Homesick

The cheapest urn cost a hundred dollars, so the mortician packs the ashes in a plastic bag and staples his business card to the front. Hold your loved ones close, it reads in blotched black ink.

“In case you change your mind. My number’s on the back.” He dropped his yellow-toothed salesman smile a while ago. Right after he realized I couldn’t afford any of the empty metallic boxes standing on the shelf behind him like gentrified government buildings on a new Freedom City side street. 

He shoves the bag across the warped countertop toward where I stand engulfed in my dad’s old army jacket. Remnants of my father lay buried beneath his fingernails and when he scratches his bald head, searching for sprouts of hair, the ashes fall in a flurry, blending into the dust mite wood.

“Do you have something I can tie it with?” I mumble. The question has been lodged in my throat since the cash register swallowed my last ten dollars on ‘packing fees’.

The mortician turns on his heel until all I see is the back of his pale head and the fat rolls seeping down his neck. A drawer below the shelves whines open on waxy hinges.

“That’ll be a dollar,” he says, holding out a garbage bag twist tie.

“Good thing I already gave you ten.” I grab the tie from his palm and loop it around the bag’s threadbare handles. Before he can argue, I lift my father into my arms, ignoring the arthritic aches burrowed deep in my wrists, and carry him out the door like a toddler, the storefront entrance bell punctuating my exit. 

I sit on the funeral home’s steps for a while with my father in my lap, letting the fall air and weed smoke coat my lungs. The bus stop, a broken bench and a ticket machine, stands down the street. People in fast food uniforms and construction hats mill around, muttering on their cellphones, waiting for the evening shuttle to arrive. A lone police officer leans against a nearby billboard, his rifle [KB1] at his hip, his body obscuring a photograph of a thin model in a bra half biting half kissing a perfume bottle.

I know I should stand. I wrap the end of the twist tie around my thumb. Sitting gives off the impression of homelessness. The olive skin at the tip of my finger pales. The bag in my lap could easily be mistaken for drugs. Pins and needles creep in. It’s the end of the month. Quotas are due.  

My thumb numbs.

Something holds me to these steps.

I wonder what he’d think of his final resting place. He never really slept in beds, anyway, preferring twenty-minute cat naps on bar stools and the occasional day-long drug-induced coma. When he did sleep in a bed, he made all of us shake him awake every hour or so, to ward off dreaming. I imagine shaking him now, like salt, to wake him up.

Sometimes when he landed on the right edge of tipsy, he’d laugh about the places he slept during the war. It was a hoarse laugh. The only kind he had.

One night, he came home early from Murph’s, smelling like piss. His friend, Nick, from the factory, dragged him through the door, their boots trekking brown slush in from the cold. In sputters, Nick told my mom they’d gotten kicked out. He never said why. It didn’t matter really. There was beer in the fridge, and my mom was in a good mood, so they cracked a few, fell onto the flat couch cushions, and laughed about the past.

Beth slept, her birdlike arms and sticky kid fingers wrapped around my waist. I could hear their drunken mumbles through the thin walls. I lay on my back, goosebumped, and stared up at the shadows crossing our popcorn ceiling drifting off to his laughter.

It’s hard to explain now how intensely his moods affected mine. An invisible string tied us together, connecting our hearts, so that when his beat, so did mine. It made it so his laughter felt better in my stomach, than my own. When he was here, his body and spirit stretched so wide, it consumed me.

Now, what is left of him fits in my hands. And still, I cannot stand. Even though I know, if I stay where I am, tucked on this sloping step, hidden in the ghost of his corpse, I’ll rot too.

The bus’s rusting brakes squeal to a stop. On its side, an ad of a man in a white doctor’s coat smiles. Underneath him, in crisp blue letters reads, “No health insurance? No problem! Open Credit with Prime Care!”. People line up in a row. The cop keeps his spot on the girl. His head turns from where I sit on the funeral home steps, my sneakers scraping gum stains. I tuck my father’s ashes in my coat pocket and hurry toward the end of the line, my joints cracking with every footfall.

…

My ticket expired a week ago, but the driver on this corner, always lets it slide. The girls in my neighborhood call him Santa because of his scraggly beard and rumored affinity for lap dances. I flatten the crumpled edges of the ticket on the leg of my jeans and flash him a small smile. I cover the barcode and date with my fingers and Santa waves me forward. I scoot past the plastic bag he uses to throw out his cigarette buds and step back to avoid an old woman fumbling with her purse. Santa’s eyes stay ahead, absorbed in the red and green flickers of his scanner. When his hand, sticky and dry, creeps up my thigh, and grabs for my ass, neither of us says a word. After all, nothing’s ever really free.

I find a window seat in the back. Stains mar the early 2000s vinyl. It smells stale and sad, like a supermarket bagel, but guarantees nobody will sit next to me, so I sneak in, feel for my father, and wait for the sweet smell of gasoline to burn the lump in my throat to a pulp.

…

At home, Beth sleeps curled up on Dad’s recliner, her thumb stuck in her mouth. A shiny Freedom City reporter with eyes matching his blue suit collar babbles on about some hurricane barreling up the coast. I let its fluorescent glow guide me towards the remote, forgotten on the kitchen table, by a bowl of disintegrated mini wheats. Muting the news, I inspect the cereal, sniffing for hints of sour. Beth’s spoon tastes like sugar and germs. And before I bite down, the wheat melts on my tongue.

Mom left the window open. Pitch black pours in, cut up by cop car lights, pierced by sirens. Quiet lives far from here, somewhere in the suburbs. Beth doesn’t remember them, but I do. When we first moved, my mom had rules about the window, afraid a stray bullet would fly through the glass and into one of us. Leave it closed, blinds down. Then, the bills started piling up, and that fear got buried, beneath all the others. And so, to keep from suffocating, we opened the window inch by inch, until one day we forgot all about the stray bullets, too busy dodging the real ones.

I chug the remains of the bowl, letting the cereal and sirens melt into the background. Beth’s breaths stay steady, as I scoop her up, tug her thumb out from her teeth, and tuck her beneath the quilt we share in sleep. I hate that she still sucks her thumb. It gives off the impression of parental neglect, which reminds me of my dad, who weighs down my pocket.

I spend the next half an hour walking in circles around the apartment plopping him in different places. The top of the refrigerator is a no, even though he spent most of his waking hours swinging that white door back and forth looking for beer. I’m afraid somebody might throw him in the garbage. So, I stuff him in between the recliner’s cushions, but he keeps falling through a rip in the seams. By one a.m., I give up and leave him on the bookshelf, he called a waste of space during life.

“Maybe you’ll take up reading in death,” I pat the bag, dusting off the shelf with my fingers.

My pajama bottoms are at my ankles, toothpaste dripping down my chin, when a faint buzz sounds from the lump of dirty clothes at my feet. I bend down and find my phone in the crotch of my jeans.

“This Luce’s girl?” an old New York accent scrapes against my ear.

“Yeah?” I spit mint green goo into the sink.

“Look, kid, I don’t wanna be a bitch to a widow or anything, but your Ma hasn’t shown up for a shift in weeks and I’m running outta coverage.”

My toothbrush clatters into the sink.

“I’m gonna have to start finding a permanent replacement soon and I…”

“Wait, wait,” I swallow, my hand clenched around the phone so hard, the glass should shatter. “I will get her in tomorrow. I promise. She’s just been really sick and…”

“Get her in by 8 a.m.”

“Okay, okay, thank you…”

I keep muttering thank yous long after she hangs up, swallowing my night pills, staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, wondering when fifteen got to looking so old.