Cause of Death by Laura Dembowski (sci fi books to read .TXT) 📕

Dearest found out that I had met Zack for dinner the other night instead of going to the annual homeowners’ meeting for our subdivision. Did she seriously think I was going to go to that meeting? In the twenty years we’ve lived here, neither she nor my dad has ever gone to the damn thing.

It was really my fault. I had stupidly paid the bill, literally tearing it out of Zack’s hands, with a credit card. This shouldn’t have been a big deal, since I normally pay the bills, but for whatever reason, she just had to check the statement.

“Where were you last night?” she asked, in this menacing tone. I try not to read too much into her tones, since there are so many of them, and they have far too many meanings for me to keep straight.

“The meeting. I told you. It was boring.”

“Who else was there?”

“I don’t know. That lady from down the street and that old couple from the court down there,” I said, pointing vaguely in the direction of a house.

“You’re lying to me. You were at Medium Rare.”

“I was not,” I said. Maybe I should have told the truth, but in the moment, sticking with the lie seemed like the right course to take. “I was at the meeting.”

“Lana, don’t lie to me. That is one thing we don’t do in this house. We don’t lie.”

She’s lied. She lies all the time. I wanted to call her on it, but this conversation was already snowballing down a mountain with no sign of stopping.

“Fine; I was at Medium Rare.”

“With whom? I hope not one of those online dates. Women who meet men from the Internet end up as stories on the five o’clock news, not madly in love.”

I thought about telling her that I’d met Dad there, and he probably would have backed me up, but for some reason I chose not to. Maybe I didn’t want to lie anymore. Maybe I wanted to piss her off, blow the doors off the underground bunker I feel like I am trapped in. I still don’t really know.

“I met a friend. He’s actually kind of my boyfriend, and he got me a job interview.”

She sat down on the sofa, one hand covering part of her face as though she had just been told I had cancer rather than that I’d gone on a date.

“I . . . how could you do this to me?” she said. “I thought we had a good thing here.”

“We do, and I’m not running away from you; I just want to branch out a little. Don’t you want me to branch out? Wouldn’t you like to have a grandchild one day?”

“No. I don’t want you to leave me. I should just kill myself. Or you. Probably both of us.”

A similar statement had gotten me to quit my job in New York, a job I’d loved, to leave my friends and move back home. But this time, I wasn’t going to let it stop me. It’s not her right to say that to me. Plus, I’m not really going to leave her; she’s just being overdramatic as usual.

Now here we stand in the kitchen, her, drinking her grape juice. She’s gone through almost a whole bottle today. She becomes more upset when I tell her the interview has gone well and that I’ve looked at nearby apartments so I can have a place of my own.

I knew she would be upset, but this screeching, really, is enough to burst an eardrum. I know she won’t really kill me or herself. She doesn’t have it in her. She talks a big game, but not much else. In fact, she’s probably more upset at the thought of losing the game than losing me. She didn’t get her way. That’s scaring her more than me moving ten minutes away from her.

“Don’t say that, Mom,” I say calmly, but firmly.

“I mean it. What do either of us have to live for if you leave?”

My eyes nearly bulge out of my head. She could take trips and volunteer, she could even get a job if she really wanted to force herself to meet new people and not be alone. Me? I can get a job, grow as a person, start a family.

“Are you kidding?” I ask. “We have so much to live for. This isn’t funny, Mom, not at all. You’re scaring me.”

“I want to scare you into staying.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t want to scare anyone you love into doing anything.”

“You don’t know what I want.”

“What the fuck do you want, Mom?”

“I want you and your father here with me, and if I can’t have that, I don’t want to live at all.”

“I’ll come over for dinner every night to start. We can go shopping every weekend. It will be fine.”

She makes a disapproving snorting noise.

She’s not going to scare me. I know for certain that I have to leave now. I go up to my room and call Zack.

“Hey, what’s up?” he says.

“I have to get out of here. Can I come stay with you for a while until I can find my own place and figure out my life?”

“Yes, of course. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. It’s just—how did things turn out like this? What did I do?”

“Nothing; it’s fine. This is just a blip on the radar. Everything will be fine.”

“Thanks. That’s what I needed to hear.”

I hang up and start packing up my room. I put headphones on and just groove to the music while I fill my suitcases and duffel bags with as much of the past twenty-seven years as I can fit. I will come back for the rest another time. For now, I have enough to get started on the next phase of my life.

All of my clothes and shoes and handbags are expensive designer goods I could really do without. It’s beyond me why a handbag should cost four thousand dollars. Or a pair of shoes, one thousand. What are