elizabeth rasich's a mother in the hand

“It’s what beagles do,” she says. “The smells on this sidewalk must feel to him like snorting a pinkie nail of cocaine every half-second.”

My dad flicks Aunt Shannon on the back of the neck. “Stop saying that stuff in front of her.”

A lot of people think my mom is dead. That’s not true. She just moved to Italy. Here are the explanations I have gotten.

She is having a hard time. She is having an artistic crisis. She was only ever half-married to my dad. She gave up everything once before. She won’t do it again. She is taking time off to go to Great Uncle Marco’s art school and follow her dreams. When I am older I can come to visit and see the Galleria Borghese and I will understand. She has always loved my dad, but things have changed and they are learning how to be their own people. She loves me too much. Aunt Shannon will be there to take care of me. Have I learned about divorce in school? Do they teach that in school? It is better to have a happy mother on the phone than a bathroom weeping mother in a house. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. The cherubs on the ceilings of the churches remind her of me. I am a cherub on her ceiling.

We decide not to stray too far from our usual route. We have never seen Michael Phelps buying groceries, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he isn’t our neighbor. First, up the street towards the harbor. As cars thud over cobblestones next to us, Aunt Shannon points out all the houses she has worked on. There is the brick one where she found a small opossum family in the attic and the blue one with stained glass chandeliers in every room. My favorite is on the corner, right behind Bertha’s Mussels, painted a deep, velvety purple and shining out golden light from every window. But none of them can belong to Michael Phelps. Where would he have put his pool?

Past Bertha’s Mussels and the headrush of seafood smell is Broadway. Since it’s June, all the high schoolers are out of school, holding hands and meandering the plaza at random. Opie is a narc; he can smell weed on anyone and lunges for every stoner he sees. My dad ogles the ice cream truck parked next to the tapas place and Aunt Shannon drifts vaguely towards a stand selling incense, but I keep marching on. They follow.

I scrutinize the shoulders of every tall man I see walking down the street. What is the best way to say it? A simple “happy birthday,” or will I have to string it into a full sentence? Can I just wave?

Aunt Shannon tugs twice on Opie’s leash like she’s trying to get off a bus.

“Let’s take a breather,” she says, and motions towards the Henderson’s Wharf Hotel. “I need to pee.”

It’s been three months since I first found her topless on the couch, hunched over her folds, injecting hormones into a bruised patch of skin above her left hip. When she noticed me in the living room, she’d only winked.

“I’m baby making,” she’d said.

Now I stare at her stomach as she walks towards the hotel doors. Is it rounder?  Her dress whips around in the wind and I can’t tell.

We stare after her for a moment, until my dad breaks the silence.

“Should we go down to the water?” he asks.

My mom told me that every night in Rome the nuns dance in the street. On the phone she said it feels like they put on a show just for her. They bang drums and dance and one of them stands on the church steps and warbles something in Italian. Their habits are gray and loose, and they shake tambourines.

When I mentioned Opie, she laughed a little, as if she were surprised he was still around. I reminded her that Opie was her idea. That she had just come back from a six week trip to Malibu and was edged all around in optimism, just like every other trip. That she wasn’t even angry that I had discovered my surprise pooping on the linoleum floor of the laundry room. That she was instead delighted, radiating joy from her cheek dimples, as she took me to the couch and set him on my lap, where he curled in the scoop of my legs and huffed himself to sleep.

“Do you remember what you said?” I asked her.

“Of course not,” she replied, her voice distorted by our cross-Atlantic connection.

“You said I should name him Magnum Opus. Like the Hans Hoffman painting we saw at the MoMA. The big red one that looks like Texas drawn in blood.”

She paused for a long moment. I could almost hear her shake her head.

“I would remember going to the MoMA with you.”

While we wait on the dock, I keep an eye on my dad. His shoulders are hunched in. He keeps kissing my hair.

“You’ll never get a tattoo, will you, Cate?” he asks while we both lean on the railing watching the water tilt the buoys back and forth and up and around.

“Never,” I say, and they tilt up and around and down again.

A few minutes later, Aunt Shannon returns holding an enormous pink-striped straw hat onto her head to keep it from flying away.

“Where’d you get that?” my dad asks, dumbfounded by its size. 

