Death Is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca

Author:Suzanne Rivecca
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

The mother waited until after a great deal of cleaning had been done—the blinds taken off the windows and soaked in the bathtub, the baseboards scrubbed, the ceiling fans dusted, and the linoleum doused in bleach—before telling her about the uncle.

“What I was told,” she said, wiping her forehead carefully, “is that he got religion.”

The daughter looked out the living room window, toward the casket factory and the Grain Belt brewery. The air smelled of refrigerator and leavening. “What religion?” she said.

The mother looked down at the gleaming baseboards. “I don’t know, that doesn’t ever mean a particular creed, does it? ‘Got religion’? It’s sort of like a generic born-again thing, I guess. Definitely not Catholic, but then he wasn’t born one. And he never officially converted for Amelia.” She picked up a dirty sponge and tossed it aside. “All I know is, he’s going to these churchy meetings and he’s taking it very seriously. That’s what Amelia says. She’s not very happy about it.”

The stucco wall looked like white meringue stiffly whipped into peaks. She sometimes felt the urge to put her tongue to it.

“I’m telling you this,” her mother said, “because I think…because of his religious calling or whatever…that he might contact you. He might seek you out.”

The daughter laughed. “Seek me out?”

Her mother laughed, too, flailing one wrist in a minimizing gesture, loose with uncoordinated relief and anxiety. “I don’t know. There’s some emphasis on making amends. They talk in these strange pilgrimage terms. So Amelia says.”

The daughter said, “So Aunt Amelia told you this. Aunt Amelia said, ‘My husband is going to seek out your daughter and apologize for what he did.’ As plain as that?”

“Well. Not exactly as plain as that.”

She turned just enough to see her mother’s profile. “How much does she know?”

“If anyone told her,” the mother said, “it was him.”

They sat in silence for a while. Her mother kept glancing sideways at her with anticlimactic intakes of breath, as if about to speak. Then she blurted out, “You know what I never could understand? How you always wanted to be with him!” Her eyes stretched wide. “I thought, The kid wants to be around him, what could he possibly be doing to her that’s so bad? I mean, he wasn’t the type of man you’d think would—My sister wouldn’t have married him if she thought he was. Would she?”

The daughter had once called her mother a bad mother and made her cry. She didn’t want to do it again.

She said, “How do they even know where I live?”

Her mother flicked a foot up and down and did not answer right away. Then she said, “Amelia asked for your new address a while ago. I didn’t really think twice; what was I supposed to say? It was before I ever dreamed she knew…you know, anything about it.”

In the silence the ceiling fan rollicked around and around, its unsteady revolutions weirdly comic. It seemed to be winding up for a dramatic liftoff and the daughter almost laughed.

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