The End of My Sentence

The deal I had with my people was that I could sleep in. I got up early those last days at the hotel, but not if I knew I had to get up. After many appointments were foiled by a sleep-stealing worry over getting to a doctor or to court on time, I received a group email from my folks informing me that they had agreed to keep my appointments a secret from me and just let me carry out my regular pattern of pass-out in peace: do all the rare coin and haunted doll internet searches, take a walk from the Marriott to La Raza Mall, take in a few beers or no beers, watch the puppet-faced laugh-track-laden TV late into the night, and then sleep in stiff and sanitized hotel sheets.

If there was somewhere I had to be at nine or ten in the a.m., my cousin Dot would rouse and ferry me to my errand or appointment, ready for justice or an X-ray machine, with a safety net of sleep behind me. Dot: who could always put an end to all my sentences with her fast assessment of my dress or manners or failure to meet the minimal codes of each. Dot: who brought with her the scent of Sea Breeze, that antiseptic cotton-ball-saturating eye-sting product, right into the musk-leather spritz scent of my room, an olfactory order I had cultivated from cologne sample cards fallen from slick stacks of outdated issues of Esquire and GQ left in the hotel lobby, which I always took up and read on the can or in my covers, my library of fast and fragrant ephemera. That skin cleanser scent recalled the shame of acne and hours of vanity and adolescent worry before mirrors that were never my mirrors, always a friend’s mother’s mirrors or, during these last eleven months, this hotel mirror in this room I was not paying for, nothing mine, not even the luxury of my own reflection. That leather driver’s cap Dot wore, as with the rest of her chauffeur uniform, which on Dot looked like she was making fun of or having fun with an SS regalia leather look, typified by all those pale bands who sang about flood lands, that costume, like the skin cleanser fragrance, was strategic. My people studied what kept me quiet in a car ride, and it was kinder than chloroform.

My cousin was the genial end of a familial decision, and she was easily the only one I still talked to, simpatico to my stamp collection and perhaps even wistfully respectful about what it meant to have chosen to catalog the seals of foreign lands yet not leave this city since my last arrest.

When she showed up at my door at 10:20 a.m., holding a dark suit in dry cleaner plastic and a box of black shoes, I thought her visit would be something court-related for sure. But when Dot handed me a new and folded white handkerchief, I knew we were going to a funeral: “Uncle Seth,” she said. “He went easy.”

I nodded and went into the bathroom to shave while Dot sat at my desk and looked over my papers. “Everything Uncle Seth did was easy,” I said, “why should his death be any different?”

Dot coughed a fake cough for me to get serious before a serious appointment.

She leaned on her palms before a stack of designs to study my drawings, which she knew would seem like a compliment to me.

The pencil rubbings I had been working on might look to anyone else like escape plans or secret tunnel pipes or the cartoon corridors of an ant village, but Dot knew I was constructing crossword puzzles for the family newsletter.

My job, if I had one these last eleven months, was producing and distributing a fourteen-page newsletter that addressed all the luck and legacy of the Montez clan: tidbits about which niece would be performing in what school play; a guess-who regarding which relative in Reynosa had just opened a new pharmacy; scant details observing the missing Montez children, codes regarding the accuracy of their whereabouts, hints detailing mail addresses for missing Connie or missing Caleb or missing Toma; my words of reach-out-to-say-hello to people I did not directly speak to anymore.

I got a coffee at the breakfast nook by the front desk, where they had already stopped saying hello to me unless I really needed towels, grabbed three bran muffins before they hit the wastebasket, and munched on one as we drove over to Las Palmas Cemetery.

There was talk—in my head at least there was always talk—that Seth was Dot’s real daddy. She had been working for the man since she was thirteen, because her mother was tight with him, and everyone who looked at Dot and Uncle Seth whenever they stood in the same room would notice the similarities in their mugs: the thick eyebrows and flat nose that was Seth’s nose which belonged to no one else in our family but Seth and Seth’s kids and that one aunt we still had a picture of and who, according to family lore, wandered off into the streets of Monterrey in 1947. The story of that woman’s disappearance served as a warning to us all that we had a documented genetic tendency to get lost, a scary story to keep us kids from wandering off in supermarkets and to encourage us, as grown ups, to always remain in touch. I named the newsletter after that legendary missing aunt: the “Clara Casey,” or the claro que si, which I call the Of Course, of course, which I allowed Dot to print and distribute to my people, believing she would, while still suspecting this job was really just some family con of busy work designed to keep me strapped to the seat and ready for sleep.

