Loretta is Dead, Sincerely Dwayne

Dwayne was the one who told me Loretta was dead. He sent me a letter scrawled on three sad pieces of paper torn from a crappy dimestore notebook. The letter was covered in pizza grease and Kool-Aid stains, and the first two pages were nothing but poorly punctuated ramblings about his sad-sack life. The last page was about Loretta, and even though grease had worn it translucent in spots, I got the main point. It went something like this: three months ago Loretta died a sad and pathetic death. For the past twenty years, she and Dwayne had been living together in the squat little home where I spent most of my childhood. Now he had to move to a trailer park in Okeechobee to live with a cousin named Calvin. Loretta’s body, which was sitting in a freezer at the coroner’s office in Cleveland, and the house and everything inside it, were now my problem to deal with. 

Loretta was my mother, but I hadn’t seen her since I left town twenty years ago and hadn’t heard a word from her since we swapped unenthusiastic postcards two or three years ago. The one she sent had a picture of downtown Cleveland with a yellow swoopy script that read, “The Home of Rock & Roll.” On the back, she wrote that she had tried the enchiladas at some new Mexican restaurant and replaced the hot water heater at the house. The one I sent had a generic picture of a sailboat tooling along somewhere on Lake Michigan, and I told her that summer was coming and that I may go out and buy a new pair of shorts. Now, here’s the thing: I’ve always had terribly skinny legs, and I gave up wearing shorts in junior high because I thought I looked like an ostrich. And I bet a dollar to donuts that Loretta never set foot in a new Mexican restaurant. My point is that me and Loretta were never on the level with each other about anything. Closeness and sentimentality never occurred to us. I suppose you could say we tried it out a few times, but we never got beyond the “sending of random bullshit postcards that neither of us really cared about” stage. 

This doesn’t mean I was indifferent to the letter. I just wasn’t broken up about it. I knew Loretta would die someday, and I knew when it happened somebody would track me down and tell me about it whether I liked it or not. I figured it would be some balding, short-sleeved bureaucrat who simply dropped information into the appropriate blank spaces of a generic government-issued death notice that “regrets to inform you of the untimely death of [INSERT NAME]” while chomping on a day-old donut, and that would be that. But I never thought I’d get the news from Dwayne.

A hapless conga line of unremarkable men like Dwayne was always shuffling in and out of Loretta’s life. A tall, skinny guy whose hair fell out in clumps gave her a vacuum, a biker who always wore an ill-fitting Bob Seagar t-shirt fixed the carburetor on her Oldsmobile, and a persistent old bald guy kept asking her to go to Myrtle Beach with him, just to name a few. I wasn’t a sophisticated kid, but I wasn’t a numbskull either. I’d walked through enough crowded parking lots with Loretta to know what men thought of her. I knew what the unremarkable men were looking for and why they did the things they did, but I never had reason to believe she was contemplating a serious relationship with any of them. They were useful idiots she kept around for menial tasks and heavy lifting. They were there one day and gone the next, so I never spent much time thinking about them. But Dwayne was different. Dwayne was a stand-out among the unremarkable men if such a thing is possible. 

He was the short, sweaty guy who sold drugs behind the high school football stadium to teenage burnouts and bus drivers. Now when I say sweaty, I don’t mean a few persistent beads of perspiration occasionally rolled down his forehead and into his mustache. It was a thorough, full-body watering the moment he engaged in any physical movement whatsoever. I remember thinking that his sweat glands must have been the size of garden hoses to unleash the amount of fluid they did. He could bring a bag of groceries in from Loretta’s car in the dead of winter and look like he just climbed out of a swimming pool. The other thing about him—he always had a gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans and he wasn’t shy about it. In fact, he purposely struck a variety of poses and postures just to make sure you got a good look at it. This was menacing at first, especially to a kid, but the feeling didn’t last long. A few weeks after he started coming around, I walked out of the house and found Dwayne and Loretta in the driveway. Dwayne was changing the oil on Loretta’s car, and Loretta was sitting in a lawn chair, smoking cigarettes, and paging through a magazine. It was a standard transaction between Loretta and an unremarkable man, and I was planning to breeze right by until Dwayne bent over to pick up a fresh quart of Pennzoil and the gun popped out of his waistband. Dwayne and I instantaneously froze. Then the gun bounced off the bumper of the car and hit the ground with a clickity-clack that made it obvious the thing was a toy. Dwayne looked at me with eyes the size of dinner plates and scurried like a sweaty little ninja to pick the thing up and stuff it back into his trousers, but the cat was out of the bag. The strangest part of the whole thing was that the humiliation didn’t register with Dwayne at all. You’d think he would’ve given up the dangerous drug dealer ruse after that, but he didn’t. He just stuck with it. He kept coming around posing and posturing like a pint-sized Burt Reynolds with a dumb toy gun stuffed in his pants. He was either the world's dumbest drug dealer, or he was just plain nuts. 

