Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  “Hi, Dale,” I said, standing and tightening a thin hospital blanket around my shoulders.

  He didn’t even look at my mother. He crossed the room and latched his skinny arms around me and mumbled apologies into my hair. For a moment, I thought he had started to rock me in his arms, as if I were a child, but then I realized I was the one carrying his weight as he swayed drunkenly on his knobby legs. I could smell the cheap beer on his skin, the cigarette smoke on his clothes.

  My mother’s nurse appeared in the window, her low brows and downturned mouth wordlessly asking, Is this man bothering you? Should I ask him to leave?

  I wanted to say yes, but I shook my head no.

  Dale leaned back slightly and gripped my shoulders with his hands. “You look just like your mom,” he said, “such a pretty little thing.”

  It was and is difficult for me to understand why my mother loved Dale—what kept her going back. His touch revolted me, and I had to pry myself out of his arms, keep my mother’s bed between us, to tolerate him there. He was the last person who saw my mother alive, and for that alone I needed him.

  Dale staggered to my mother’s bed and slowly took one of her hands in his.

  “What happened to my mom?” I asked, knowing only the pieces the hospital had given me—that my mother had had a seizure, and Dale had brought her into the ER; that she had suffered a heart attack during that hospital visit.

  “She was livin’ down in the park with her friend Heidi,” he began, his head nodding under its own weight.

  My mother had been homeless; the reality was startling. In our last conversation, my imagination populated their lives together with old and familiar props—in their garden, a radio played country music, and a case of beer warmed under a golden Florida sun. I never considered an alternative. But the image of my mother that I’d carried in my head for six months was wrong. I lost sight of everything in front of me and tried to conjure her other, actual, life—begging in the sun, sleeping on the ground, and living on beer and bologna sandwiches like the ones I helped my grandmother make at church when we packed meals for the homeless. I would draw smiley faces in mustard on the bologna slices, then flatten the smileys with a piece of white bread.

  I stirred and asked him why she had been living in the park.

  “Your mom was real sad after Ron died.”

  “I know,” I said.

  But I didn’t, know. When my mother called to tell me about Ron, she seemed as sad as she had always been. But maybe I hadn’t listened well enough. I let myself believe she was okay without me, and I let months pass without asking how she was doing or how she was holding up. And then she was gone, and there was no phone call I could make, no bus ticket I could buy, that would bring her back to me.

  Dale and I stood across from each other, silent. He swayed forward and caught himself on the bedrail and made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh, wasn’t quite anything. “Your mom went back and forth between us so many times…you know, I actually started to like the guy. But how could he? How could a man do something like that over money?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He told me my mother moved in with him after Ron died, but she didn’t get along with his roommate, so she left again. She lived in the park with her friend Heidi. But a few days before she died, she moved back into his house. She quit drinking, cold turkey. She was sick and refused to eat anything. She had a seizure, and then another.

  “I’ve been through them with her before,” he said, and slow tears rolled down his cheeks. “I’d just hold her tight, you know?” He scrubbed the tears away with the back of his wrist. “She drank too much,” he said. “I always told her she drank too much.”*2

  “I know,” I said. But I thought, it would have to be bad—really bad—for a man like Dale to tell you that you drank too much.

  He stopped talking. He stared down at my mother, considering, and then leaned over to give her a kiss. It was a long, slurping kiss, his lips feeling around her respirator like a catfish digging in the mud. His hand, the one still clutching the bedrail, bumped a button that sent the mechanical bed’s motor whirring.

  “Dale,” I said over the sound of my mother’s bed rising. The longer the motor ran, the more anxious I became. “Dale,” I pleaded. “It’s time to go.”

  Dale had offered me a place to stay the night and a chance to go through my mother’s things, so I gave him a ride home. When we walked into his house, Dale’s roommate was sitting in the living room watching Jeopardy!. Dale offered introductions, but his roommate hardly glanced up. His roommate’s dog, though, trotted across the floor and bumped into my legs, his tail beating the leg of the wooden table that filled the front room.

