Aunt Vicki
My brother Joe and I shared a bedroom for eight years. Whenever either of us complained about it, Mom was quick to remind us that for thirteen years she and her sister Vicki didn't merely share a room, they shared a bed. From the time Aunt Vicki graduated from her crib until Mom got married, they slept side by side.
Money was scarce. One of Mom's favorite memories was the Christmas she received a "dolly" that she knew Memaw and Papaw could never afford, but somehow Papaw made it happen.
When Aunt Vicki "became a woman", she had no idea what was happening. Mom taught her the facts of life. I have no idea who taught them to Mom; Memaw wasn't comfortable talking about "such things."
Mom and Dad were married on Aunt Vicki's eleventh birthday. It was a practical decision. It was Good Friday, and in Winston-Salem at that time, Good Friday and Easter Monday were both holidays. They would have a four day honeymoon without Dad having to take time off work. Aunt Vicki wasn't happy, as her special day had been hijacked, but she got over it long before Mom and Dad exchanged vows.
I don't know what happened at the family home after Mom moved out. Maybe nothing. But for whatever reason Aunt Vicki was convinced that she was defective, and therefore unlovable. I experienced similar feelings as a gay teen and know the black hole of despair that such thinking leads to.
She was considered too young to babysit when Sister was born. She was 14 when I came around. Sister is twenty-three months older than me. A newborn and a two-year-old were sometimes too much for Mom, and Aunt Vicki often took care of us to give Mom a much needed break.
She doted on me. By the time I was three I doted on her.
We moved from Winston-Salem, NC to Washington, D.C. when I was three. Mom was a stay-at-home mother, and Dad's job was at an entry level with pauper pay. A friend told him that AT&T was hiring in D.C. Dad drove there one week to apply for a job and was hired. He worked for the phone company until he died. Shortly after we moved to Washington, Memaw and Papaw and Aunt Vicki moved to Mount Airy, half an hour from Winston-Salem.
Aunt Vicki was 16 or 17 on the only visit I really remember. I was four years old. I had only fuzzy memories of our visit last summer, mostly of Vacation Bible School at Memaw and Papaw's church.
At the time I didn't know why we were visiting now as it wasn't summer, which was when we usually went. We sat on her bed in the bedroom that was her own. She smoked and I sucked on one of those god-awful Christmas candies that Memaw kept out all year. I don't know how long they'd been in the bowl on her coffee table, but they were all stuck together. I rapped the glob of candy with a butter knife until I broke off manageable pieces.
Aunt Vicki got a reel-to-reel tape recorder out of her closet. My eyes lit up. "Is it going to blow up?" I asked, not hiding my eagerness.
"Let's find out," she said. She pushed a couple of buttons, and the reels began rotating. She pointed the metal microphone at me. "Sing your favorite song."
"There was a farmer had a dog, and Bingo was his name-oh. B! I! N! G! O!, B! I! N! G! O! B! I! N! G! O! and Bingo was his name-oh!"'
When I finished, Aunt Vicki turned off the tape recorder. "Are you ready to see if it self-destructs?"
I nodded. She duh-duh-duh'ed the Mission Impossible theme song while she stopped the tape and rewound it. She hit play; and her voice, albeit tinny, came from the speaker. "Sing your favorite song." Then I heard a voice that I knew was mine, though it didn't sound 100% like me. I was blown away. When I looked up at Aunt Vicki her grin was a twin of my own.
She let the tape keep going after, "and Bingo was his name-oh." We both held our breath waiting for a plume of smoke that never came. We laughed and she hit the record button again. This time I think I sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Again, we held our breath when the playback ended. We must have spent two hours doing this.
During those two hours she smoked three or four cigarettes. Each time after lighting the cigarette she'd take a drag and then French inhale the same the smoke that escaped her mouth. After reinhaling it through her nose, she’d exhaled through her mouth. Mom and Dad never did anything this clever when they smoked. I was mesmerized the first time she did it. She winked at me when she saw my reaction.
"Can I try?" I asked.
She smiled like I'd asked if I could drive the car and handed me the cigarette. I put it between my lips and blew. The end burned cherry red, but when I stopped treating her Winston like it was a balloon all I blew out was air.
She took it back and laughed and told me it was a good try. After that, every time she lit a fresh cigarette I asked to try, and every time I blew on it instead of sucking on it. I would later have a similar confusion over the phrase "blow job."
