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Her Last Breath

Steve Prusky

    Sid has money now. But a few years back, he was broke and living with his acerbic mother, Val, a bitter, puckered-up, sickly 56-year-old woman with little time left above ground. According to the latest ex-ray, Val’s lungs looked like two black chunks of coal culled fresh from the mine. She would either die of advanced COPD, alcohol poisoning, or stage four melanoma—pick one. Until then, Sid’s mother demanded he cater to all her whims and needs till her last breath. Given the arduous nature of those tasks, Sid wouldn’t have complained if she had passed on by lunch.
    Daily, Sid emptied and refilled Val’s portable nebulizer. He helped her on and off the toilet throughout the day and often reinserted her oxygen nose piece—a losing battle. Sid changed the oxygen bottle once a day and her diaper often. He hand-bathed her with a frayed, heavily stained washcloth, avoiding the cancerous sores all over her body. Sid cared for his mother without complaint, but he also had his own issues to wade through.
    Before he turned twelve, a man had sodomized Sid. Sid, the boy, refused to point the finger and say who did this to him, maybe out of shame or fear that the pedophile might find out and come for him. Then the symptoms slowly appeared: self-imposed isolation, anxiety, drug use, and alcoholism. For the rest of his childhood, several psychologists diagnosed Sid as paranoid schizophrenic, and they universally agreed that closed-mouth shame was normal for afflictions like Sid’s. Sid was put on a high dose of Prozac for life and numerous other experimental meds with poor to measured success. But Sid’s mother refused to consider him irretrievably damaged, “He’s just lazy, is all,” she often said. “He’s using what happened to him as an excuse to quit school, avoid getting a decent job, smoke pot, drink too much.” But when it came to women, Sid was a charmer.
    Sid was physically fit, the women loved him for it, and he did his best to love all of them back. He used the gym daily and religiously followed a self-prescribed training regimen; weights, jogging four miles at the indoor quarter-mile track, then breaststroke twenty laps, a mile per day, at the gym’s Olympic-size pool. Sid had deep-set brown eyes, a copperish Calabrese complexion, and thick, closely cropped, curly black hair. He was square-jawed-handsome, gentle, and affectionate. Sid had no trouble enticing women into his bed, but he had trouble keeping them.
    Recently, Sid introduced a girl he had begun to have feelings for to his mother. It was a mistake. Val patiently listened to him slowly list the girl’s redeeming qualities, “She doesn’t drink.” He lied. “Doesn’t do drugs.” Another lie. “Her father is a Detroit Bank and Trust loan officer.” Wrong. He was an alcoholic long-haul truck driver who never stayed home for long. “And her mother works for General Motors in downtown Detroit.” Not true. She was a checkout clerk at a Kroger grocery store in East Detroit, a mile from Val’s house. Fifth Vodka Martini in her liver-spotted hand, unlit Pall Mall slung between her pale lips, she sized up the hopeful wide-eyed girl from her widow’s peak to her huaraches and slurred, “Sid isn’t the catch you think he is.” She drained her Martini. “He doesn’t have money, never has had money, and never will have money.” She took up a hand-held mirror and studied a silver dollar-sized gin blossom that had erupted on her right cheek. “He’s 31,” she said to the mirror, “and works at Goodwill with all the other retards sorting used clothing for minimum wage.” Then, she lit her Pall Mall as a reward for her hard-nosed eloquence.
    Val’s left cheek sagged past her jaw like warmed flesh-colored Silly Putty from a recent stroke. She slobbered, “And he still lives with me, his kind-hearted, loving mother.” Her loosely set dentures clacked as she spoke.
    Sid stared at the floor as the old woman ranted on. “He swills that expensive cognac like it’s Koolaide and robs my purse to pay for it all when I’m not looking.” She didn’t mention his Goodwill pay electronically posted to her checking account every week, along with his monthly disability check. She considered Sid’s money as hers in payment for keeping him near her his entire life. “Now, that said: Is he truly the type of man a fair-haired beauty like you would want in your bed?”
