Just Another Family

Just Another Family Lori Ostlund (bio) My father spent the last year of his life discontinent. He'd always had trouble with prefixes. The day after he died, I entered my parents' house—the house I grew up in—to the smell of piss, the humid night air thick with it. "It's the mattress," my mother explained, and I said, well, then the mattress had to go. I tried to haul it out right then, just dropped my bag and went down the hallway to their bedroom. I started with the soda bottles. There were five of them, scattered beneath their bed, three with urine still sloshing around inside from when my father had relieved himself during the night. I used a broom to maneuver them out while my mother watched, lying on the floor on the far side of the bed, peering at me across its underbelly and demanding that I call them pop bottles. She was sure that I was saying soda to bother her because she said there was no way a person could grow up saying pop and then find herself one day just thinking soda. As I knelt beside their bed, I felt something hard beneath my right knee. "Why are there cough drops all over the carpet?" I asked, using the plural, for I could see then that the floor was dotted with them, half-sucked and smooth like sea glass washed up in the dingy blue shag of my parents' bedroom. "Your father coughs a lot at night. He sucks on them until he's just about to doze off, and then he'd spit them on the floor," my mother explained, her sentence beginning in the present tense but ending in the past, because that's the way death worked, the fact of it lost for whole seconds, whole sentences. "I used to pick them up in the morning, but he'd get after me for wasting perfectly good cough drops." "Bettina's not here yet?" I asked. My sister lived just an hour away, so I was annoyed that she had not arrived, but I was also admitting defeat: the mattress was too much for me to handle alone. "You know she has a family," my mother said, by way of excusing her absence. Rachel and I had been together eight years. We had a house, jobs, two cats, and a dog, so I thought of myself as having a family, also. "You know what I mean, Sybil," my mother replied. I did know. She meant that I didn't have children, but mainly she meant that two women together was not a family. "Well, if she's not here in the morning, I'll call a neighbor to help," I said, but [End Page 48] my mother did not like this plan. She felt a mattress soaked with urine was a family affair. My father was dead, I said, so what did it matter, and she said, "Why can't you say 'passed away' like everyone else?" This was a good question. From where she lay on the floor on the far side of the bed, she announced that she was putting me in my old bedroom. "So you'll be comfortable," she added, and I did not say that I had never been comfortable in this room and could not imagine I'd start being comfortable in this room now, nor did I remind her that Rachel would be arriving the next day, which meant that I would not really be in my old room long enough to get comfortable because Rachel and I always slept in the basement, in the rec room that my father had built years ago with teenagers in mind. My parents did not approve of us sharing a bed, and the rec room was a compromise: it allowed us to sleep together, a technical win for us, but together on separate sofas, unlike my sister and her husband, Carl, who slept upstairs in her old room, in a double bed that my parents had purchased for this very purpose. "Why are you lying on the floor?" I asked, bending low to peer beneath...