The fourth time Aunt Vicki handed me the lit cigarette I finally sucked on it. I didn't inhale the smoke I had sucked into my mouth, so I didn't even get a buzz, but when I blew that smoke out of my mouth, Aunt Vicki looked stricken.
She snatched the smoke from me and glanced at the closed bedroom door. "Never EVER tell your mother about this!" She was so frightened of what Mom would do to her. Mom went to her grave not knowing my first cigarette was fourteen years earlier than she'd always supposed.
Aunt Vicki also kept that secret from Mom. I wouldn't find out until many years later that she was also keeping a secret from me on that visit.
I didn't know that Memaw and Papaw had asked us to come. They wanted to prepare my parents for the impending shame and ostracization; Aunt Vicki, still in tenth grade, was pregnant. She had found a way to, temporarily at least, feel loved. She was considered "easy" almost since starting high school. Today her high school peers would just call her a slut. She was very popular with the boys, not so much with the girls. None of her relationships lasted long. Boys were eager to have sex, but averse to dating the school tramp. Each break-up left her feeling unlovable again, and she actively sought out another boy to pretend he liked her so he could get in her pants and make her feel wanted.
Memaw and Papaw's warning was prescient. It was the worst for them at church where they did their best to ignore the pointed glances and whispers. In 1967, abortion wasn't an option. Even if it had been, her parents wouldn't have allowed it. Sadly, Aunt Vicki had an undiagnosed case of syphilis. Her daughter, diagnosed with congenital syphilis soon after her birth, was born blind. "God was punishing the baby for my sins." she said years later. She felt horrible, being responsible for God's curse on an innocent baby.
I'm going to digress for a moment. Mom and Aunt Vicki were raised in a strict fundamentalist house. Church brought no solace to Aunt Vicki. To paraphrase Martin Luther, she believed in God; she feared God; but she didn't love God and was convinced God couldn’t possibly love such the irredeemable sinner that she was.
Two years later Mom was pregnant with my brother Joe and was about to pop. Mom wouldn't learn to drive for another six years. Dad took the day off work to take her to an OB/GYN appointment. Aunt Vicki was visiting and was recruited to babysit Sister and me.
We lived on the second floor of a five-story walk-up. My best friend Robby lived on the third floor, right on top of us. We liked having similar names but didn't like what the names were, so when we played together, we called each other Jim. Every afternoon I asked Mom if I could play Jim and Jim with Robby.
When I asked Aunt Vicki if I could go upstairs to ask Robby to play outside with me, she said, "I don't know him or his parents. Stay inside today."
I'd put up with a lot the last month: a mother whose belly threatened to explode, a Sister who wouldn't shut up about her "new sister" that was on the way, and a father who spent way too much time going over the family budget and trying to rob Peter to pay Paul for the upcoming added expenses. I'd be damned if anyone was going to keep me from playing Jim and Jim.
"No!" I shouted and opened the door to the hallway. I'd made it as far as the stairs when she picked me up, not like a swaddled baby but vertically. My legs dangled several inches off the ground while we stared each other in the eye.
The more I struggled to get free, the tighter she held me. My legs were flailing, and I accidentally kicked her in the belly. She loosened her hold on me, and I kicked again, as hard as I could. She made a noise like Tupperware makes when you burp it and let me go.
I'd forgotten we were at the top of the stairs. I went ass over teakettle down the concrete steps.
When I hit the bottom, I waited for the stars to go away before looking up to see if Aunt Vicki was in pursuit.
She was in a heap on the landing where she had crumpled after I kicked her in the abdomen. I ran upstairs but didn't stop to check on her at the second floor. I kept on going to the third floor and pounded on the door to Robby's apartment. Mrs. Dewy answered. "What's wrong?" she asked in alarm when she saw my face.
"I killed Aunt Vicki!" I sobbed. She told me to wait with Robby until she got back, and she went downstairs. She was gone a long time.
She looked grave when she returned. Yep; I'd kilt her all right.
"She's okay," Mrs. Dewey said. If I was wrong about that, maybe I was wrong about being in trouble. "But I think you're in a lot of trouble.” So much for that. “You'd better stay here until your parents come home." So, I got to spend the day with Robby after all, though not how I had planned. We didn't call each other Jim once. I sat on their balcony watching the parking lot.
I saw Dad's Buick pull into our spot. "Mom and Dad are home," I told Mrs. Dewey. "I guess I better go home." She sadly nodded in agreement. I turned to Robby, "I'll miss you.” Dad was waiting for me in the stairwell. When he saw me coming downstairs, he unbuckled his belt.