For a while, we follow the shoreline of the harbor and its concrete pilings. I scrutinize the houses. In this part of the neighborhood they are all stacked together like dominos. If you knocked one, they’d all fall down. Which house looks like it has a kitchen big enough to hold Michael Phelps’ daily 12,000-calorie diet of egg sandwiches, chocolate chip pancakes, grits, omelets, ham sandwiches, pasta, pizza, meatball subs, and coffee?

Aunt Shannon and my dad have fallen behind while Opie and I lead the vanguard. Four months since mom left, and four months since she moved in. There was something about her lease and the fact that she was already cooking everything and coming over in the mornings to do my hair. It was supposed to be temporary. But I'm learning that temporary things can often be final, and even permanent things can be gone in an instant if you don’t hold them to their promises.

Sometimes people ask if it’s odd for me to have my aunt still living with my dad so long after everything happened.

“Do they do weird stuff?” Ava asked me once. We were trading bites of sandwiches at lunch.

“Weird stuff like what?” Hannah asked her, and I gave her a fruit rollup if she would stop asking.

My dad and Aunt Shannon are friends now—not like Ava and Hannah, but something more side-by-side than that. When I hear him laugh, I know that Aunt Shannon is the one he should have married, the one he should have chosen. The fact of it comes to me simply, as if it has fallen lightly into my lap on a cloud. If I left maybe, if I wore one of Michael Phelps’ gold medals and slept on his floor, if they could come together and be happy.

The last time all three of us were together was on a boat. My mom had gotten back from another trip, this time to Boca Raton. To get us all acclimated to one another again, the thing to do was to go on an oyster harvest. Back then Aunt Shannon was still dating Dwayne, who worked as a first mate and got us in for free. I was impressed by his dark neck tan and the fact that he looked me dead in the eyes when he said hello.

Everyone gathered at the railing.  We saw the water turn from a muddy brown to a thin green to a color so final and blue I couldn’t stop watching it slip against the

smooth white sides of the boat. There was a speech about not falling over the side. I imagined being the one to do it, just so people would tell stories about me.

My dad tried to make conversation at the same time he worked to overhear my mom’s animated conversation with another passenger.

“That’s a nice dress. Is it new?” he asked.

He had bought it for me at Goodwill two weeks ago. 

“Yes,” I said, and asked him how oysters were harvested to get his mind off things. 

He started in on rubbing his eyebrow, excited already.

“It’s fascinating, really,” he was saying.

While he talked, I watched my mom fix her hair in the reflection of the mast. She smiled at herself, then frowned, then smiled again, and picked something out of her teeth. After a while she came over. 

“I just met the most interesting man,” she said.

When we had moved out to a patch of ocean where shellfish could be harvested,thick cables churned through the froth, pulling up massive wire cages filled with mud and rocks. We each got a screwdriver. Our job was to pry apart the big clumps of oysters that clung to each other in the thick, grayish mud and wash them

together in a big bucket. Dwayne showed us how to knock them together and listen to see if they sounded hollow. If they did, we tossed them into the sea. Any oysters with an open shell, even just the tiniest gap, got tossed into the sea. If they showed any sign of weakness, any imperfection, they were tossed into the sea.

For a while, it was nice to sit in the sun and break the shells. I liked the feeling of the dark mud and the satisfying clunk of two oysters rapping against one another. My mother sat across from me on top of a bait cooler. Her forearms were covered in freckles, hundreds of them; her hands were a pointillist painting slipping oysters away from their partners, cleaning them, turning them over in her palm.

Soon, though, she got bored and made some excuse about needing to stretch. My dad didn’t say anything, just kept steadily cracking oysters apart from one another and handing them to me to wash off the mud and pile them in the wire basket. I was also getting painfully bored, so bored I could feel my skin starting to itch from the inside out. He had a look on his face that I didn’t often see anymore, just the peace and pleasure of working with his hands. He wanted me there beside him so badly I could taste it.

Aunt Shannon laughs and the sound is big and throaty. I turn to them behind me, wondering if it’s three-time Olympian Michael Phelps they’ve seen or something else. They wave me off.

“Go on ahead,” Aunt Shannon says.

