Sissy Spacek Chemo Patient (pt 3).

My grandfather killed my mother, Jackie says to the Hispanic woman at the folding table in the Laundromat: it’s just the two of them and twenty dryers turning over; the woman has accepted Jackie’s company without comment, folding towels under the humming bare lights without pause. That’s right, Jackie says, he just came over one night and shot her right in the middle of dinner. Nobody thought he’d ever really do it because he’d been saying he was going to kill someone for years, usually when he drank which was any time he had his eyes open. It was sort of a family joke, I suppose. Grandpa’s in the whiskey again, better get on your bulletproof vest. My aunt got us after that and never let a day pass without letting us know what a burden we were. She was getting two hundred bucks a week from Social Security, but you’d never know it. She starts taking pictures of us in the bathroom and when we’re getting ready for school, and then videos with those kinds of cameras you record things on. When we were freshmen, and it was already starting to get around that Jackie Rose liked to wear her hair at night when no one was watching, some football playing fool gets his hands on our childhood greatest hits, and what a joke it was for everyone to enjoy.

The Hispanic woman clucks her tongue; Jackie hops up on the table.

My aunt would tell you that she threw us out because she saw us in bed, she says, but she was making tapes of us for weeks before she decided to catch us. And those got copied too, we were movie stars. We lit out for Chicago, and we only had thirty dollars between us, and you know the kinds of decisions hungry people end up making. You do it little by little, just a few times until you save up, because you think it will be like in the movies, see, with men who are very nice to you and always pay. We never tried to get jobs but that doesn’t make us bad people, we were just kids. We hooked up with a couple of girls and going in on a room, and oh my, Shawn and I thought we had it beat, counting our money and dreaming. We both got our asses beat, we both got the clap, and there were nights that I’d hear him in the bathroom trying to take a shit or throwing up because of what some guy did to him, and I’d think, what are we doing? And then in my head I’d hear the gun go off and I’d see my mother drop on top of the spaghetti and I’d stop trying to think about anything at all.

Mi madre fue asesinada por su Hermana, the woman says, going to a dryer and coming back with an armload. La familia es la más peligrosa delgada del mundo.

Jackie gets down off of the table and starts to say something but does not, leaving the Laundromat. Leaves blow over her feet; it’s jack o lantern weather and she decides she’s going to walk, keep moving like a shark until the sun comes up. It was penicillin, she tells the dark, he got sick and one of those girls had a bottle of pills she got from the doctor to kill a rash and Shawn took them, and we didn’t know that we are allergic. And I can still feel you, baby, all the time, feel you around me and in me, and walking out the door and waving to me and never coming back, and I hate you a lot for that. La familia es la más peligrosa delgada del mundo, she says, walking into an alley as black as the end of time, disappearing. Esa es la santa verdad.