After my spanking he told me to go to my room. Aunt Vicki followed me, looking sadder than Mrs. Dewey had. She spent the next half hour apologizing to ME because I kicked her twice in the belly. She held me and stroked my hair while I cried myself to sleep.
I was seven on our next trip to NC.
Before we left home mom made several dozen peanut butter crackers and put them in a couple of empty Wonder Bread bags. Every meal break on that trip was at a Horne's restaurant. In addition to burgers and breakfast fried chicken they sold peanut logs, hard candy, coloring books and other items to tempt the traveler. The first time we passed one I read the sign and said, "What's hornies?" I naively pronounced the E. In second grade I had no idea what 'horny' meant. Mom and Dad thought it a real knee slapper and from that point on all five of us called it Hornies, but I was still too dumb to understand the joke.
When we got to NC, we spent a few days with Great Aunt Alma and Great Aunt Lois. Now we were staying at Great-aunt Rosamund's house for 4 days before going on to Aunt Vicki's. After a few days there, we would head back to Florida. Aunt Vicki couldn't wait, and she and Uncle David drove to Burlington to see us. The rest of the family stayed at Aunt Rosamund and Uncle Howard's, and I went home with Aunt Vicki. My cousin Eddie was Aunt Vicki's third pregnancy. She had another baby out-of-wedlock. This second daughter was also given up for adoption. When she was in her 50's Aunt Vicki told Mom she was terrified that a stranger would knock on her door and say, "You're my mama!"
When I was six, she was pregnant again but this time the guy married her. She lost the baby after one of his many beatings. Memaw threatened to kill him graveyard dead if he wasn't out of the house in ten seconds. Not long after they divorced, she was pregnant by a married man who disavowed all knowledge of her. Another man married her and became my Uncle David. He always knew that Eddie wasn't his child, but he raised him as if he were. I don't think Eddie knows even today. There is no chance he will find it out here. He's 100% MAGA and doesn't care for my politics or sexuality. And to be honest, anything beyond Beverly Cleary is above his reading level. A couple of years after they married, they had a child together, my cousin Jeff.
I loved the time I spent with her on that trip to North Carolina. Uncle David had a huge collection of paperback comics compilations: B.C., The Wizard of Id, Dennis the Menace, Beetle Bailey and Peanuts. I spent hours reading those books and sharing my favorite comics with her. She laughed at what I showed her. I felt special...until Eddie, two years old, handed her a book at random and pointed to a comic. The laugh she gave him was the twin of the one she'd just given me. I guess she didn't think mine was that funny, either.
Mom, Dad, Sister and Joe came a few days later. Sister was nine. I don't know if she was just a brat or felt superior (a lifelong trait). She treated Aunt Vicki with such disdain, but with just enough ambiguity that Aunt Vicki never took it as Sister intended, but I knew what she was doing, having received my share of for years because I wasn't a duck (See Insincerely Yours, link below for details of her multiple attempts to murder me.)
At the end of the week, we packed up the station wagon and set off for home. As we drove, Sister began talking smack about Aunt Vicki. "I can't believe Vicki's house is so messy. Vicki can't even make iced tea. Vicki this, Vicki that, Vicki has two bastard babies."
I sat in silence but soon was quietly weeping. "What's wrong?" Mom said from the front seat.
"Sister is being mean! She won't even call her 'Aunt Vicki' but just 'Vicki'. It's like she doesn't think of her as family."
"I don't," Sister said. Instead of chastising Sister, Mom defended her, reminding me of all of Aunt Vicki's faults. I did get my childish revenge, though I got in trouble for it. Halfway through South Carolina, Sister got sick. Dad had to slam on the brakes and pull over to the side of the interstate. She opened the car door and yawned the technicolor rainbow on the shoulder of the road.
We got off the highway at the next exit. Dad drove to a mini mart and took Sister inside to rinse out her mouth in the bathroom sink.
The rest of us took advantage of the unexpected stop to empty our bladders and Mom bought us all Cokes.
When we got back to the car Mom said, "Bobby and Joe, y'all sit up front next to your dad, and I'll sit next to Sister."
"I call window!" I shouted. Joe slid over the bench seat next to Dad and I got in next to him. Mom got in the backseat behind Dad and Sister was behind me. While Mom coddled Sister, I reached behind me and pushed down the door lock.
Mom still had half a Wonder Bread bag of now stale peanut butter cookies. She kept foisting them on Sister. "The crackers will settle your stomach." The only thing the crackers settled was who was in charge of Sister's tummy.
