Not long after, you asked for your ex-girlfriend to move in. She needed help, you said. Our basement had become somewhat of your apartment — it had your old regal furniture (solid dark wood, a king size bed, great big paintings, brown carpets, ugly leather rich-people furniture) — but also the table full of Legos and the doll-houses and boxes of GI Joe’s and Nerf guns and the ping-pong table that had got broken in half somehow.

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Sometimes you’d come up with some ride-on toy or bb gun from down there and do something stupid with it, like ride it down the treacherously steep hills of the neighborhood or shoot one of the boys. All with your wintergreen chaw in hand, of course.

So this was the place you split with her — Krystal. I remember her as an inordinately tall, stick thin figure generally wearing pumps and leopard print leggings, with immense hair like a cloud of dyed-blonde cotton candy. She was surrounded by a suffocating haze of perfume and the slurred speech of Xanax. 

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Once she and my mom sat on the rickety benches of our kitchen (green-painted bead-board with dog-stained red cushions), talking. My momma shared a painful story and, as she told it, Krystal wept. She apologized, she said it wasn’t her turn to cry, it wasn’t her pain to feel. But she felt it anyway, Lord, did she. 

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She moved out awhile later, off to seek something new. Within five years she was dead of overdose. Someone had found her on the side of the street down farther South somewhere, Georgia or Florida. It took awhile for anyone to realize who she was, longer still for the word to get back to anyone who knew her. 

 

But for us it was another guest come and gone. The door was always open; the siblings’ significant others, momma and daddy’s friends who were in trouble, anyone who needed it. So I went back to playing the piano and singing my Broadway tunes, and stifling laughs when I heard your footsteps pound on the unfinished stairs and the door swing open. You would walk by and mock-opera sing over me, out of key, slamming the keys for just a second. 

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And then there was the bird. We had two, a cockatiel momma had gotten right when she left her first husband -- he'd never let her have pets -- and an ugly, dull little lovebird she'd seen at the pet store years later and pitied. Daddy had gone back and bought it for her. The cockatiel;s name was Rumpil; he liked attention and would chirp "pretty boy, pretty boy," over and over. The lovebird's name was Rudy and he was a biter who hated everyone. ​

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But you had a thing about animals, especially the standoffish and outright cruel ones. You had a way of taming them. Part patience, part bull-headed stubbornness, part relating to them, probably. You'd pretend to eat the food right out of dogs' bowls and growl back at them. You'd sit in the driveway with treats til that damn tomcat with the missing ear finally gave in and loved you. It didn't take you long to win Rudy over. Soon he was playing soccer with you at the kitchen table -- tossing a plastic Sprite cap at you that you'd slide back. He would carefully clean out your nostrils, as gross as it was sweet. And when you had that all-night insomnia where you'd just put the TV on until dawn and sleep came, he'd sleep with you, curled up in the crook of your neck. 

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It was around that time maybe that you almost killed yourself. I didn’t hear much of it but somehow my momma told me a year or two later. I was sitting on her bed, toying with a piece of stuffing from inside the Americana patchwork quilt that had long been torn to pieces by the cats, the bedposts scratched nearly to breaking. She was teary. Maybe she was on the phone talking with someone, not even to me. I remember more staring into the same faceted glass lamp that I’d spent so many nightmare and flu-filled nights laying awake looking at, studying the way the soft glow dribbled through its rivets.

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She said you had the gun to your head. She said you told her that you kept thinking about how it would affect me, how you couldn’t do that to me. I remember even at that age thinking that if the one thing I did in life was save one life — yours — I will have been worthwhile.