“Six thousand dollars?”
“Afraid so,” Mom says. She sits at the kitchen table, her greasy, unwashed hair slicked back off her forehead, a vodka gimlet in her right hand.
Mom decided to sell the dealership three weeks after Dad was killed. Just like that. She called the University of Notre Dame athletic department to tell them we wouldn’t be renewing our season tickets for the ’93 season and then farmed out the remaining ’92 season tickets to Dad’s friends. Just like that. Next there was Halloween—Jack in a Batman costume sat in his Radio Flyer, while I pulled him around from house to house, crossing streets at inopportune times and taking shortcuts to avoid the questions and the compassion. Then there was Thanksgiving—we decided not to go to Mass, opting for ham instead of turkey, and forgetting to even watch football. Christmas came and went—Mom gave Dad’s golf clubs to Uncle Howard and mailed his Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum to Uncle Mitch without asking me if I wanted either of them, and everyone overbought for Jack as if to say, “Don’t worry kid, there’s still a Santa Claus.” After that, we had to resolve a dispute with the cell phone company over a four-hundred-dollar phone bill, because someone stealing your Dad’s phone off his still-warm corpse is not a legitimate excuse for unpaid service. And now, after three months of haggling with the insurance company, a goddamn six-thousand-dollar invoice from Wishard Hospital is what we’re left with.
Well, that and a fucking armed pedophile.
“Six grand for what? Dad was DOA. We’re paying the hospital six grand for managing to keep him dead?”
Mom takes another swig of her gimlet. The ice rattles in her glass. “It was for the blood, Hank.”
“His blood?”
“No, the hospital’s blood. They pumped something like forty pints into him. He was losing it as fast as they were putting it into him.”
She’s crying again. I sit down beside her. I hold her left hand. “It’s going to be okay, Mom.” For these last few months since Dad’s death it seems like these are the only words I’ve been saying to my mother. The thing is, I need more convincing than she does.
“That’s not what’s got me all torn up.” Mom squeezes my hand and then lets go. “This just came in the mail this morning.”
She hands me a seven-page stapled document. I read the first few lines aloud. “‘Indiana University School of Medicine Department of Pathology Forensic Division. Autopsy Report. Name, John H. Fitzpatrick. Age, forty-six years. Sex, male. Autopsy number nine-two-one-oh-two-three. Date: October two, nineteen ninety-two. Time: seven-thirty a.m.’”
I start flipping through the pages. “Don’t tell me you read all this.”
Mom nods. “Every word of it.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
I run my fingers over particular words and phrases as if to make them more real: “white blood-soaked underwear…khaki pants with blood smears…significant deforming blunt force injuries of the legs and right wrist…contusion and deep subcutaneous hemorrhage invests the tissues over the anterior pelvis, groin and upper thighs, encompassing an area of 13 x 8 inches…extensive lacerations and crush injuries of the mesentery and bowel…ruptured colon…lacerated liver…extensive retroperitoneal hemorrhage…ruptured bladder…multiple-fractured pelvis.”
I even pause at the descriptions that have nothing to do with his injuries, the ones that talk about Dad as if he was a healthy man, as if he has every reason to still be alive.
He had a great heart: “no softening and/or mottling of the myocardium due to recent myocardial infarction or necrosis…no myocardial fibrosis…no myocardial contusion…no defects in the arterial or ventricular septa.”
His vascular system was that of a man half his age: “no evidence of aneurism, coarctation, dissection, or laceration of the aorta…renal arteries are not stenotic.”
He had the lungs of a lifetime non-smoker: “trachea complete, without malformation, from the larynx to the carina…lungs and hilar nodes not significantly anthracotic and no emphysema.”
He wasn’t even close to brain-dead: “no hemorrhage in the scalp or galea…no evidence of herniation at any of the portals of the brain…no internal evidence of contusion, edema, hemorrhage, tumor, atrophy, infection, or infarction in the cerebrum, cerebellum and brainstem…craniocervical junction demonstrates a usual range of motion.”
His brain, his heart, his lungs, his “genitalia of a short foreskin male adult”—hell, even his prostate—were all given clean bills of health. Then why the fuck isn’t he here? Why isn’t Dad here to take Jack trick-or-treating or to tell Mom, “Debbie, nobody eats ham on Thanksgiving”?
“Well?” Mom takes the autopsy report, flips it face down on the table.
I back away from the table, a little teary eyed. I stand up, already trying to distance myself from the words. “That’s not something I care to ever read again.”
Mom smiles. A full-on fucking smile! She pours some Rose’s Lime Juice into the glass. She shakes the glass, mixing the lime juice with whatever is left of the vodka and melted ice mixture. “Two hundred and thirty-one.”
“What?”
“Your father’s weight.” Mom finishes her drink. “The autopsy report said he weighed two hundred and thirty-one pounds.” She opens the report face up again and turns to page two. She points to where it says, “The body is that of a well-developed white male adult appearing the stated age of 46 years. The body length is 72 inches and the body weight is 231 pounds. Scalp hair is gray.”
Mom is still smiling. In fact, she’s laughing.
“You okay?” I say.
She finishes off her gimlet. Still laughing. “That son of a bitch told me he was one ninety-five.”
I smile, laughing with her now. I see Dad eating his nightly chocolate-covered ice cream bar he’d have about an hour after dinner, even if he already had dessert. After he ate it, he’d lie on the couch for hours at a time until one of us got up, just so he could hand you his chewed-up ice cream stick and say, “You mind throwing that away for me, champ?”
I don’t second-guess this unexpected gift of humor. Given these last few months, laughing at my father’s autopsy makes sense. Mom finishes her gimlet. “I know why you were upset with Mitch.”
“You do?” I say.
“Sure I do. He slept around on Ophelia with other men. You and John knew, but you never told me.”
“Dad told me when we went to the Bahamas,” I say. “Nobody wanted you to know. It’s like we all unconsciously decided to protect Uncle Mitch, which if you ask me was disgusting.”
“We all make mistakes, Hank.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re defending him.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Mom says. “You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Kids coming into my office, struggling with their sexual identities. I feel sorry for him.”
“I feel like he’s a demon that needs to be exorcized from this fucking family.”
“Well, you’re going to need to confront those demons at some point.”
“Come again?”
“Uncle Mitch is moving back to Indiana. He’s looking at apartments in Empire Ridge.”