"I'm gonna throw up!" Sister shouted a few minutes later. Dad frantically pulled off onto the shoulder again. Sister reached for the door handle while the car was still moving. When she pulled it, nothing happened. She kept jiggling the door handle. I took pity on her and was about to reach behind me to unlock the door, but I wasn't fast enough. She hurled all over the backseat window and caught a bit of backsplash.
That's for AUNT Vicki, I said to myself.
Mom and Aunt Vicki wrote to each other once a week. No internet back then, no cell phones, and long distance was an expensive luxury that was only used for special occasions.
I never saw Mom's letters to her sister, but she let me read the letters from Aunt Vicki as a way for me to practice reading cursive. Her letters were handwritten on a steno pad and were ten to twelve pages, front and back. The letter I was reading was a long one with four pages devoted to bowling. She and Uncle David enjoyed it and went often. On her last game she scored 163. The way she went on about how it was the best game of her life, and David was so impressed, yadda yadda, I assumed that was a great score.
I decided to write her back so I could practice writing in cursive as well as reading it. It was only a page, and not compelling reading. Hello, how are you, I'm good, I liked your letter. Congrats on the bowling score. I've never been bowling but if I go, I will ask you for tips. Love, Bobby.
Mom mailed it for me. A week later Aunt Vicki wrote to me, instead of Mom. Sister and Joe had never received a letter in the mail, and I lorded it over them. Even Sister was impressed, though did snort that it was "It’s only from Vicki."
She'd outdone herself. Fifteen page, front and back, bowling tutorial. I read it all because it was from my favorite person in the world, but it was as riveting as a sewing machine repair manual.
David and Vicki's marriage was a disaster from the start. He treated Eddie as his son but always made sure Aunt Vicki knew what a saint he was for raising her fourth bastard. They fought a lot. One night while Aunt Vicki was bathing two-year-old Jeff, who was David's child, he came into the bathroom in a rage. I was never told what set him off and couldn't begin to guess. He accused her of loving "that man's kid more than you love mine. Fine then."
And then the psychopath shoved Aunt Vicki away from the tub and pushed Jeff's face under the water. Aunt Vicki tried to pull him away while Jeff thrashed. Uncle David only pushed her away. She grabbed a bottle of shampoo and hit him in the face repeatedly until he released Jeff.
Aunt Vicki and Jeff went to the hospital by ambulance. Mom said that Uncle David was in the mental institution, which I thought was a think tank. He was there several weeks.
In spite of this, they stayed married.
Jump ahead a few years. Dad is dead, Mom was transferred from Boynton Beach, FL to Birmingham, AL. The Navy kicked me out when they learned I was gay. Now that Mom was in Alabama, I didn't have a home in Florida to go back to. I came to Birmingham and stayed with Mom while I looked for a job and a place to live.
Aunt Vicki's boys were grown, and she was ready to divorce Uncle David but didn't have the money to pay a lawyer, so Mom paid him. This was still pre cell phone, but the nation was no longer limited to AT&T for long distance. Dozens of new companies competed for customers, and rates plummeted. Mom and Aunt Vicki no longer exchanged letters now that they could afford to call each other. They didn't do it often because Aunt Vicki was rarely home. After the divorce she dated a long-distance trucker and went with him on his route.
Aunt Vicki called Mom collect from a truck stop in Texas, just to say hi and catch her up on her cross-country adventures. Mom told Aunt Vicki that my enlistment had ended, but didn't tell her why, and that I was staying with her for a while. Aunt Vicki and I hadn't seen each other in years. She asked if she could come see both of us and of course, Mom said yes. She took a Greyhound bus from Houston to Birmingham.
I was Aunt Vicki's favorite nephew. Hell, she preferred me over her own children, which didn't mean she didn't love them, she just loved me more. They had never been interested in singing to a tape recorder or how to be a better bowler. To be fair they had also never kicked her in the belly.
I said to Mom, "I need to tell her I'm gay."
Mom agreed but reminded me that if I ever told Papaw, it would kill him.
I smoked back then. Mom didn't allow it inside and I don't blame her. When I wanted to smoke, I went out to the backyard deck. Mom had a glass patio table where I kept an enormous ashtray. Aunt Vicki was also a smoker. She hadn't been able to smoke on the bus or in Mom's car on the drive from the bus station to the house.
After our hello hugs, I took her to the smoking area and we both lit up. I was nervous knowing I was about to drop a bomb shell. She had been raised in such a strict fundamentalist household that I wasn't sure how she'd react. I didn't want to hit her with it first thing, so we just chatted while we smoked.