  “That dog loved your mom,” Dale said.

  I have always been nervous around dogs—I don’t speak their language—but I smiled and patted the dog’s head and stroked his ears.

  The house smelled like cigarettes, and the tile floor was off-white, tracked with dirt. I sat down at the table and focused on the burger I had picked up on the drive and I tried not to look at all the things that collected in the corners of the room.

  I couldn’t understand how my mother had lived in a house like this. When my mother visited me in Pennsylvania, she cleaned my kitchen from top to bottom, scrubbing the inside of my oven and reorganizing my cabinets. She wiped down every surface; swept and mopped the floor. I’d never learned how to clean to my mother’s standards—I always seemed to miss something. When I washed the dishes, I left the silverware in the bottom of the sink. When I swept, I left crumbs along the baseboards. But Dale’s house might have been—must have been—cleaner when my mother still lived there.

  After I finished eating, Dale showed me into the room he and my mother shared. The room was empty except for a long dresser and two twin mattresses: one bare mattress on the floor, and the other propped against the wall. He opened the closet, stacked high with suitcases. “The things hanging at the top are mine,” he said, rubbing the side of his neck, “but everything else is hers. She left a couple things on top of the dresser, but I didn’t touch nothin’.”

  I thanked him, and he wandered back into the living room.

  I began with my mother’s dresser. She had a few stereotypical Native American knickknacks: a dream catcher; a painted clay vase, accented with rabbit fur; a wooden chalice, carved with buffalo. It was impossible to know where she had gotten them—if she had brought them with her from the reservation, or if she had received them as gifts. Regardless, I wrapped the vase and chalice in T-shirts and set them aside.

  One of the dresser drawers was full of cassette tapes, but I left all of those behind.

  In Dale’s closet, I found my mother’s suitcases. Cross-legged on the floor, I opened her diaries for the first time. I paged through her most recent diary, digging for clues about the last few months of her life. She wrote about breaking her clavicle and being in and out of Dale’s house. She snuggled up with someone she called “Jimbo.” The way she wrote about the men in her life reminded me of a young girl gushing over her first loves.

  I read the sentence “My things are all fill with Bed Bugs,” and as soon as I did, I kicked my own bag toward the door, away from the suitcases that surrounded me. I kept reading, but I could feel them, phantom bugs, crawling down my arms and through my hair.

  “How you doin’?” Dale asked, poking his head through the door.

  I said I was fine and avoided his eyes. I shuffled through a stack of letters and set them aside.

  He moved past me and casually flipped the mattress that had been propped against the wall onto the floor, next to his own. “You can sleep here when you’re ready,” he said. “This is where your mom slept.”

  I stared at the mattresses. Before I arrived, he had mentioned a spare room, with a spare bed. I stared at the mattress and wondered if Dale would dare try
to wrestle me into the shape of my mother.

  “Do you have bedbugs?” I asked suddenly, and I began to stack my mother’s things—her diaries and her photographs and her letters—into the smallest suitcase, a navy-blue carry-on.

  “Bedbugs?” he asked, and he chuckled quietly. “Maybe one or two. But I got a little gecko in here that keeps ’em in check.”

  “Actually,” I said, zipping the suitcase closed, “I have a friend in West Palm I haven’t seen in a long time, and she asked me to come stay with her tonight.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding surprised. “You sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I stood and started stacking the rest of my mother’s suitcases back in his closet, one on top of another. A little lizard suddenly darted out of the closet, past my feet, but froze between Dale and me.

  “There he is!” Dale yelled, and he stomped one foot toward the lizard.

  I stood motionless as he tried to herd it back into the closet with his hands.

  “Get back in there before the dog gets ya. He’ll eat you up!”

