Family Feeling

The Stash

138 The Stash A woman rushed up to Glenna in the parking lot of the supermarket that morning—a pale woman with a blotchy complexion and a mass of pulled-back dark hair. “I thought you were my mother! She passed away last month—for a minute there you looked just like her!” The woman seemed agitated yet somehow proud, as if Glenna would find this news interesting and even complimentary. Glenna pulled the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. The woman wasn’t that muchyounger than shewas herself; how could she possibly be taken for her mother? “I’msorry,”shesaid.Shetouchedthewoman’s shoulderlightly. “Well—have a good day.” Had she really said “Have a good day”? In the store, studying the offerings at the fish counter, she thought of the encounter with annoyance. I could have told her about my mother, she thought, with a kind of lofty bitterness. And what would her mother have done in her place? She’d have put her arm around the woman and said, “She’s better off than we are, hon,” which was the kind of thing she said to the  the stash 139 bereaved at funerals. Kindhearted to a fault, that was her mother. Once in this same Miami neighborhood—not a very good neighborhood , though this was a good store—a raffish-looking young woman had been standing out on the sidewalk at eight o’clock in the morning calling, “Help me! Won’t somebody please help me!” standing there holding a cucumber, and Glenna’s mother, out shopping early, stopped the car and said, “Get in. Where you need to go?” and had driven the woman to the projects. “That was dumb, Mama,” Glenna said. “Anything could have happened to you, anything!” “Pooh. I can tell about people,” her mother said contemptuously . “Did anything happen? No. That poor girl—she was upset. She said, “My uncle’ll kill me if he finds out I was gone all night.’ Holding that cucumber! But I just hate it the way people won’t get involved.” Her mother wasn’t driving any more. Glenna took her mother ’s car out every few weeks—on a fair day, because the roof leaked. “You don’t need to keep the battery up—might as well sell it,” her mother said dispiritedly—as if the bother would be worth the two hundred or so the car would bring. Her mother’s cancer was in remission, but she was not strong. “I’ll never drive any more.” “Sure you will,” Glenna said. She wasn’t sure why she was keeping the battery up; it had simply become a habit. Driving the car made her irritable; she would start thinking of the sickness. For a while it hurt like having three babies at one time, her mother said. She would start thinking of her brother Clayton, who wanted her to look for her mother’s stash of pills, the pills she’d hoarded against the future. Thinking of Clayton and the pills and the pain, she would soon be speeding, trying to outrun it all, and the little car would quiver beneath her. the stash 140 . . . Clayton had fallen out of a plane, and not long after that had been born again. No one knew how far he’d fallen. Twelve or fifteen feet, he said, but Glenna thought he might have tumbled out just after it hit the ground. It was a light plane, piloted by a seventy-one-yearold pilot, one of his mysterious friends, who’d also been banged up in the crash. Clayton had broken some ribs and had a scar slanting above his upper lip; it gave him a supercilious, curled-lip expression. “When they checked you over in the hospital, I hope they checked your brains too,” his mother said tartly. “Going up with that old man, oh Lord.” She loved Clayton beyond measure. In the Navy, Clayton had been trained as an electrician. When he got out after twenty years, he and a partner opened a repair shop. He and his wife had divorced years ago, and Glenna had expected to see him often. She loved him and forgave him for being the favored child; she imagined him sitting at the dining room table after dinner, talking, the way it had been when he’d come home on leave. He had the wide-ranging, quirky knowledge...