By Michael Conniff
Copyright © 2024
All Rights Reserved
By the time Curtis set up camp on her couch Maggie was ready to kill herself.
If not for her two little girls she might have done the deed—things were that bad. If you assumed she was depressed because her mother dropped dead out of nowhere, you would be correct, but that was not the only reason to pull the plug.
Maggie’s real trouble actually began when the antidepressants made her feel that much better. Go figure: up to that point, there was no way in hell she was going to make a baby with Lawrence, not even after living with him for nine years. She had options: Maggie was a good-looking woman with a body, and she was smarter than any of her friends, and she could make you laugh until you cried. Flush the antidepressants down the toilet, and she probably would have cut Lawrence loose snip-snip and moved on with her life. Things would have taken a turn for the better if those pills had not painted a picture of her soul with all the blanks filled in.
Such is the miracle of modern medicine.
After taking the antidepressants, Maggie thought she really loved Lawrence and that he would be the father of her children whether they got married or not. Thanks to the meds, she was so crazy in love at that moment that a plan immediately presented itself. Maggie would keep on running the architect’s office and her mother would watch the kids and Lawrence would do whatever it was Lawrence did on any given day. By the time they went off to Boulder for the weekend Maggie had stopped with the birth control entirely without giving Lawrence the slightest hint. That’s how sure she was. Night and day their sex was red-hot—she was on fire in Boulder—and by the time they were driving back Sunday night Maggie was pregnant with Scout, with Sarah not far behind.
So far, so good—up to and until Maggie’s mother dropped dead in the checkout line at midvalley Whole Foods three months after Sarah was born, thereby blowing Maggie’s chemically-induced child-rearing plans to smithereens. Maggie made the major mistake in mourning of blowing off the antidepressants because she wanted to feel what she was feeling for her mother—she wanted to sink right to the bottom of that black hole. Maggie started to call herself an orphan to her friends because her Pop had passed when she was still in college, and she started to feel like an orphan, too, utterly and completely alone. Maggie looked at the various ways she could off herself, up to and including automatic weapons and swan dives from suspension bridges. She Googled “marijuana overdose” and liked the idea of synthetic marijuana laced with rat poison because it would look like an accident.
Maggie actually started to think about death as her friend.
Of course Lawrence painted Maggie into a corner of her own making even before her mother had the heart attack. He had once been a cellist in the Boulder Symphony but by the time Maggie met him in the valley he had been to Burning Man so many times he had stopped working for The Man entirely. Instead Lawrence had taken up carpentry, a little painting, some electrical work. He wore a bandana over what was left of his hair and occasionally bothered to shave. He wore painter’s pants so splattered you could only guess at the original white. When they found a fixer-upper out toward Ashcroft, the old ghost town, Lawrence figured he could be the general contractor who could do it all, increasing the value of their home by leaps and bounds in the bargain. Maggie wanted Lawrence to watch the kids while she was at work, but that went out the window after he started to bitch, bitch, bitch about being with the little brats all day. In the interests of peace at home, Maggie found a baby-sitter who could barely speak English: she began to consider the advantages of a bilingual education for her children until that made her even more depressed.
***
That was the way things stood with Maggie and Lawrence when Curtis showed up.
He was Lawrence’s brother and he would have been his best man had there been a wedding—but Maggie knew next to nothing about him before he took up residence on her couch.
“Lawrence didn’t tell you, did he?” Curtis smiled. “I’m dying.”
“He forgot to mention it,” Maggie said.
Lawrence tried to explain it away when he got home: how his bro had pancreatic cancer that gave him less than six months to live, how Curtis could not work a lick and was out of a job and had no money, how Lawrence did not want to tell Maggie because she was already so upset—but where else was Curtis supposed to go?
“What about your family?” Maggie said when they were alone.
“Everybody’s broke,” Lawrence said.
“So are you,” Maggie said.
“That’s bullshit,” Lawrence said. “Just because I don’t put on a suit and tie and ride the 9:09 doesn’t mean I don’t have a job. This house is my job. I’m saving us thousands of dollars every week.”