Loretta, on the other hand, wasn’t dumb or nuts by any means, but she was a thief. She wasn’t a serious thief, mind you. She wasn’t cracking safes or repelling from ceilings in elaborate jewel heists. She was a practical thief. A small-time, nickel-and-dime, just trying-to-make-ends-meet kind of thief. Which, in the simplest of terms, meant that she stole useless crap. Most of it was commercial quantities of things she swiped from her latest menial job, like two thousand single-serving ketchup packets from the Old Time Hot Dog stand or forty gallons of industrial strength floor cleaner and two hundred rolls of prison-quality toilet paper from the Genie Clean nighttime janitorial service. Being a kid, I didn’t have a moral objection to the whole thing, but it did bother me. I was poor, I was awkward, and I wasn’t particularly good-looking, and the eighty-five flea and tick collars Loretta pilfered from Doggy Doodle Dog Grooming weren’t going to change that. All I wanted out of the operation was to win friends and influence people by showing up to school in a newly lifted Members Only jacket and passing out a backpack full of hot Sony Walkmans. But Loretta stole what she stole and she didn’t take requests. I was free to buy my way into whatever social circle I wanted, so long as the payout was limited to well-dressed hot dogs cooked up in a kitchen with minty fresh floors. If I suggested I deserved anything more, Loretta probably would have hit me over the head with the bag of two-hundred-fifty frozen egg rolls she stole from the Manchu Wok. 

As I read the letter, I considered the troubling possibilities of what could be inside the house I was now responsible for. Had Loretta remained a hardscrabbled kleptomaniac who pilfered household goods and condiments? Or did her time living with a dumb drug dealer turn her into a full-blown felon? But Dwayne never bothered to mention it. Not a word. 

All the same, he did provide a direct and matter-of-fact description of her death, which I appreciated. According to Dwayne, Loretta left the house in the middle of a nasty evening snowstorm to buy cigarettes and scratch-off lottery tickets. She made it back to the house safely but as she walked up the front steps she slipped on ice, hit her head, and knocked herself out cold. If there was a horrifying thud or a gut-wrenching cry for help Dwayne never heard it because he had fallen asleep in a chair while watching Johnny Carson. Loretta lay there until the following morning when he realized she hadn’t come home and went looking for her. He found her outside the front door buried under eight inches of snow. She was surrounded by scattered packs of Winstons and Bingo Gold tickets and frozen stiff. Simple as that. 

He apologized for the delay in contacting me and assured me he tried just about everything he could think of to find me. Loretta never really mentioned me, he said, so he didn’t know where to look. He went on to explain how he spent months rummaging through the house looking for an address before he finally found it scribbled under the letter “S” on the inside of an old matchbook sitting on top of the refrigerator under a pile of expired coupons. He outlined the legal aspects of my mother’s death as best he could, and he offered general instructions for the things that still needed to be done. Outside of that, he said, he couldn’t do anything else about the situation because they weren’t married. He wrapped things up by telling me, in a ham-handed way, how he thought Loretta would have wanted her final arrangements handled. She wouldn’t have wanted a lot of fuss, he said, but she would have at least wanted something simple and proper for the sake of the people who cared about her. At the bottom of the page, he attached an old house key with a roughly torn piece of duct tape and signed the letter, “Sincerely, Dwayne.”