    The girlfriend stood up, quickly waxing indignant. “Sid’s a timid thirty-one-year-old man still living at home. Why is that?” Val brushed the girl’s question aside with a wave of her hand. “He takes the bus to work for lack of a driver’s license. He doesn’t dare be behind the wheel because you’ve convinced him he doesn’t have the confidence to pass the written test, much less the hands-on driving test. The other day, when I asked him if he wanted to see a movie, he said, ‘I gotta ask Mama.’ I’ve seen him cower in a corner at a party. He avoids eye contact at all costs. He’s a peace-at-any-cost man when faced with an adversarial confrontation. You’ve completely emasculated him. Shame on you!”
    “My son was born with no character. Haven’t seen any improvement since.”
    Val set her empty Martini glass on the coffee table and pushed the joystick forward on her wheelchair. The electric motor began to whine in the key of ‘C.’ Her oxygen bottle rattled in tow as she traveled to the kitchen on a mission. Her nicotine-coated larynx deeply growled, “Get me a refill, boy. Chill it longer this time. ” She lit another Pall Mall from the cherry of the last, savoring her re-asserted dominance over her son, and violently coughed until her blood pressure jumped and her face turned red, “And be quick about it, too.” She coughed a few minutes more.
    The girlfriend stood up, face flushed with anger. She shuffled up to Sid, eyes tearing, angry, whimpering, “I’ll find my way out, Sid. But for your mother, you are a keeper in my eyes. I’m sorry, this just won’t work for me.”
    “Should I have Mama call you a cab?”
    “You’re a cab,” the old woman said from the kitchen.
    The girl didn’t hesitate or turn back to reply. She didn’t close the front door behind her either.
    Once the girl was gone, Sid’s mother returned to the living room with two morphine tabs and three fingers worth of Wild Turkey 101 in a tumbler. “Don’t look at me that way, son.” She washed the pills down with the bourbon, lit another Pall Mall from the cherry of the last, coughed up a wad of blood-laced phlegm, and spit it in a tattered, blood-streaked styrofoam cup. Stunned, speechless, Sid went to the kitchen, fetched the cognac, and returned, drinking courage straight from the bottle.
    “Where’s my cocktail, Sid?”
    “I would’ve been better off bringing a stray dog home.”
    “You just let one get away. All she lacked were four paws and a tail.”
    “At this pace, I’ll never leave home.”
    “That won’t happen anytime soon. I’ve fed you, clothed you, and kept a roof over your head all your life. I know women like her. Believe me. She isn’t the one for you. I’m all you got. And I’ll put you on the streets too if I have to, mister.” Her dentures clacked with every word. “Now it’s your turn to take care of me. And you can’t do it with a clingy girlfriend distracting you.” Sid had heard all of this before. “Now, where’s my cocktail?”
    Sid tried to love the old woman, not entirely or unconditionally. He was barely sincere enough to convince her that her version of familial love, including her browbeating and verbal abuse, kept him securely under her thumb. His love for her was a filial obligation, nothing more. But, no matter how he tried, and he had quit trying long ago, Sid could not bring himself to like her.
    Sid and his mother settled into the home hospice routine a month later.
    A visiting nurse set up a self-medicating morphine drip for Val. She replaced the bag three times a week. She taught Sid to change out the empty bag and left him with more than enough morphine to last until her next visit, his mother’s death, or a merciful gesture on Sid’s part.
    Sid had had enough. “It’s your time, Ma. Find God quick,” he said.
    Val looked at Sid and said, “It’s been a fucked life now this!” And she slid into a coma a few hours later.
    Sid took the device that controlled the morphine dosage to her arm and clicked the button four times, twice the safe dose. The narcotic began to slowly shut down her life-sustaining functions, one at a time in descending order starting at her throat, then through her lungs, liver, and finally, her heart. Sid hovered over her and said, “When I go, Ma, I want to go out loaded like you,” and he clicked the device three times more to be sure. She died later that day.
    Sid had his mother cremated. He quit Goodwill and sold his mother’s house at a market-driven inflated price. He cashed out her bank accounts and liquidated her furniture, curios, and clothing at an estate sale. Her high bank balances were a profitable surprise to Sid. He sold his mother’s gold and diamond jewelry and deposited all the money, including his monthly disability checks, in a new bank account under his name only. Sid opened the lid of her urn, waved a wad of hundreds over the darkness, and said, “Look, Ma, I got money now,” as if her soul, if she had one, lay cowering in the ashes.

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