Maggie looked around the house. Lawrence may have fancied himself a general contractor but the place was a godawful wreck. None of the doors inside had frames. The windows would neither open nor close. There was a hole for the fireplace but no fireplace. The kitchen was missing a counter. Half of a wall between the upstairs bedrooms had been knocked down but not picked up. The deck was half-done and therefore unusable and an outright hazard every time the kids went outside. There were incoherent splashes of paint on every wall. The toilet flushed but only if asked to politely.
“When are you going to finish?” Maggie said.
“I’m not playing that game with you. I’m not going to live up to your expectations. Fuck that.”
“I just want to know when you’re going to finish. And how long your brother’s going to be here.”
“Until he croaks,” Lawrence said. “Is that what you want?”
With that Lawrence unbuckled his utility belt, let it fall to the unfinished floor, and stomped away like a crazy man.
***
Maggie Googled “pancreatic cancer” so she knew Curtis was supposed to be in real pain—but there he was turning her couch into a tropical island, chowing down at every meal like a last supper, ordering cable movies on her dime, and generally eating them out of house and home.
Curtis, on his supposed death bed, put on weight: after three weeks a new roll was layered onto his belly and he lost the ability to button his pants all the way up.
“You must be in terrible pain,” Maggie said at dinner one night.
“I guess so.” Curtis sliced himself another piece of pound cake.
“Don’t go there,” Lawrence said to Maggie.
“Where does it hurt?” Maggie said.
“Does it matter?” Lawrence said.
Curtis felt around his new-found belly with his fingertips until he identified the exact spot.
“Right there—ouch!”
“What’s your point?” Lawrence said to Maggie.
“I want your brother to be comfortable,” Maggie said.
“He is comfortable,” Lawrence said. “You don’t need to worry about Curtis being comfortable.”
“Is it getting worse?” Maggie said to Curtis.
“Much worse.” Curtis poked at his own belly. “Ouch!”
Maggie might have managed the whole thing better if only Curtis had not been laughing at everything on TV like he was the laugh track. She knew enough about Curtis now to know he had not been a happy camper in life: his idea of work was to do something menial long enough to qualify for unemployment. She also knew Lawrence’s family was white trash without two nickels to rub together. Lawrence and Curtis and their brothers and sisters did not have a real job between them.
“There’s something else we need to talk about,” Lawrence said in bed that night. “Something that would help Curtis a lot.”
He rolled over on his side and looked her in the eyes the way he always did when he wanted something. In the light Lawrence was sexy bald, not bad-looking, and Maggie could almost remember what she loved about him.
“He’s in real pain,” Lawrence said.
“And?” Maggie said.
“And his doctor—he’s given Curtis a prescription. For medical marijuana.”
Maggie sat up in bed like she had been electrocuted.
“What? What?” Lawrence said.
“You want me to buy your brother drugs?”
“It’s medicine,” he said.
“How much?”
“It’s a few hundred dollars a month. Three or four hundred.”
“Three or four hundred?”
Maggie sat there with her head in her hands.
“Three or four hundred dollars is our cushion every month. Our margin of error.”
“Babe—”
“You can pay for it. He’s your brother.”
“Don’t give me your bullshit. If you were paying me for everything I do around here you would owe me thousands of dollars every month. You would have been broke a long time ago.”
Maggie looked out the window that would not open to the deck that Lawrence had still not gotten to. She looked at the half-painted walls in the bedroom and the doors with no frames. She looked at the paint brushes he had left out in the pan without cleaning. She looked at the mirror still on the floor of the bathroom because he was still not ready to hang it up.
“My brother wants to die with dignity.” Lawrence said. “Does anything else matter?”
***
Maggie knew Lawrence, her Burning Man, was going to start getting high all over again.
Sure enough, after the kids were asleep she could hear him outside with Curtis, the two brothers giggling like little kids. She could have made a major stink about it, but what was the point? By now Maggie had given up hope. With her mother gone she was both the breadwinner and the major caregiver for the kids. Lawrence was nothing but a bum who called her a bitch with a brother without the decency to die.
When they came back inside both Curtis and Lawrence went for the unopened bag of Archway chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. Curtis, still giggling, pulled out a carton of 2 percent milk: with every cookie they passed the milk back and forth, mouth to mouth—until Maggie, in her nightgown, took the carton away from Curtis.
“Hey!” Lawrence said.
“The children need milk for breakfast,” Maggie said.
