Excerpt: Count on Me by Ann Cavlovic

Excerpted with permission from Guernica Editions

I found my mother bent over a washroom sink, hands gripping the sides, gown bunched up around her waist. A young and heavily tattooed nurse stood behind her, wiping her vulva with a cloth. I froze. The nurse methodically wiped every fold much like I would when changing Zoe’s diaper. Except here there was the rasping sound of cloth over pubic hair. My mother turned to see me. The soft flesh that hung from her arms swayed as her torso shifted. “Don’t grow old, Tia. It’s no fun.”

I stepped back and banged into a doorframe. “I’ll see you … I mean, I’ll be back soon.”

At the nursing station staff hustled between monitors and pill dispensers. The last time I’d been in that hospital I was on another floor giving birth; the nurses were like surrogate mothers, kind and steady when I dug my fingers into a warm hand with each contraction. Today, the constant crackling of announcements over the loudspeaker brought on, strangely, a wave of nostalgia.

In the waiting area, where Tristan sat beside his girlfriend Gloria, I was reassured by his calm expression. He’d moved back to our hometown, Kingston, after I fell pregnant (as the Francophones put it and an accurate description of what happened). But Zoe was now a year old and I hadn’t seen as much of Tristan as I’d hoped. Apparently, Gloria was having some trouble with her teenage daughter and it preoccupied them both.

Gloria’s short blonde hair puffed around her face. I’d only met her a few times but she looked older than I remembered.

“She can’t go back to living in the house,” Gloria said, in the way of people who don’t feel the need to say hello.

I turned to my brother. “I thought it was just gallstones?”

“Mom’s an alcoholic, it turns out.” I was no stranger to Tristan’s diagnoses of her failings. But this was new.

“What? Dad’s never said anything about alcohol.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m in shock myself.”

Tristan wore a belt with a giant buckle, a new style for him. I was still getting used to the plumpness in his cheeks. He’d been tall and skinny his whole adolescence and early adulthood, like me. When he moved back home last year, in his mid-forties, he’d filled out enough to partially conceal the scoliosis that twisted his right shoulder upward.

“She’s probably been drinking ever since Mr. McGuinness started coming over,” he said, gazing at a poster on the wall. “Worst mistake of my life, that.”

Your mistake? I couldn’t speak, in disbelief that he could so casually invoke that name at a time like this.

“Oh, and just to be on the safe side,” he said, “we took all of Mom’s jewellery to our place.”

“Safe?” But I was wondering why they’d do that and why they’d bring it up here.

“Dad asked us to!” Tristan’s voice rose and his eyebrows drew together. “He didn’t want to worry about it.”

I had a hard time believing Dad would have cared. When it came to our mother’s things, Dad usually made a gesture like chucking a frisbee, which suggested that it could all be tossed to the curb. That would have included the musty suitcase under my mother’s side of the bed filled with little boxes of jewellery containing everything from plastic beads to designer pieces. She’d made it clear that she planned to split all her possessions equally between her two children, except for the jewellery, which was to go to me, the daughter. It was the sole inequity.

“Okay. I could store it at my house,” I said.

“No. Dad says she’s in massive debt. Looks like we’ll have to sell the jewellery to pay it off.”

“Wait. Can’t we talk about this?”

“She’s not dead yet,” Gloria said to the air.

“Tia, this isn’t the time to be thinking about yourself,” Tristan said.

“I’m just asking why you’re deciding things without me.”

“She’s not dead yet,” Gloria said, louder.

Tristan launched to his feet. “Why does everything have to be about you?”

Something between us erupted, something deep-seated. It must have been a sight: two tall, brown-eyed redheads hollering out of faces we’ve been told look almost identical despite the age difference. Neither of us said anything rational. He was accusing me of caring more about things than people while I was trying to comprehend my mother’s situation, and like a dim-witted puppy I leapt for the stick he was waving.