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to beat him with my fists. The lizard scurried under a pile of clothes, and I threw the last of the other suitcases into his closet, shoved it hard against the wall, and grabbed my bag and the carry-on off the floor. I carried them to my rental car, and Dale followed me outside. I closed the carry-on inside the trunk.

  “Will you come back tomorrow morning before you leave?” he asked as I slipped into the driver’s seat. He balanced his hand carefully on the open door.

  “Of course,” I said, forcing a smile.

  He waved me off as I pulled out of the driveway and drove down the street. Legions of stray cats crisscrossed the road. I stopped after a couple of blocks and called a videogame friend who had offered to pay for my plane ticket and a hotel room when I first learned my mother was dying. I had been too stubborn, or maybe just felt too guilty, to accept.

  I told her what had happened with Dale; I told her I felt unsafe. I asked her to find me directions to the nearest bedbug-free hotel. “Anything,” I begged.

  She promised to call me back.

  As I waited, a man rode a skateboard through a cone of streetlight. A dog galloped a few feet behind him. Its leash dragged on the ground.

  I worried I was taking advantage of my friend. I worried I was no better than my mother or my sister who, my grandmother claimed, used people for money and only thought of themselves.

  The man and his dog appeared and disappeared farther down the road.

  “I made you a reservation,” my friend said when she called back. She gave me directions to a Hilton near the airport and told me to call again if I needed anything.

  At the hotel, I tried to hand the concierge my credit card, but she only smiled. “It’s already paid for.”

  As soon as I walked into the room, I shook off my clothes and left them beside the door. I walked into the bathroom and filled the tub with water as hot as I dared. When I climbed into the water, my knees and breasts broke the surface, and my skin pebbled in the air. I imagined I was back in the ocean, the sun warm on my face. I let my head sink beneath the water and squeezed my eyes shut and listened to the rush of blood in my ears, which sounded just like the ocean’s waves.

  I set my alarm for seven. I slept soundly and did not dream.

  The next morning, I kept my word and drove back to Dale’s house before the hospital opened for visitors. We sat at the table in his living room, and he cracked open a can of beer.

  He told me about how my mother took care of him when he had cancer; she was there with him through the diagnosis, the sickness, and the chemotherapy.

  I watched a palmetto bug crawl across the table in a shaft of morning light.

  “I really loved her,” Dale said with tears in his eyes. “I don’t think I realized that until after she was gone.”

  I followed him from the house into the backyard, where his roommate was using the edge of a shovel to scratch weeds from between the patio tiles.

  “He’s starting the garden,” Dale said, gesturing to a row of potted plants. “We got some jalapeños, and some tomatoes, and”—he laughed, nodding at a small marijuana plant—“you know what that is.”

  I smiled a smile that didn’t reach my eyes and walked to the edge of the patio. The would-be garden was an empty patch of dirt, baking in the sun. The dog dug deep furrows in the earth.

  “He tracks that dirt all over the house,” Dale said, pointing at the trail of muddy paw prints that led through the back door. “Your mom used to call them ‘dog flowers.’ ”

  I looked again at the mud blooming on the ground and tried very hard to see what my mother had seen.

  * * *

  —

  I MAIL DALE a small album of all the photos my mother had taken of the two of them together, and then I stop answering his calls. His number appears on my phone every few days for a couple of weeks, and then it stops.

  *1  I find no record of that day in my mother’s diaries. At the beginning of November, she mentions a yard sale with Ron. On November 14, 2012: “Running out of money. Call back to unemployment to make sure everything done. Ron & I are sick. 4 beers left so Ron let me drink it.” On November 21: “Moving freezer food and can goods out of house.” On November 30: “Went to Police Department to get report of death for Ron.”

  *2  February 1, 2013. “I sold my DVD’s so we could have beer money.”

  I would still now want him with me

  BEFORE MY NEPHEW was born, Eileen moved from her old apartment into one in Red Lion, near our grandmother and our aunt. I helped her move in before I left. We painted matching portraits of snails to hang above my nephew’s crib.

