Your Dead Mom by Amy Stuber
Associate editor Zoa Coudret on today’s bonus story: Amy Stuber's “Your Dead Mom” is an affecting yet funny portrait of loss and how we deal with grief. The levity in the beginning transforms into something tender and moving that will remain with the reader long after they've finished this story.
Your Dead Mom
A month after my mom dies, a month during which I have no one to talk to about the best pink Himalayan salt crackers you can find only at Costco or the way baby pigeons look like human penises onto which some child has drawn a cartoon face, I find a service, “Your Dead Mom,” to text me a few times a day and pretend to be my mom. It’s what they do.
“Put us in your phone as ‘mom,’ or some permutation, mommy, mama, whatever,” the contact person, Raj, tells me on the phone.
“I don’t think I can do that,” I say, and he says,
“You called us,”
and I say, “Okay, sure, I can label you whatever in my phone, but it won’t change that I know who you are and who you are not,”
and he says, “Trust,”
just that one word, which rankles me. The person who lives below me and sculpts human heads out of stone starts up. Her daily pounding is so close and familiar it’s like my own nose hovering in front of my own dumb face. Her sculptures are beautiful, the smooth eyes blank of pupils, but the process, the constancy of it, has made me seek out another apartment, even though I don’t want to be in a new place, one where my actual mother will never have been, will never have stirred soup and asked me, “Did you cut your hair, something looks different,” to which I said, “Good different or bad different?” after which she shrugged. We won’t be able to climb while balancing soup bowls out to the small iron balcony to sit as if in a floating cage while car lights blur below, and the soup bowls turn our legs red with heat.
“Did you do it?” Raj asks.
When I don’t answer immediately, he says,
“Okay, good. Now it’s just a wait and watch situation. Take care,” he says and hangs up.
For what it’s worth, wait and watch is a cancer term as well. You knock cancer out by decimating your body temporarily and then wait and watch to see if it will come back. Sometimes it takes years.
Take care is a phrase I hate. As if care is something you can pick up in your hands and transport when you walk to the park or perch above a toilet in a public bathroom or wait for the call from your father who stalls out trying to fish the words from the well of his brain, like someone took the dictionary he’s been walking around with and blacked out 10% for every ten years he’s been alive. “She’s” pause, sink turning off, chair creaking from sitting down, breath in, breath out, “gone.”
There is, for the record, no such thing as taking care.
The next day, I wake up, and there’s a text that reads,
I didn’t sleep.
The dog next door woke me up several times.
It’s okay, though.
I’m fine.
I call the number. “Ha ha, Raj,” I say into the phone. “Nicely done.” When contracting with the service, the only requirement was to send them all the texts I had from her, and they fed them into algorithm, and that was that.
“This is Liesel. I’m sorry, Raj isn’t available right now.” I hang up.
It’s weird, uncanny, really, how much the text sounds like the real now-gone her. The “I’m fine” was a particular text-chain-ending flourish of hers, as in
I have ten doctors’ appointments.
Don’t worry.
I’m fine
or
Your dad and I got into a huge fight.
He stormed out.
No matter that I’m sick.
It’s okay.
I’m fine.
I’d always balked at her methodology, because the subtext was always, I’m very much not fine, pay attention, respond with your own dramatic flourishes, I need you.
I call the number again. A woman, presumably Liesel, answers.
“So, can I respond to the texts? I forgot to ask.”
“Oh, yes, of course. We encourage it.”
Sorry you didn’t sleep. Hopefully tonight will be better. [heart emoji]
Nothing for a few minutes. Then:
It’s okay.
Playing bridge at noon, then will haul dead leaves from the flower beds. Good distraction.
Haul. I am not sure it’s a word she would use. Still.
The first apartment I look at is only one room, a studio, which always sounds like a place where important things happen: photo shoots, music being made. This is just a rectangular room, though, with a radiator painted yellow and a wall with kitchen things in a row: stove, refrigerator, sink.
Mom, the apartment I’m looking at has the stove right next to the refrigerator.
It’s a test she passes:
Who does that?
Stove and refrigerator side by side?
Hot stove immediately next to cold refrigerator??
Big sigh.
The studio has a roof deck, which, anywhere but this city, would be unappealing because of its view (brick walls), rat quotient (high), size (tiny), but here is glorious. You can climb out the one window onto a flat expanse and sit among the plants someone has left on a metal rack that looks like it was once in a restaurant kitchen.
When I move my things from the apartment to the studio, I’m already anticipating the blank days without the sculptor pounding on stone. My father, who probably shouldn’t be lifting heavy things, helps me get the loveseat into the service elevator.
“She would consider this a downgrade, I’m afraid,” he says to me,
and I say, “I know.”
That night, I arrange the plants in a circle on the roof deck and put the small woven folding chair in the center. I check my phone. I check it again. Nothing. I text her a photo of the setup: all the golden pathos trailing their long arms toward the chair. For a few minutes, no response and then,
Oh pothos, the most insistent of the plant kingdom.
And then a minute later
I’m fine
Amy Stuber's work has been published in American Short Fiction, New England Review, The Common, Ploughshares, Idaho Review, and elsewhere. She’s been included in the Wigleaf Top 50 and Best Small Fictions 2020. She's an editor at Split Lip Magazine. She's on Twitter @amy_stuber_ and online at www.amystuber.com.