“Bitch,” Lawrence said it under his breath and both brothers broke out laughing.
“That’s funny?” Maggie said. “You’re a father. You have two daughters. And you’re high as a kite.”
“Higher,” Curtis giggled.
“Shut up, Curtis,” Maggie said.
“Don’t talk to my brother like that,” Lawrence said.
Curtis walked outside and started to poke at the cell phone Lawrence had bought him with Maggie’s money.
“Your brother needs a second opinion,” Maggie said.
“My brother is dying,” Lawrence said.
“Your brother’s high as a kite and fatter than a pig. He never felt better in his life.”
“He’s really hurting.”
“He’s not hurting at all. Why should he be? He’s got the best deal in town.”
“Are you calling my brother a liar?” Lawrence said.
“Either he gets a second opinion,” Maggie said. “Or he’s gone.”
Maggie went up to bed before Lawrence could get in his usual two cents. She heard the two brothers downstairs giggling and mumbling, mumbling and giggling: she was almost asleep when Lawrence came into bed and stuck it in her the way he did. Fool me twice: with the birth control pills, there was no way Maggie was going to have another baby with this man.
“That was nice, baby,” Lawrence said when he was finished with his business. He rolled over on his side and Maggie knew something else was coming.
“Curtis already got the second opinion,” Lawrence said.
“Really?” she said.
“He’s just barely hanging on,” he said.
“Who did he go see?”
“Someone at the hospital.”
“I need to see it,” Maggie said. “On paper.”
Naked and high as he was, Lawrence boinged out of bed like he was bouncing off a trampoline.
“You want my brother to get a fucking letter from his fucking doctor. Is this the second grade?”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Maggie said.
“No fucking way I would ask my brother for proof,” Lawrence said. “This is a matter of trust. Either you fucking believe him or you don’t.”
“I fucking don’t,” Maggie said.
“Don’t push me,” Lawrence said. “I’ll take you for everything you’ve got.”
“We’re not even married.”
“Common law,” Lawrence said. “I’ve been to a lawyer. You don’t have a leg to stand on in Colorado.”
So Lawrence had been to a lawyer: he had crossed that line.
“Bitch,” Lawrence said. “Cunt.”
***
Sick as it was, Maggie started to think about how death in the end could be her friend. She wanted to welcome her pain like a comfort, to wear it like a string of pearls, strange as that sounds. She wanted to love Scout and Sarah as long as she could so they would always remember their mother’s love no matter what.
The next morning Curtis was playing on the couch with the Terminator III doll Scout and Sarah wanted nothing to do with.
“So you’ve been lying?” Maggie said.
“I wouldn’t say that at all,” Curtis said.
“What would you say?” Maggie said.
“I just hit a bad patch,” Curtis said. “I just needed a breather is all, just like anyone else. Please don’t tell Lawrence.”
“What about my breather?” Maggie said.
“What can I do to help?” Curtis asked.
“Leave,” Maggie said.
“We’re going to Burning Man,” Curtis said.
Maggie had never been happier to see them go. She went to the best sandwich shop in town for turkey and tuna sandwiches so Curtis and Lawrence could get off on the right foot for their trip. She packed up their pickup with all their favorite munchies: Mallomars, cheese sticks, Ruffles, cupcakes, and nothing of nutritional value except Cliff Bars. She loaded up the cooler with their favorite imported beer. When it was time for them to go, Maggie waited for Scout and Sarah to say goodbye to their father and uncle before she leaned in on Curtis’s side. She handed Curtis a small wrapped package.
“Synthetic marijuana,” she said. “For the ride.”
“No shit?” Lawrence said with his big shit-eating grin.
“No hard feelings,” Maggie said to Lawrence and Curtis both before she waved them away.
***
Scout and Sarah were heartbroken when they heard Curtis had some kind of seizure behind the wheel. Both brothers were killed instantly when they went off a cliff outside Black Rock City and landed in the pickup snout-first.
That was all she wrote.
Maggie would never need her meds again. Her depression lifted and might never come back. With the lower overhead and the life insurance on Lawrence, she could start all over with the girls in an unincorporated village down the road from the ghost town.
Maggie never felt more alive, like she had finally done something with her life. Can you blame her?
