed wild to anyone on the outside, I knew I was lucky to catch her at the beginning rather than the end.
She rammed her shoulder hard against the doorway into the kitchen as I came into the house. Her eyes wide, she seemed to look right through me. Her jaw racked and her teeth chomped on some imaginary thing she could never get chewed enough to swallow. When her eyes pulled back and settled onto me, she went to scratching her arms. “Where the hell did you come from?” She meant that question wholeheartedly, as if maybe I’d just manifested out of an Appalachian summer.
“Just pulled up. Needed a place to hide out for a bit.”
“Well, you’re just in time.”
“Just in time for what?”
“Just in time to help me find that goddamn lightbulb.” Her head yanked to the side, and she scurried into the back of the house, but I didn’t follow.
I plopped down on a ratty couch within falling distance from the front door, foam pushing through tears in the cushions. I reached into my pocket and took out what was left of a sack of weed, just shake now, but still enough to roll a pin. There was a half-empty pack of JOB rolling papers propped against a tarnished brass lamp on the side table. I pulled a paper from the sleeve, creased a fold in the 1.5, and dumped in buds that had been ground to powder. I was already twisting it tight and licking it sealed when Mama stumbled back into the front room.
“Jacob! Jacob, you not going to help me look?”
“Look for what?”
“The goddamn lightbulb, I done told you I need the goddamn lightbulb.”
I lounged back on the couch, struck a lighter to the end of the joint, pulled hard, and offered it toward her for a drag.
“Have you lost your ever-fucking mind, Jacob? You know I don’t smoke that shit and you can’t smoke it in here, you got to go outside if you’re going to be smoking that shit ’cause the last thing I need is the goddamn law.”
My mother was the definition of rode hard and put up wet. Her eyes were bulbous, her face sunken in, just a thin layer of skin stretched tight over bones. Hair that was thick and brown in old pictures strung greasy down her neck now. She was nothing like those pictures anymore, though she was exactly how I’d always remembered. She was absolutely pitiful. Before I could even respond, she was off again hunting that lightbulb, and I just loafed there and toked till a run crept down the seam of the joint. Licking a little spit onto the tip of my finger, I dabbed the fire, kept it burning even, and hit it again.
I slid my cell phone out of my pocket and checked to see if Maggie had written me back. She hadn’t. I knew she’d respond eventually because she always did, just never right away. Maggie hadn’t cut me out entirely, but there seemed to be few words left between us, or words too heavy for either of us to say. She loved me too much to let me go and I loved her too much to drag her down. That type of love doesn’t work. I recognized it before she did, I guess, so instead of hurting her for a lifetime, I broke her heart right then and there, and now she was gone. Probably in another world, I thought, and leaned back into the couch smoking on that joint to find a universe of my own.
I could hear Mama in the back cussing, drawers being ripped off rails and slamming against the floor, and only when there was nothing else to throw did she return. “Jacob, what the fuck did you do with that goddamn lightbulb?”
I laughed and coughed and spit on words that couldn’t make it out of my mouth quick enough to stop me from choking. “I didn’t do anything with a lightbulb.” She had me gassed, but there was always uneasiness in laughing at my mother. Even while I was laughing, there was an uncomfortable feeling that settled in the pit of my stomach. She’d given birth to me. She was blood. Those types of things are deserving of love, and I did love her. Since I was a kid, I’d carried those few moments when she came around sober like treasure. I’d always hoped she’d become a real mother. But with time, I realized that someone can’t give what they don’t have. She was what she was, an addict, and there was nothing that could be said or done to change her. Death was her only savior.
Staring intensely, her eyelids seeming to roll back even further on eyes the size of taw marbles, she swept her hair back against her neck, trotted over to the couch, and cannonballed down beside me. “Give me a hit off that shit.”
“You didn’t even want me to smoke inside, and now you want to hit it?” I leaned away from her and took a few quick drags off the roach that was already burning my fingertips.
Her jaw still racked like she was trying to saw logs with dull teeth, and that serious look never left her face. “What the fuck do you mean, I didn’t want you smoking inside?”
“That’s what you said. You just told me I had to smoke outside.”
“I didn’t ever say that shit.” She scooted closer. “Give it here.”
I bent forward, rested my elbows on my knees, and held the roach out to her. Mama picked it from my fingers like some cranked-out chimp culling fleas, and I stood up from the couch to let her lay with it. She sucked back on what little bit of paper was left to burn, and all of a sudden that son of a bitch shot into her throat, and she went to choking till I was sure her eyeballs were going to pop out of her head. I couldn’t stop laughing and fell into the doorframe on my way to the bathroom while she coughed and gagged and tried her damnedest to curse me without enough air to start a blow-and-go.
There were tears streaming from my eyes by the time I made it in front of the bathroom mirror. I pulled a bottle of eyedrops out of my pocket, tilted my head back, squeezed a bead into each eye, and stared at my reflection. Seeing a smile spread across my face lumped that uneasy feeling into my throat. I shouldn’t have found how bad-off she was funny, but with a lifetime of disappointment, it was the only way to handle it. Smiles outweighed tears. Laughter outweighed pain.
I turned on the faucet and wiped a palm full of water across my face. Daddy needed to see me in an hour, and he never liked handling business when I was stoned. My green eyes began to clear, and I brushed my thick brown hair with my wet hand. Daddy never cared that I smoked. He didn’t care that I popped pills. He drank and smoked and was known to eat a few painkillers when the mood hit him. The only drug off-limits was crank, and seeing what it’d done to my own mother, I’d never wanted anything to do with it anyways. But the line of work my father ran demanded a clear head, so I had to appear collected.
When I headed into the main room, Mama was in the kitchen, one foot standing in the seat of a dining room chair, the other foot propped up onto the back. She leaned out over the table to get her hands on the lightbulb, her head constantly shaking hair away as she twisted the bulb free. Her shirt lifted up and her belly hung out: loose skin, no meat, and stretch marks still visible after all these years from where she’d carried me. Just when I was about to speak, the chair rocked and she slapped down out of the air onto the floor. Her head smacked the laminate tile hard, but it didn’t faze her. She popped up to her knees and scanned the room, her jaw still chewing, and I didn’t say a word. I left her there on the floor like a bad joke, a bad joke that’s really not funny at all, but that a man is forced to chuckle through until the awkwardness fades.