Page 101 of Snake

One fucking weekend of his nearly forty years. That was all the time they’d been together. One fucking weekend, right before the last corner of his life’s foundation fell to dust. Almost like Autumn had brought his mother’s suicide to town with her.

He was all but dead inside, yet the sound of her name enlivened every pain he’d ever felt. She was a parasite, burrowing into him deeper than he could reach.

“Cox,” Badger prompted. “Will it be a problem?”

Yeah. Yes, it would. But he shook his head.

In the end, nothing fucking mattered.

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~oOo~

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“Do what you want with it. I don’t give a shit.”

Tally gaped at him. “Danny—”

That name was a spear shoved into his brain stem. There was nobody left in the world he wanted calling him that name. “Cox.”

“Okay, enough.” With a great heave of a longsuffering sigh, Tally set the small jewelry case on the kitchen table. The bits of gold stitching in the faded embroidery across the top blinked in a strip of afternoon sunlight. She set her hands on her hips and gave Cox a hard look. “I’ve called you Danny since we were kids sitting on the street in the summer playing tar pits driving our Hot Wheels though the melting strips of tar. It’s your name.”

He didn’t give a shit. “Call me Cox or don’t call me anything.”

“Fine,” she conceded. “Cox. You have to make some decisions. The estate-sale guy is coming in the morning, and anything you don’t take or make a note that you want to keep, it’ll all go into the sale.”

Cox knew that. He deeply regretted taking Tally up on her offer to help figure out the house. He should have just doused the whole thing in gasoline and struck a match. He glared at her and said nothing.

Tally set her hand on the tattered box. “This is your mother’s special jewelry. Things she loved. Her engagement ring is in here. The promise ring your dad gave her in high school. That red stone pendant that was her mother’s. The locket with Billy’s and your baby hairs in it. These are her special treasures. When I was a kid, she used to bring this out when I was here and show me each piece, telling me its story.”

A banked fire had smoldered in his chest for weeks, throwing out occasional tongues of flaming pain to knock his breath away. One hit him now, and he closed his eyes while his insides bubbled.

He felt Tally’s hand on his arm and yanked it away. Opening his eyes, he glared at her. She gazed back, her eyes lively with pity and frustration.

“Then you take the box,” he told her. “I don’t give a shit.”

With another infuriating sigh, she collected the box and took it to her growing stack of shit she was taking from the house.

And that was fine with him. She could have whatever she wanted. He just wanted this finished.

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~oOo~

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The day of the ‘estate sale’ (like his mother had ever owned a damn thing grand enough for her leavings to be called an estate), Cox felt especially foul. His presence was required; something to do with the estate sale people’s insurance or bonding or both (another point in the should-have-burned-the-fucker-down column), so he had to stand there and watch strangers and acquaintances alike rifling through his mother’s shit, his father’s shit, his brother’s shit, even his own shit from when he was a kid. Fucking strangers wandering in and out of every damn room, talking over the merits of his mother’s furniture, the glasses and dishes that had filled her cupboards, the clothes and coats and bedding and towels in her closets, the ancient, ignored tools and crap in the garage. Even his rusty fucking Huffy ten-speed, handed down from Billy.

None of it was worth shit, but it pissed him off nonetheless to have strangers pawing at it all. Fucking maggots, digesting the rotting leavings of the dead.

“Cox?” A sweet, feminine voice spoke his name softly, like a question.

Cox turned from the living room window, where he’d stood for he didn’t know how long, watching the maggots digging through the tables on his mother’s front lawn.

Abigail Freeman stood there. She held an empty glass bottle in her arms, so big she had to hug it to her body, her fingers linked. That old thing, about two feet tall and two feet around, with a narrow neck and a mouth as small as one on a gallon of milk, had stood in the corner of the garage as long as he could remember. It had been full of spider webs and old spider sacs, but the estate-sale people must have cleaned it out.

He looked at Abigail and waited for her to say what she’d come in to say.

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