Alphabetic Karma, End of Story

Home Sweet Home

We're serializing Alphabetic Karma, a short story originally published by Hawkshaw Press. This is our final posting. When we left Kim last, Kim and Tony had both been shot, and Kim had retired from truck-boosting.

***

When I turned twenty Uncle Zach and I had to tap into our hard-way gains. I hired a woman in the trailer park to watch over Zach while I worked at the garage. He was on his own in the evenings while I held down a job as a cashier at the market. I knew the end was near when we decided on a hospital bed. I had to disassemble it to wiggle it into the bedroom—I leaned the old box and mattress against the trailer on the freeway side. We both knew there was no going back. But oh, how he hung on the monkey bars and straps I rigged overhead. He levitated back and forth between the radio and the miniature TV and the stacks of magazines—like the slowest pendulum in the world. His regrets came with weirdness. “I tell you, Kim, I wish I had taken up knitting. Too late now.”

Making withdrawals from under the trailer, I paid for upgraded hospice and the nurse to come in, better than flat Medicare. They turned out to be stingy with the drugs, sizing them out for hundred-pound chemo victims, so I made a deal with Emilio, Mrs. Cisnerosʼ nephewʼs son four trailers down. Emilio carried a bit of everything. “I run the Honk N Holler of recreational merchandise.”

It wasnʼt so bad until the last week. Zach ate less and less and wheezed more and more. I fed him mostly beef broth and emptied the bedpan after it had run through him. The BMʼs smelled, but they arrived further and further apart, and drier and drier. The last week, like I said, Zach and I agreed privacy was a thing of the past and I attended to all his functions. He told me on Monday, “Iʼm through. No more food, just enough water to swallow the pills.” His lips cracked like an old parking lot.

With no food to buffer the drugs, Zach slipped off to La-La Land. I sat watch over him as much as possible, and called Raven to tell her I wasnʼt coming in. I donʼt know what was dream and what was memory, but we circulated through seventy years of work and play, of bitter disappointment and some happiness.

On Friday, lying on his back like a great mound of waiting, he flipped and thought I was someone else. He said, “Margy, donʼt dump me. Not for that shit brother of mine. Iʼll get us some money.”

It felt like he had hit me in the forehead with a tire iron, not just my motherʼs name.

Uncle Zach passed that Saturday night. Neighbors helped me lug him out of the trailer to the gurney outside, where the funeral home van waited, saving me a hundred bucks. Those funeral home assholes didnʼt have to struggle with Zach down the narrow hallway past the closet and the bathroom, but they didnʼt lay any gratitude on us, just the discount.

###

The trailer has been handed down to me. I pooled the left-over money stashed in the bag and the last of Zachʼs mutual funds and bought a small share of the garage. No idea where thatʼs going.

Itʼs been seven years since Dad dumped me out on the street, and Zoeʼs probably dead by now, but if not―I thought I might find her and bring her home. I can nearly afford her dope. Sheʼd have a safe place to fix and it might stretch her days out some. She saved me, those first weeks on the street. Uncle Zach saved me, those years in the trailer park. Strange they both had names with capital Zʼs. Alphabetic karma.

It should be my turn to pay back. And I donʼt want to live alone.