  Eileen still didn’t drive, so while I was home, I sometimes gave her rides to and from McDonald’s, where she worked most nights.

  Her boyfriend, the father, moved in.

  “His mom is Native,” she told me one afternoon as I drove them to the grocery store.

  “Athabaskan,” he said, from the back seat. “A crazy Indian, like yours.”

  I find out, years later, that she got pregnant the night he broke into her apartment; the night she found out our mother and father had slept together on that graduation trip. Eileen was overwhelmed. She didn’t love him—had already left him—but she felt alone and vulnerable. It was easy to fuck him, to forget.

  I visited my sister again a few months after I moved to Boston, a few weeks after my nephew was born. Eileen had to teach me how to hold him. His socks slipped off his little feet. He had our mother’s eyes and her ears and her nose.

  I don’t know how long my sister was clean. My grandmother told me that her boyfriend started dealing, and then that my sister started dealing, but there was no way for my grandmother or me to know. A year later, Eileen was charged with possession and tampering with physical evidence; I would find the public records on York County’s website. The courts sentenced her to probation for twelve months. She started attending NA meetings and talking about God. But not long after, she started using again. She broke probation, and the courts sentenced her to confinement at YCP. She surrendered custody of her son. She’s just like your mother, Grandma would have said; would say.

  A few weeks later, Eileen sent me a letter. “I seen dad in jail,” she said. She described walking back to her cell from medical, and on the way, spotting my father looking hungover and lost in his prison jumpsuit. “I was hoping I’d run into you,” he said, wearing the weird, knowing smile he got when the universe aligned the way he always envisioned it should. In her handwriting, large and sharp: “It freaked me out.”

  But before her letter even arrived, my father called to tell me his version of the same story. When he told me he saw Eileen in jail, I assumed he had visited her, but he told me he ran into her in the hallway. He had been picked
up on a drunk-and-disorderly, and spent a few days in jail.

  I pried for more details, because I was confused—didn’t they separate the sexes?—but my father didn’t want to elaborate.

  “Do you think I could come and see you in Boston for a couple of days?” he asked. His voice sounded small.

  “Of course,” I said, without thinking.

  Instead of calling to tell me he’d bought a ticket, my father called from the bus to tell me he was already on his way.

  I was supposed to meet a guy from OkCupid for a first date that night—I should have canceled, but I didn’t. We met at a bar a few blocks from my apartment. I ordered a taco and a strawberry margarita.

  When my date mentioned he smoked weed and relaxed with a beer every night, I panicked. “I don’t really drink,” I said, prodding my straw against the bottom of my margarita glass. “Alcohol makes me nervous.”

  “Really,” he said.

  It wasn’t a question, but I felt compelled to elaborate. Most people don’t talk about family trauma on first dates, but as my father’s bus tore through the miles between Pennsylvania and Boston, the distance I had placed between my adult life and my childhood felt distressingly small.

  “My parents were alcoholics,” I began. I told him my mother left when I was young; that my grandmother had adopted me and my sister, but she had let us live with our father for months or years at a time.

  “Maybe we should talk about something less serious,” he suggested.

  But once I started talking, I couldn’t stop. I told him about the time my father, as a teenager in Colorado, had shot a man on a ski slope but pled criminal insanity and served his sentence in a psychiatric facility. In his twenties, in California, he’d tried to set fire to a building so the owner could collect the insurance money, but he was too drunk or too high and set himself and his truck on fire instead. Later, in his late twenties, when my sister and I were little and still living with him on Nokomis, he called the White House and threatened to kill the president if they didn’t let him speak to the president on the phone. The FBI showed up at our door and hauled the three of us to the police station. They called Grandma to come fetch us girls, and when she arrived, she begged them not to press charges against my dad. “He isn’t going to hurt anybody,” she told them. “He’s just a drunk.”