At the funeral, Dot’s secret pedigree felt like a palpable fact, with all of my legitimate cousins lined up by Uncle Seth’s twenty-nine-year-old widow and even Dawn: Dawn, the one love child we all knew of. I never saw Dawn, Seth’s mid-career creation. The woman was twenty-five but looked twelve at 4’11” and had inherited from her father that juvenile glow he wore even as he succumbed to his disease. Dawn was a nurse in another county, I had heard, but of course never mentioned in the family newsletter. Now that Seth was dead, she did nothing to allay the suspicions about her true parentage, standing in line with Ric and Paol and Judo and Simon. To me, Dawn was the cousin I never knew, and Dot was Seth’s secret daughter, hidden in plain sight. Seth had taken care of both of them all these years in the kind of earned silence that the guy with the most money always gets to enjoy.

Whatever Dot was, today she was just a woman at her boss’s funeral.

I was doing obvious double takes between Dawn and Dot, because yes, they looked like sisters, but it was a funeral, so no one’s eyes were on me as that black box descended under the gaze of a hot widow in hot mourning.

A few of the gathered who worked for my uncle looked Dot over like she was in the wrong line and should have been over standing next to my twenty-nine-year-old tia, Maria Medici, Seth’s trophy wife, and the somber new kids he had with her that were my cousins and maybe Dot’s brothers.

No one cried, though some people made that face where it looked like they were trying not to laugh, but really everyone looked worried, making that overstepping and cautious face you make when you walk into a café and order up a plate of this and a glass of that and look at the dessert menu and realize you have left your wallet in your other pants.

“All this is going away,” Dot said, in a way that I knew referred to really everything: the mourners, the pretense of familial congregation, my clothes maybe, for sure where I slept. I nodded, and the sunglasses on my nose slid a bit.

“I am not getting paid for today, I know, and no one has read your family flyer in months. I feel I should tell you. Not since Uncle Seth talked to Maria about stopping the treatment,” said Dot. “If you were hinting, like I know you were hinting in those crossword puzzles, that you might be trusted with a desk job or a trip abroad or maybe be put in charge of designs for Gina’s ten-year reunion or Ruthie’s quinceañera, that was all just for you to read and feel good about. All this is over, and I would like a bite to eat,” my cousin said, her right hand out, bobbing pointer finger along the heads of the bereaved like she was taking classroom attendance.

There was a kind of funeral after-party at Maria Medici’s, but I didn’t feel comfortable going, and Dot suggested we get something at HEB and eat in the car. “Or we come back here once everyone leaves to hit the free food and drink at Seth’s place. We can park ourselves right here in late-day mourning and talk out the situation.”

I nodded yes. I needed to figure out the plan.

Dot knew what she would do, of course, with that confidence that could make me buy anything. She would leave. This car that Seth was letting her drive, this old school baby blue Oldsmobile that no one envied and no one would be looking for, or her, for a few days at least, she would drive it over to our cousin Karlo in El Paso and leave it with him, then take a train to some daydream of California that she was not embarrassed about still having at twenty-seven. With me, she had no idea and no suggestions to offer, stressing again that I needed to know: “The room is over, the hotel room, your hideout, Seth’s gracious salacious tab on the slab. Don’t even try to get your stuff back, cousin. Your stuff was all his stuff, but this suit you have on is not a rental. It is your suit now, Seth’s old suit from when he was a fit man in his early forties. It suits you and fits no one else.”

“Jeez, maybe Seth was my daddy too,” I said.

“You’re crazy,” Dot said and shook her head. “You look nothing like your uncle, and you look nothing like your dad even, so maybe that saint of a mother of yours wasn’t so much of a saint.”

Dot handed me a gift card for $100 and told me to go into HEB and come out with whatever we would eat that evening: apples, grapes, cheese, crackers, wine, and beer.

Once inside the store, I had the strongest compulsion to shove tiny bottles of single-pack wine into my tuxedo pockets, because I looked serious and in serious mourning, and these pockets were deep, but I had the gift card and blew it all on extravagant memorial munchies: four bottles of wine and a twelve-pack of Dos Equis and a party tray of cheese and salami and a few pears.

We drank in the car. In the parking lot. We drank to nothing, not to Uncle Seth, not to lost inheritance, not to lost worlds, not to all the goodness Seth showed by trying to set me up in that room when I declined his offer to go to a posh rehab in Wimberley. My uncle tried to set a lot of us up towards the end. He gave his brother-in-law Reggie the run of that check cashing store in Roma, and he gave his alkie brother Marin twenty bucks a day just not to drink until happy hour, and his generosity extended to the folks outside the family too, to women he had not spoken to in decades, to a disbarred lawyer buddy who needed rent-free office space to get a security firm going, to this janitor who had a stroke while mopping up the church where Seth and Maria tied the knot. He had a fruit basket sent to his room, with a note that read: I hope my honeymoon is as slick and reflective as the church floors, good sir. All in an effort to make every association an ally in the end.