I didn't want to put it off too long, though, so after supper I asked her if she'd like to join me for a smoke.
We sat at the patio table swatting at mosquitoes and puffing on our cancer sticks. She still French inhaled the first few drags, something I had never been able to master. I took an especially long drag on my cigarette and blew it out in a sigh. "I have to tell you something," I said.
"Okay," she said, looking concerned.
"I'm gay."
"But you have a daughter. What makes you think you're gay?"
"I have sex with men," I said putting it in terms she'd understand.
Now it was her turn to take a long drag. After a pause she said, "If you're gay, you're gay, I guess. Can I ask you a question?"
Here it comes, I thought. Are you the husband or the wife? Or worse, questions about anal sex. I braced myself. "Shoot."
"How do you get the taste of cum out of your mouth? I've tried every brand of mouthwash and toothpaste and nothing works."
I stubbed my cigarette into the ashtray and pushed my chair back from the table. "I think I hear Mom calling me."
She continued driving cross-country with whatever trucker she was hooking up with. Still looking for love? Just really liked sex? I certainly do. But things changed when Papaw died. The funeral was at our Episcopal church, but the eulogy was given by Papaw's Baptist preacher. Every time he mentioned that Dan was with Jesus now, Aunt Vicki looked nervous.
She was still convinced that her sins were such that she could bathe in the blood of Jesus every night for a year and God would still send her to a fiery hell. She'd been able to push those fears aside with the Scarlet O'Hara approach. "I won't think about that now. Tomorrow is another day."
The death of her father served as a reminder that she didn't have an infinite supply of tomorrows. It was time to get right with God.
She stopped sleeping around. She bought a single wide at a trailer park and gave up the life of a trucker’s girlfriend. She joined the Son-light Baptist Church. It wasn't affiliated with the SBC or any other national organization. They spoke in tongues and were one step away from dancing with snakes. Sermons were full of Just As I Am, Jesus provides salvation for all, but they were also filled with graphic descriptions of the torment in store for the "unrighteous."
When Eddie went to prison for selling cocaine, his wife and two children moved in with Aunt Vicki. The four of them lived in the 650 square foot mobile home for eight years until Eddie was paroled.
Cousin Jeff was doing better. He was a Seabee in the navy until he dropped something on his foot that caused enough damage he was given a medical discharge. He walked with a cane after that. He received a disability payout every month and Theresa was a nurse making good money. They had no children. Aunt Vicki didn't like Theresa. Whenever she and Aunt Vicki disagreed on something, Jeff always took his wife's side rather than his mother's. She told Mom that she had proof Theresa was slowly poisoning Jeff with arsenic. She no longer wrote or called me. Now that she was born again, she was less interested in mouthwash recommendations and more interested in telling me I had to repent of my perversion or spend eternity wailing and gnashing my teeth. When I changed phone carriers, I requested a new number but didn't give it to her. We communicated via Facebook. Not mine, as I was tired of all the Leviticus memes she kept posting on my wall. I messaged her through Mom's Facebook. I always abandoned the chat when she tried to save my soul.
Not long after Eddie was released from prison, Theresa was diagnosed with leukemia, according to Aunt Vicki. She told Mom she'd been wrong about poor, sweet Theresa and the arsenic. I think she was counting down the days until there was no one to compete with her for Jeff's attention. Six months later Aunt Vicki reported a miraculous cure. I have no idea if Theresa really had cancer or not. No one in that family was on speaking terms with the truth sometimes.
Theresa weighed over 400 pounds and a week after the miraculous leukemia cure, she fell over dead of a heart attack.
Then came Covid. My cousins and aunt were convinced Covid was a Chinese plot to wipe out America but were also convinced that Jesus would protect them. Masks were for chumps and vaccines were for people who wanted microchips in their bloodstream so the government could track their every move.
I wasn't surprised when Jeff contracted the disease. He was on a ventilator at the VA for weeks. The doctors were worried about keeping the respirator tube down his throat and into his lungs for more than a few days. They performed a tracheotomy and ventilated him via the trach.
He beat the odds and recovered, though he still had the trach. I never understood why until I learned he told folks his disability wasn't for dropping a box of anvils on his foot, but because he'd been shot in the throat by a sniper. The trach gave credence to his story, at least to the folks he told it to. I wasn't aware that Al Qaeda snipers were hiding in Gulfport, Mississippi, which is where he was stationed.
