Driving back to New York from the outskirts of DC, where my once difficult aunt and still problematic uncle live in a well-kept, depressing home for unwanted old people, my dead mother is reading a story by Grace Paley.   The sun is fading behind the car like a world disappearing into the past as my mother reads the story like she’s one of the little girls, later women, arguing on that Bronx stoop.

“But Edie!” my mother pleads as Ruth, the perfect Bronx six year-old.   I used to buy my mother journals, try to get her to write, but she always complained that she couldn’t.  To hear her read a story, you’d never believe she couldn’t write one, she reads the stories exactly the way she would have told them.  Plus, toward the end she often spoke happily about how much she loved to lie.  She was pretty creative with some of those lies, too, and sneaky fast.

Eventually tears came to my eyes, driving as the daylight died, my dead mother’s voice coming through the car speaker, reading with such feeling, such understanding.   I used to urge her to write, she’d get defensive, then mad, but it wasn’t like I was writing.   I mean, I was writing, but I wasn’t out wrestling with other writers, proving my prose could kick their prose’s ass.  I wasn’t promoting myself, fighting the brutal fight to get recognized and paid, though my mother would once in a while read some pages I’d give her and smile and sometimes say “this is wonderful”.

“So your dead mother was a fan of your writing, how nice that must be for you,” says the guy standing on my head to get where I thought I was going.

The emotions I felt listening to my mother read, I’ll spare you.   How did I get the cassette?  It was found, by chance, in a box of tapes by my first cousin, my only cousin, really, as he was preparing to put the torch to his childhood home.  His older sister died young and I’ve tried to be more or less the brother he never had, he’s been the brother I grew up lacking.  We come from a very small family, most of the rest murdered en masse or dead of cancer.  Our two mutual grandparents, cancer.  His sister, cancer.  My mother and father and both of my mother’s parents, cancer.

“That’s impressive,” says the writer, eating my sandwich, drinking my single malt Scotch, dainty feet up on my hand tooled Corinthian leather divan.  He has all my stuff neatly arrayed in his condo.

But it’s not the cancer I’m thinking about, though on the same trip we visited a brilliant, patient, gentle man with a wise, slightly reptilian smile always at the ready, with stage four lung cancer, it turns out.  Explains a lot about how he looks.  He looked bad right after the radiation, but, even with his hair grown back, he looks bad now.  But he’s cheerful, taking every moment as a gift and planning on hanging around.  The new chemo is holding the tumors at bay, and he’s thankful for that, even with all the terrible side effects.

As I drove north, musing, I was unaware that a large library had fallen out of my pants pocket, onto the ground somewhere, probably at a Maryland gas station, with a tiny plink I didn’t notice.   My mother would not believe it, all the things that were on three tiny drives on a loop of black cord that together were no larger than a finger.  Maybe 2,000 pages, probably 1,000 tunes I’d recorded over the last few years, 200 short animations, maybe 500 drawings.   I have no idea what was on those flash drives, how to reconstruct them, back them up again.

Sekhnet was all solicitude, too much, really.  Her cousin reassured me that I could recreate the flash drives from my computer, probably.

It was almost like the gift of the found tape, recorded in 1986 when my mother was Sekhnet’s age, was cancelled out by the lost back up copies of my life’s work.   Why I was carrying my life’s work around in my pants pocket is a bitter little puzzle, at the moment.  As for the tape my mother recorded and sent to my aunt, another mystery.  

My mother once offered me $2,000, then quickly $3,000, to reschedule my court appearances and come to Florida for the week my aunt and uncle would be there visiting her, not long after my father died.

“You can’t leave me alone with them,” she pleaded, “I’ll jump out of my skin, just the thought of it.  If you love me, you’ll take the money and come down here when they come.  Please, Elie, there’ll be bloodshed.   Six days!   I’ll pay you!”  There was nothing phony about her desperation.  

The funny thing is, twenty years earlier she’d sent the tape of her reading Grace Paley stories (probably from the book of them I’d given her) to her only sister-in-law, the same woman she probably would have paid 5 Gs to be protected from.   By the way, I earned every penny of that $2,000.

“Your parents both look good,” I told my cousin at breakfast that last morning.   

“Way to kick me in the nuts!” he said, alarmed, echoing my mother’s tone as she bribed me to protect her from them.  “Why don’t you just take this fork and stab me in my right testicle?” he said, offering me the fork.

My uncle is 86, and except for the fact that he’s in a wheelchair after a stroke a year and a half ago, he looks like he could live another ten or fifteen years.  My aunt, a few years younger, also looks good.  Whatever serious health worries she’s had seem well in the past.  She’s steady on her feet, eats with a good appetite, the mild dementia agrees with her.

“I’d trade both of them for your parents, in a heartbeat,” my cousin said.  I nodded and chewed my breakfast, and thought of that ledger on which all our deeds are tallied.