“He was very obviously trying to buy his way into heaven,” said Dot. “And I don’t even remember anything funny he said now.”

“I do,” I said. “It was about desert island reading material. Seth said to me, ‘If there were ever a true desert island situation, you would ask for all that Shakespeare or the King James version of the Bible, and if you had three choices and already had all that Shakespeare and the King James version of the Bible, then you might want a damn dictionary to look up all the words you never knew, but that was only on an island with nothing, with no one.’ He said the more crowded the island was, with objects and signs of what once passed for civility, the more radio towers and water towers and dying palms, the more you might seek out the blank storm of Samuel Beckett or those gray room depictions of William S. Burroughs. ‘In this town where I have lived all my life and will die,’ he said to me, ‘I read obits and phone books.’”

Dot cupped her fingers around her short neck like it hurt and said, “Let me show you what’s yours. We all got something from Seth, and we all got it when he was at his most worried.”

Back at the cemetery we did not bother walking over to Seth’s grave, which already looked like a cartoon of bereavement with white petals and the life-he-lived flyers strewn over graveyard grass. Seth’s littlest kids had brought ornaments to toss back and forth and no way this place did not also look like Christmas. We walked down the hallowed ground like there was a real place for us to be, and Dot pointed to a section of headstones off away from all the dead aunts and dead uncles and on to an open grave, like in a horror movie or suspense flick, some scene where our hero is compelled towards premature burial at gunpoint. But here I was walking happily towards an open grave with a beer in my hand.

I looked at Dot and took a fast and deep draught from my bottle and she tossed me another, which I caught like a pro because I was so good at catching things when I drank: names, numbers, a break here and there. The other green bottle I had been holding hit the soft earth and did not break.

“You know Seth set you up in more ways than one,” she said.

I nodded.

“I don’t think you get it,” she added.

“When you were losing it real bad last year and got arrested so many times and went missing so many times and your poor dying dad did not know what to do and your mom was not speaking to anyone about you, Seth knew that he was dying and that there would be many business questions asked when he was gone. He started buying graves for us all—the silent minority, he called us. I am here if I want. Your mom is here if she wants. You are here if you want and you should want because you have no place else now that he is gone and they dug this up for you when you went missing last October. When they found you they kept the grave open, just in case, but Seth went first. Well your dad went first, then Seth went, but who knows how long you might last.”

I looked at the open earth and saw that a bright electric-blue tarp had been set inside, and there were afghans and a wicker basket and a metal money box with a combination and a book of stamps and a pocketknife. A pillow even. All that was missing was a chocolate on it, but I knew Dot always kept Hershey’s Kisses in her purse.

Tugging at her leather jacket and holding up an open bottle of white wine, Dot said, “All of this is going away, and I give the ghouls three days. Then the people will start to know what was not paid and look for who will be blamed. That room where you lived was an office, but you didn’t know. Other people did, they knew, that was enough, and other people think you were in on everything, a conniving crazy man taking advantage of his dying uncle and living in that hotel room to be safe and nefarious, in hiding.”

“It was like my office. That newsletter I worked on, for everyone to see each other.”

“That family paper starts and ends with me. Maybe four cousins read it five months ago, but everyone would still think it’s all you, from how you have been, that newsletter looks like some kind of mad evidence. I shredded them all. I was supposed to keep them around to make it look like some diversion from the laundering purpose, but there is no evidence anymore. I saw to that. The room is clean, and maybe someone new has checked in. You will see how good I was about no emails, too. But that plan to take advantage of all the mess in your head was a good one. Yeah, Seth set you up good. Creditors will think that Seth was not thinking right, giving you so much power on paper, and he was not. Seth was thinking very wrong.”

I nodded and allowed the falling temperature to take my palms.

“The pocketknife has a corkscrew and a little saw, even. The safe combination is the year Seth was born. If you don’t know it, just run the number back from 1964 until you get it right,” Dot said.

There was a large blue plastic cover, which would be good for the night. Dot suggested I get creative with ways to stay warm. If I was the most trouble in the family, maybe it was because I got out of trouble the best. I nodded at her compliment.

My cousin and I hugged in deep goodbye forever ways. I pulled away like a child, feeling orphaned in a daydream.

As Dot got into her car, she called out, “Hey, I warn: there are kids that come here every Friday to get crazy, and sometimes this midlife-crisis gang of ladies that read the stones and talk to spirits hold hands and flinch at every twig they step on, they’re so easily spooked. Sometimes they like to get drunk and look for ghosts. There is always a lot of noise, and if you stay here, you need to lie low.”

My heart raced like I was nine and just found twenty dollars on the street as I stared at my grave, waiting until I was sure Dot was gone before crawling in to sleep.