California, I had blurted my secret to a woman I liked at a party. It didn’t make sense, but it wasn’t a surprise; lately I’d felt the walls around the past crumbling, sensed something stalking me again. Standing on a dais at mybrother’s wedding, about to give a speech in which I wouldn’t say her name, I caught myself looking for my mother’s face in the crowd. After a day spent flying kites with a friend and her daughter, I stood in her kitchen watching them build a house together out of Popsicle sticks and remembered for a moment how it was to have that bond. On Mother’s Day I lay in my bed, thinking of the gun I keep beneath it, wondering how it felt to die that way. For years now I’ve denied my mother’s murder, always trying to be some different kind of man—normal, stable, calm. I’ve hoarded the rage in my heart, and it manifests in the destructive ways rage does: chronic chest pain, failed relationships, an exaggerated response to threats. I expect the people I care about to die at any moment, and I don’t make plans for the future, because I don’t believe in it; in order to do that, I’d have to understand the past. Running from it has only brought me here, to a graveyard at the end of the West, still watching for the Beast out in the weeds.
My mother is buried beneath another black stone on another hillside, a few thousand miles east. I don’t visit her grave. She fades a little more each day: I can’t picture her face, can’t remember a time when she was alive. I don’t know her story, because I’ve tried to forget, and because there was so much I never knew. She didn’t like to think or talk about the past, a trait I inherited. Nearly a decade now since she died, and all that’s left of her are a few relics and my own suspect memories. I know more about Wyatt Earp than I do about my mother.
She was born Deborah Ann Bennis in North Philly on August 10, 1957, to teenage parents from working-class Catholic stock. When my grandmother got pregnant at seventeen, my grandfather did the honorable thing: he married her and joined the military. They gave it a shot for a few years, living on airforce bases—West Palm Beach, then Belleville, Illinois—but soon they moved back to Philly and divorced. Neither of them can explain why, and when they see each other now, which is rarely, they act like the lovebird teenagers they once were, although both insist they never should have gotten married. My mother lived with her mom, seeing her dad on the weekends. He would take her to a pond near his house to feed the ducks. He says she was so tiny, they were bigger than her.
My grandmother remarried, had my uncle Tom, and got divorced again. My mother lived with her mother and brother for the next decade, in different houses with different men. That period of time was never mentioned in later years; my grandmother still won’t talk about it except in the vaguest terms. Once, at a family reunion, a distant aunt sat next to me, patted my knee, and said my mother had it rough growing up. “There are a lot of things you don’t know,” she said. But she wouldn’t tell me what they were.
At thirteen my mother showed up at my grandfather’s door in the pouring rain, soaked and frowning, holding a suitcase. She’d said she wanted to live with her father one too many times, and finally her mother had dropped her off. Grandpop was working full-time for a union, living with his siblings in a house they’d inherited when their parents died. There was nowhere to put a teenage girl, so he sent her to a Catholic school north of the city, where she lived with the nuns for a year. He says she hated it; she was the only boarder, woke up with the nuns, had breakfast with the nuns, was schooled by the nuns, nuns nuns nuns. She told Grandpop she didn’t know why he was punishing her. He told her one day she’d have kids and she’d understand.
After a year of picking her up every weekend and bringing her home,
My mother is buried beneath another black stone on another hillside, a few thousand miles east. I don’t visit her grave. She fades a little more each day: I can’t picture her face, can’t remember a time when she was alive. I don’t know her story, because I’ve tried to forget, and because there was so much I never knew. She didn’t like to think or talk about the past, a trait I inherited. Nearly a decade now since she died, and all that’s left of her are a few relics and my own suspect memories. I know more about Wyatt Earp than I do about my mother.
She was born Deborah Ann Bennis in North Philly on August 10, 1957, to teenage parents from working-class Catholic stock. When my grandmother got pregnant at seventeen, my grandfather did the honorable thing: he married her and joined the military. They gave it a shot for a few years, living on airforce bases—West Palm Beach, then Belleville, Illinois—but soon they moved back to Philly and divorced. Neither of them can explain why, and when they see each other now, which is rarely, they act like the lovebird teenagers they once were, although both insist they never should have gotten married. My mother lived with her mom, seeing her dad on the weekends. He would take her to a pond near his house to feed the ducks. He says she was so tiny, they were bigger than her.
My grandmother remarried, had my uncle Tom, and got divorced again. My mother lived with her mother and brother for the next decade, in different houses with different men. That period of time was never mentioned in later years; my grandmother still won’t talk about it except in the vaguest terms. Once, at a family reunion, a distant aunt sat next to me, patted my knee, and said my mother had it rough growing up. “There are a lot of things you don’t know,” she said. But she wouldn’t tell me what they were.
At thirteen my mother showed up at my grandfather’s door in the pouring rain, soaked and frowning, holding a suitcase. She’d said she wanted to live with her father one too many times, and finally her mother had dropped her off. Grandpop was working full-time for a union, living with his siblings in a house they’d inherited when their parents died. There was nowhere to put a teenage girl, so he sent her to a Catholic school north of the city, where she lived with the nuns for a year. He says she hated it; she was the only boarder, woke up with the nuns, had breakfast with the nuns, was schooled by the nuns, nuns nuns nuns. She told Grandpop she didn’t know why he was punishing her. He told her one day she’d have kids and she’d understand.
After a year of picking her up every weekend and bringing her home,
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