I won't eat it, I'll never eat it. The blood red gush and purple mass of whatever it is my sister pulled out of that can. It isn't cranberry sauce. Why can't it just be cranberry sauce? I am not the oldest, I was once the youngest. Three of my sisters are setting up the table. It's big, and oak, and four of us can squeeze onto the bench.
My oldest sister doesn't live here. She has her own family in her own house. She is maybe too drunk to make dinner, or she is waiting tables. Her son plays next to me, hopping from one yellow square to another, again and again on the sandy, scuffed floor. I pretend he is my brother.
Our sisters talk for a time around the table, and among the clinking glasses and the splashes of sliding silver, in-between asking me to get out the milk, they talk above my brother and I about a foster child we never met who lived in my mother's house before me.
She, apparently, loved beets. She called them cookies. She pilled them in her mouth and asked for more cookies. She, apparently, was a fuckin idiot.
I by contrast am 7. I can tell the difference between something that ought to be cranberry sauce, yet isn't and what definitely passes as a cookie.
I am headstrong and heart sore, ruckus, rude and dirty mouthed. At the park or or on the street, I cuss like the sailor they tell me my father wasn't, though a city boy he wouldn't pass for, either. I'll smoke my first cigarette two years from now, in a circle with my older sisters on the old tennis courts above our house. I will cough, and it will burn while they laugh, and I will swear that next time I'll do better.
I can't say if they are smokers now. Each has children and entire lives on another content. But then they were my guardians.
We made cookies on the weekends, from scratch, on the same counter where our old dad used to pound ground beef into patties for the grill. He was always lecturing us, that one dad.
He's gone, I guess. They all are. All the dads we ever had are gone. But what they taught us about men sticks around, like cookies you make from scratch on a Sunday.
Today is not a Sunday. Our mother is not here to make dinner. She is working third shift. She lives with us again.
She left us once. I don't remember it fondly. I had to get used to it. I had to understand it much later: my mother as a young girl, getting pregnant at sixteen to avoid a home life worth leaving, getting mixed up with the sort of men you don't bring home to mom because they are too much like your father. Ending up with a kid like me 17 years, and whole lives later.
I had to grow into forgiving her for how she left me with a dad who wasn't my dad to try a profession that wasn't waiting tables in a city that wasn't in our town. Though she was not here now, save in spirit, and in the fridge. She was keeping the lights on. She was passing night meds at some hospital, she was wearing white shoes. Her heart was too big to waste on such small children, or her head was too stupid and she wasted her self on such small men.
Beets aren't cookies, they aren't even terrible, but they weren't hot dogs and macaroni, so my brother who was not my brother and I handed them to the dog, and when that didn't work we spit them into napkins, and when that didn't work we pretended we needed to use the bathroom and fed them to the toilet.
My brother who is not my brother is dead now. I deal with it every day.
My fathers who are not my fathers aren't dead. But my
father is. I only thought of it once, his death, and how it could have been--on the day I found out he had been dead for six monts. Maybe I think of it sometimes in February, or when I hear certain songs. But is hard to miss what you never knew.
My mother who was really my income does not work now. She has three kids left. They were my kids once, at night and at dipper changing time. Now they are not. I dream about them sometimes as they were: small and perfect, jubilant and good natured. I remember what it is like to be a teen in that household, but they do not think I do. I am sorry every time we speak for the comments I don't make, for the waves I won't wake because I am not convinced they will help.
I am like my mother. I am here to help. Tonight, I had beets for dinner, in a salad, mixed with corn. I laughed when I told the story about eating them, getting rid of them, or getting beat and sent to bed.
Beets or beat, heh, that sister only beat me once. Twice if you count the time I called the cops on her. My eye was swollen and my shirt was torn, but wasn't like the time she dragged me up the stairs by my hair. Mom was away at nursing school then, and there was no one to hear my screams.
Forgive me, I've been too honest.
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