The Last Word

  One of my hands is sticky and the other one is hot. I want to put down the steaming mug of Jack Daniels and tea before it permanently injures me, but there is no good surface. I rush to the kitchen island and slam the mug down, I move my hand away just in time to miss the drops of the hot liquid bouncing out of the mug, grasping for their last chance to burn me. My other hand is clutching a Boston cream donut with such intensity that I put a hole through it and the cream oozes onto my fingers. I lick it off. I’m a woman of simple pleasures, sugar and alcohol. 

 I devour the donut while I wait for the drink to cool. There are five more donuts waiting for me and I’m fully intent on eating them all before sunrise, but right now I need to wash my hands. My children would never believe that I wrote this letter in sound mind if I leave chocolate fingerprints all over it. Imagine if they knew that their Chanel clad mother enjoyed cheap donuts and booze. Remnants of my life before marriage I guess. My husband has been dead for a few years but I am still stuck in the shape he molded me into.

  If anyone tries to tell you that being a politician’s wife is easy you can tell them that Dagmar Larsen asked them to kindly shut the fuck up. The schmoozing alone is a full-time job. I will die a happy woman knowing that I never have to host one of those dreadful fundraisers again. I do have to admit though, it was a glamorous life at times. 

 I married my husband when I was twenty-five and he was thirty. He was already a successful business owner. People admired his story. He bought a gun store in his twenties (with his trust fund money), and worked there by himself without hiring any help. He did everything and rarely took a day off, then, when he felt the business was running smoothly he hired his first employee. Me. Even then I knew that he hired me because of my appearance, he wanted a pretty girl to work the register. My job was to give dazzling smiles and small flashes of cleavage to encourage customers to buy bigger guns. It worked. So primitive.

 Nowadays people might call my husband’s early advances sexual harassment, but it didn’t feel that way back then. He was a good flirt and we were married a year later. Four years later we had two kids. By then he has expanded the business to three stores and neither one of us had to work there. He went in to check on everything daily, and I suspected that the three pretty girls working the registers kept him at the stores longer than necessary, but he still had a lot of free time. One day he announced that he was running for office.

  I quite liked the idea of being a politician’s wife. I felt like a Hollywood star at our first fundraiser. I wore a knee-length black dress that I got at a boutique in the city and a fitted blazer that cost more than my first car. My hair was straightened at the salon, but I did the make up myself. I debated on the lipstick color for ages, I went with red to help me calm my nerves. Turned out I had no reason to worry, I fit right in. I had strong opinions in my youth, and the sense of righteousness I felt back then could only be rivaled by the sense of righteousness my children feel today.

 The thought of my children makes me get up and get another donut. Even though I just washed my hands I can’t help myself. This one is glazed and I take a bite before I get to the kitchen island. The kitchen is too big, just another status symbol, a hollow reminder of my husband’s fulfilled ambitions. The tea has cooled off. I take a sip. I don’t know why I call it tea, it’s mostly Jack Daniels. The smell of the steam is glorious, it smells of iron and comfort. I am too lazy to go to the kitchen sink again so I wipe my frosting covered hands on the silk pajamas that I have been wearing all day. I can’t procrastinate any longer, it’s time to write the letter explaining my new will. 

 I am not a monster, I won’t write my family out completely. Each one of my kids will get ten thousand dollars, and each of the grandkids will get five. That still leaves about four hundred and fifty thousand in our estate. It will be less by the time I pass, but as I recently found out I might not have much time left for spending.  

    I knew something was wrong for months, but I was putting off going to the doctor. I was too busy. Even after my husband’s death I still had a lot of social obligations. I finally found the time a month ago and went in. I wish I haven’t. I wish I never found out about the mass growing inside me, overshadowing my lungs, using my body as fertilizer. The doctor didn’t think it looked good, he told me to get my affairs in order. I went home in a daze and waited for one of my children to call and check in on me. The call never came, and I’m done waiting. Tomorrow I will visit my attorney, we will amend the will and I will make sure this letter is read to my kids when they come to the office expecting to receive a small fortune. What will they look like when he tells them that I gave it to the St. Jude’s children’s hospital instead? I get a little giddy thinking about their scrunched up faces as all the things they planned to buy with my money disappear in front of them. They might even hire an investigator to see if I changed the will under duress because neither one of them thinks of me as particular charitable. They don’t think much of me at all. When their father had a stroke their “help” only extended as far as finding a care home for him. It didn’t matter that I had the desire and the means to take care of him at home. The children looked at me like I was crazy. I was still a sharp seventy-year-old I could’ve handled it, but all they wanted was to put him in a full-time facility. “He’ll get more attention there,” they said. Bullshit. 

  It was a fight of the century, but they won it. When they were little they never dared to argue with me like that. But the day my husband was taken to the nursing home they sat in my living room, a united front with a decision that was made. Their father passed alone in a strange bed, surrounded by people watching the clock waiting for their shift to end. I could never forgive that.

  Part of me was relieved that they didn’t call, didn’t ask how I was doing. I know I would’ve told them about the cancer. I’m old, but I’m still scared to die. I was never into doing things alone, and for most of my life, I didn’t have to. I bet if they knew I was sick they would swiftly remove me from my home. They would get their hands on my money and kindly allocate some of it for my care, they might even visit me in the sanitary facility with cookie-cutter decor a few times a month. After I would die they would throw a beautiful service and speak of me fondly as if they knew me. No. I want to die in my home. I want them to know that I am still their mother and I get to make the decisions. The letter is finished, and so is my drink. I still have four donuts that are calling my name, it would be rude to keep them waiting.