You Can Say You Knew Me When by K. M. Soehnlein Read Free Book Online Page B

family attic swelled with the past: boxes of moth-eaten clothing, much of it sewn in that little room at the end of the hall, and the sewing machine itself, which hadn’t been donated to the Salvation Army after all but sat here surrounded by boxes of patterns; the small plaster replicas of the Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David, once displayed on end tables in the living room, and the end tables themselves, carved from an ugly mustard-tinted wood; the electric typewriter, flecked with Liquid Paper, on which I’d tapped angsty poetry in high school; an outdated stereo system that my father always called the hi-fi; a German knife set that I suspected might have some value. How difficult could it be to let go of a card table—a cheap piece of junk when it was bought and now an actual piece of junk, wobbly, broken, its veneer peeling off? Or a faddish appliance—a fondue set, a Crock-Pot, a carpet broom? How about a plastic Christmas tree, originally a convenience for parents of small children but over time a tacky embarrassment?
    The more I took in, the more I understood the difficulty: Everything bore my mother’s imprint. Each worthless item was something she’d chosen, no matter how long ago, or had used, no matter for how short a time. Or else it contained a dormant memory that needed only the focus of my attention to activate: the time Dee and I dressed those statuettes in Barbie doll clothes—Malibu Venus, David in madras—then waited for Dad, sighing through his nightly perusal of the newspaper, to notice our alteration, the two of us finally erupting with so much suppressed laughter that Mom dashed in to see what was wrong. Or the time a birthday party devolved into a food fight as my friends used cheese and chocolate fondue for spin art on the kitchen table. Mom was furious at first but eventually relented, flinging a forkful of wet chocolate into my hair.
    I came upon a stack of boxes, each labeled, in black Magic Marker, LEGAL , and used my fingernail to slit one open. Inside was everything related to the lawsuit my father brought against the hospital where my mother had died. I pulled out a few manila folders and scanned the contents: research into heart disease, photocopies of my mother’s medical history, correspondence between doctors and lawyers. Medicine and law, two languages good at obfuscating meaning. I dug some more, not even realizing what I was looking for until I found it: a file folder marked SETTLEMENT . I read a memo from my father’s lawyer, spelling out the situation. After weighing all the evidence, the judge in the case was prepared to decide against him, to give him nothing. My father was advised to accept a settlement of one hundred thousand dollars, enough to pay his attorneys and the private investigators they’d hired and have a little left over for himself, and to promise, in exchange, to drop any threat of appeal. A hundred thousand dollars was more money than I’d earned in my entire life, but considering the many years he’d spent on the case, and the fact that he’d once spoken confidently of millions of dollars in damages , my father must have seen this as next to nothing. I couldn’t quite believe it had collapsed this way, a decade-long odyssey abandoned with the scrawl of “Edward Garner” on the bottom line. The lawsuit had never been about the money for him, but about getting someone to take blame for his wife’s death. And no one had.
    I hadn’t thought about any of this in years—the shock of her death, the way it extinguished in him what little mirth he’d had. (Never again would he laugh at something as silly as the Venus de Milo in a bikini.) I felt an ache behind my eyes, along my neck, and a pressure pulsing in the air around me. I should have gone to New York like I’d wanted. I could have been ambling in and out of galleries, shopping for cheap sunglasses on St. Mark’s Place, smoking a joint with old friends while we reminisced about the shit