What I Didn’t Inherit

Not once, not even when she was dying, did my mother’s mother touch me. At least, so many years of imagining the glass temperature of her grayed skin and I came to remember it this way. Absence does this, recalls the wind where there was likely a lipsticked peck on the cheek, a pat of the shoulder on the way out the door. My mother refused to buy her cigarettes on principle, though she still smoked a pack a day, even after the doctors found tumors in her lungs, especially after. Once a year in the summer, my mother drove my sisters and me to the house where she lived by herself. We ate McDonald’s on her back patio, tossed pellets to the koi fish trapped in her man-made pond. She bought us a single basketball, a single board game, a single container of bubbles to blow. Every inch of her wallpaper held smoke, made my eyes water, and on the drive home I tried to picture what she did when it was just her, what anyone did when there was no one to notice. When I was old enough to find the black-and-white album of my grandfather’s mistress, I wanted to apologize but I wasn’t to blame and she wasn’t alive. Once, scared to leave a man she didn’t love, my mother told her mother if she didn’t marry him, she knew she’d die alone. Her mother barely looked up from the paper, raised another cigarette to her lips, said there were worse things than being lonely.