The Widow Next Door – Part 3 by Sherry Cassells
Why can’t I breathe? Hex said during her illness and I shrugged. I only shrugged. She was too fragile for me to tell her the truth: she couldn’t breathe because she is stuffed with lies.
Lies are my stuffing, too.
Everybody wants to hear about bad mothers, they’ll take a few dollops of horror, and gladly, too, but what they really want are the smaller faults, the ones they have mastered or rendered innocuous, they love worn carpets and dirty floors, meats bought the day of expiration, the rumour of unpaid bills, they want some good cruelty, too, some slang and slaughter, a slew or two of ranting, some small shit-talk about what was dinner, how she boiled vegetables to death and never changed the sheets, how she moved her lips when she read, threatened her children, told the birds to fackkoff.
Don’t forget her rantings, the way she’d shriek out of despair and melt like the Oz witch, or the certainty with which she grabbed a frying pan when deceived and heated it first – but like I used to say to Hex – too much and it’ll make us seem off kilter, too.
She was younger than me, I reminded her all the time, we did not talk about our mother unless we stood a chance gaining from it some sort of privilege, gifts of money or food.
Most people, and you could see it happening in their heads, convinced themselves they hadn’t heard us properly, their sense of decency swooped in like white blood cells to wounds and they believed or maybe just hoped we had said stars not scars, gain not pain, learn not burn – but there were some who heard perfectly – they understood monster not mother, we whispered jackpot to one another.
Probably because there were two of us in the same boat sociopathy was optional, we had mastered situational sanity early in life.
There was nothing physically wrong with Hex but a heart murmur the doctors were casual about, I finally told her my stuffed-with-lies theory, maybe it’s my heart trying to tell the truth she said, I imagined her tiny red likeness in there jumping up and down for justice, they believe her respiratory malfunction to be psychosomatic and she was referred to a shrink. I went with her to the first appointment. I wanted to hear the guy say the oath which she did convincingly enough, however she resigned the case three weeks later and that’s when we got Doctor Heck Starling, such a strange cat he looked like a lime, he was German from Oklahoma, I'd never heard an accent like his, the consonants from the words he chewed spilled ruined from his mouth, loose vowels rolled around his sour tongue, when I said my bit about confidentiality, he said, as he lifted his purple glasses revealing one blue and one brown eye, listen Trencchh, if I had to chooose beeetween my ooath and my liiife, I woooould chooooose my ooathhhhh.
Good enough for me.
A couple of weeks later he asked to see me and with his green lips pursed he said listen Trench, you might need some therapy, tooooooooo.
He’s the first guy I told how I got rich. The truth I mean. I’ve made up some great lies, some ridiculous inventions involving invisibility, automatic knitting needles, spray peanut-butter was my go-to as a kid. My all-time fave, though, is my ownership of The Idiot’s Guide To series of books – including the most recent in the collection, I don’t say – The Idiot’s Guide To Being An Idiot.
Lime screwed up his mouth and hollered you’re kidding! but he always knew the truth, and he issued a bubbly little collapsing sound, he never just laughed but cried, too.
Would you like to play a game of multiple choice about how I made my fortune?
a) I earned the money fairly and squarely
b) I earned the money in dastardly ways
c) when Hex and I ran away for the final time, it was our second night on the run, both of us still teenagers, we walked through a field in the darkness and something scratched my ankle, something cut her knee, and when we shone our flashlights carefully carefully lightly lightly we saw sparkles, we gathered as many as time and our pockets allowed.
Here is what they call a story nugget: What the sparkles turned out to be will be featured in an upcoming multiple choice!
My neighbours came over three days after our bourbon debut like a sort of resurrection and invited me to dinner at their house, they stood a little shaky at my door, I said yes and they waited while I took a fresh jar of pesto and a pickle jar of moonshine from the fridge and we walked over through the little forest between our houses. It turned out to be denser than it looked; I find this to be true of most people I meet, I was hoping the widows, note the pluralization, would be an exception.
I grew up moonshining and had recently set up a still in the shake between yard and forest but this was from my reserve, my father supported us with moonshine, he sold it to the bars in town at first and then throughout the county, eventually the province, he called it McGillicuddy’s but it was known as Quicksand, you could see silty rivers when you poured it, they’d form coloured blobs that hung in your drink like planets, very likely a horror under a microscope, Quicksand left no stain, no hangover, no dread.
Charlotte screwed up her face and said it taste like sin, neighbour, Stella agreed heartily, I said nothing because I knew their tune would switch, which it certainly did – let's do a time flies here – there was Charlotte the next day hanging laundry in the icy 7am breeze, and if we can dip inside her head for a moment I believe she was thinking how lucky they were, she and her sister Stella, to have a neighbour like me, a rich man who was willing to write them into his will to the tune of a million dollars apiece, and all they had to do was kill him.
I suggested it at our third round, they were looking at the moonshine in a new light, Stella looked at her sister and said I think we can manage that.