Whenever Aunt Vicki felt neglected, she had a heart attack. One day she had six of them. She'd call her kids and tell them she was having chest pains and was dying. They begged her to go to the ER, and she turned off her phone without replying. Then Eddie and Jeff would post all over Facebook that they can't reach their mom who is having a heart attack and when they went to her trailer her car wasn't there. They were frantic, which is what she wanted.
This is how they were raised. This is the behavior they learned to mimic. Jeff never had a heart attack, but when he and Aunt Vicki fought, he'd intentionally cough out his trach tube, then gasp that he couldn't breathe and was dying. When Aunt Vicki was suitably terrified and apologetic, he'd "manage" to reinsert the trach and take some much needed breaths.
In April the two of them were going somewhere together, maybe the grocery store. Anyway, they had another spat and he "accidentally" coughed out the trach tube.
Only he didn't catch it. It fell in the floorboard where it was obscured by the pile of Big Mac boxes, McDonald's bags, and enough empty soda cans to fill a shopping cart. He didn't display the feigned desperation he usually did. He was panicking, desperately going through the fast-food trash looking for the trach.
He asphyxiated in the front seat.
By this time Mom was in a nursing home. She still had lots of lucid moments, but her dementia had progressed to the point she couldn't use her cell phone. She'd forget how to answer it, how to hang up, and she called random numbers at all times of the day and night. It was a difficult decision, but I took away her phone when she kept calling strangers at 3 A.M.
Aunt Vicki missed talking with her sister daily, as they had become accustomed to. The calls usually started with "top this." Mom would say she had a cold. Aunt Vicki topped her by saying she had bronchitis. Then Mom topped HER and said she had pneumonia. When Aunt Vicki said she was stuck inside because of the rain, Mom would say she was stuck inside because she was being held prisoner in a nursing home. You get the idea.
When I visited Mom on Mother's Day I asked if she wanted to talk to Aunt Vicki on my phone. I'd considered that before, but that would mean she'd learn my number and subject me to endless doomsday predictions, but I knew how much both of them missed their daily chats.
I called Aunt Vicki and put it on speaker phone and placed it on the bedside table over Mom's bed. When Aunt Vicki said hello, Mom said, "Hey Vicki."
You could hear the joy in Aunt Vicki's voice. "Hey sugar!"
They chatted for a bit and then Mom said, "Happy Mother's Day!"
"It's not a happy Mother's Day for me. My son died last month."
That didn't go over well with Mom. "Well, MY son died yesterday!"
"I'm sitting right here!" I said.
"Then it was Joe who died yesterday."
I said, "None of your children is dead!"
"Well, they ought to be! I can't let her win!"
Dad died before I could ask him about his life and family. Mom was too far into dementia to be able to tell me much about her side of the family. After Mom died, I had only one source. I asked her to send me all the memories she could think of about Mom, about her, about growing up, anything.
She sent one of her twelve-page letters that were full of new information about Mom. She said nothing about herself unless it was related to Mom. That's how I learned that Mom told her the facts of life in their shared bed, and that Mom had won a Betty Crocker Homemaker award in high school, and several ribbons for dressage. I grew up eating Mom’s food until I took over kitchen duties in eighth grade. I called Aunt Vicki and told her there was no way in hell my mother won a Betty Crocker anything. She explained it wasn’t necessarily for cooking, but sewing, cross stitch and other “domestic sciences.”
The two of us now talked on the phone about once a week. We carefully avoided politics, sexuality, and religion. Things were good with us. She’d quit smoking when she joined Son-light Church but was still diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease a couple of years later.
She called me one day when I was in an online meeting at work. I was on camera so I couldn't answer the phone, and I let it go to voicemail. When the meeting ended, I played the message. "Hey Bobby, I just wanted to talk to you. I guess you're working. Give me a call when you can. I love you, baby."
I called her back after work but there was no answer. If it was important she'd have called me back, so I forgot about it. I’d call her on Friday, our regular day to chat.
Two days later her neighbors were concerned that she hadn't shown up on her front porch to feed the birds. When they heard frantic barking from inside her trailer, they called the police to do a wellness check.
They found her on the bathroom floor, nude. The bathtub was full of cold water. It was determined that she died soon after she left me that voicemail.
It kills me that I couldn’t answer the phone when she called. I know I didn’t have any choice. Even so, I really wish I’d been able to take that call.
I have no idea what happens to people when they die. The one thing I do know is that Aunt Vickie is not languishing in hell. She had enough of that when she was alive.
A lesson in loving one another. <3
Beautiful writing xo