Such Good Care

My mom has never been one for much crying. Not that she never cries, she was a child once, and sometimes one of my aunts will get the sharp, gleeful look of a wronged sibling about to cash in on a little emotional revenge. And then they’ll excavate a time when Rozzy peed herself in line waiting to go swimming at summer camp and how there were already tears in her eyes before the puddle, obvious and unavoidable, started to form around her. My mom only ever says, I’ve asked you not to call me Rozzy.

Once, when I was about ten, I was watching Mom pour boiling hot water into an old, blue jar, carefully, slowly, over the bundle of peppermint tea packets like she always did, but the jar cracked and exploded, the water flung out, burning her belly and thighs. She wouldn’t let me in the kitchen to help. I have always been one for crying, so I stood in the doorway, sniffling, while she shed her shirt and pants so they wouldn’t cling to the burns, and then cleaned up the glass, and wiped up the water, and put another kettle on before she applied cold packs and burn cream. It’s not great, she said when I asked if it hurt badly, but I can manage it myself.

Even when her girlfriend, Liz, was blindsided by late-stage, metastasized colon cancer, Mom’s ruddy face was damp around the eyes, and for a while, she curved in on herself when she thought she was alone, but I never saw her weep openly. We fought about it: every room I passed through flooded. Don’t you even miss her? Did you even love her? Why am I so much sadder than you? Why am I the one crying myself sick?

When it came to Shadow, Mom tolerated her, but she was always Liz’s cat, and Mom’s love manifested in the same way as any other pet we’d had: food on time, checkups at the vet, tomato juice when it tried to fight a skunk, flea baths when it ran away for a week and came back pregnant. Mom never cried that I saw when Ares, our German Shepard, heaved a last sigh and left his body on the front porch.

Since Shadow died, Mom is always crying. She cries more than I do. At Sunday dinner, her plate of roast and potatoes, or chicken and rice, or whatever I have cooked, turns to salty soup, tears slipping over the side and wetting the table. The rugs squish underfoot in every room. The wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom is sloughing away. I tell her she might as well start sleeping in the bathtub so she doesn’t drown in her bed, and she cries even harder. My aunts don’t know what to do: Rozzy stop crying, Rozzy it’s just a cat. All she chokes out is don’t call me Rozzy!

The day after Shadow died, I went with Mom to the funeral home because I couldn’t stop her from going, and she insisted she had to buy a child’s casket for Shadow. The nicest one they had, she wanted. And when the funeral director said very calmly and very kindly that it might make more sense to go to the pet cremation place by the freeway, she cried until she couldn’t talk, until she was heaving. Mom cried until her clothes were soaked and the carpet around her chair was dark and soggy.

The funeral director tried one last time to tell her that the price was so high, that she’d be better off with other options. She could probably find a cat casket online for much less, cremation was an even better option. But you took such good care of my Liz, she explained, you took such good care of her, please.