I take three steps forward, past the edge of Pitango Bakery. Something flashes,

white and furious in the corner of my eye, and under the glare of a moth-buzzed streetlamp a pit bull latches onto Opie’s bony head. His whole body strains against the leash. The sound he makes is foreign and strange: a yelp strangled by the crush of the collar against his throat. All of it travels to me and into my body through the hand gripping the leash. My fingers twitch at every rip of the pit bull’s jaws. Opie tries to run forwards and away, but I am still bigger than him and I am rooted to the sidewalk, paralyzed. I scream and scream, my hand jerking in the air like a marionette. He has nowhere to go. I am holding him there. 

After I am lifted off the sidewalk, after Aunt Shannon kicks at the pit bull until he lets go, after my dad carries me and Opie away, we find the emergency department for pets out by Johns Hopkins. 

“This a logistical nightmare,” my dad keeps saying, over and over again in the fluorescent waiting room. Finally, Aunt Shannon goes to talk to someone. The nurse is tired, worried, but when she sees Aunt Shannon’s stomach she smiles and whispers congratulations. Aunt Shannon glances at me but I pretend to be reading a celebrity magazine. 

“What’s the status?” my dad asks when she comes back. 

“He’s stable. No rabies. Nothing that’ll last except the hole in his ear,” she says.

“Can you see through it? All the way through?” I ask.

Aunt Shannon nods. “All the way.”

A week after Opie’s attack, we go to the funeral of someone I don’t know. He’s my dad’s friend from work. Although I want to stay home with Opie and cook chorizo

with Aunt Shannon, she has an appointment somewhere. The only upside I can see is that maybe I will see my first dead person ever, and my recounting it will make Ava so sick she’ll give me her Lunchable.

In Saint Casimir’s, the frescoes are not just Jesus, Mary, and Joseph but also Nazis shooting Polish people and missionaries getting their ears chopped off by Native Americans and I think some pilgrims from the founding of Maryland. There is Latin on the walls but I pretend it’s a list of spells. Multorum vocatio. Paucorum electio. Omnium retribution.

I listen to my dad recite Robert Burns poetry about mice. I stand still in my black dress. When the woman next to us cries, I don’t stare. When the eulogies are done and seemingly every Bible verse about heaven has been recited, the priest lifts his arms and the first row rises.

My dad isn’t crying but he’s sniffling, like he has a bad cold. I lean against him and he’s warm and a little sweaty. The sniffling stops and a kernel of pride wedges itself into the corner of my mouth.

When the row in front of me rises, I watch their belt loops pass and bide my time. When the last of them—a woman with something braided around her jumpsuit waist—passes by, I scramble up to get in line behind her.

Rougher than he means to, my dad sits me back down. He gives me a strange look.

“You can’t come,” he says. When I open my mouth to protest, he shakes his head once, back and forth, like a military signal. “No,” he says, and lurches past me. I weigh going after him anyway, but there is something about the set of his shoulders.

I settle for tucking my knees under me on the pew and squinting. Although my shoes dig in painfully to the backs of my thighs, I’m delighted. I can see the dead man’s yellow face. It’s as horrible as I hoped. It looks like it was sculpted out of ear wax—exactly the same orangey-yellow tint that I pluck occasionally from my ear canal. Ava will cry probably, so hard that snot dribbles into her mouth. And I will be like a sailor coming home and telling of the monsters she has seen. Look at that--the bags under his eyes are melting towards his chin.

Because she was afraid of eye bags exactly like those, my mom used to keep a bowl of lemon wedges in the freezer. She’d lay out on a lawn chair and put them under her eyes and come up sputtering when they melted. It was something she had read online. I wonder if at this very moment, while my lungs are filling up with Bible dust, she is sitting out on her back porch in Italy with a book spread over the rise of her belly and lemons on her eyes. Then, because I am feeling cruel, I imagine her in the casket at the front of the church. I imagine her collapsing while she watches the nuns, the slapping sound of her head against the Roman cobblestones. I imagine her tour guide boyfriend Gian finding her there, too late, and flexing his muscles at the sky. I imagine her thin fingers crossed over her chest, and her face yellow and corroded. I imagine again the slap, the slap slap slap of her head on the street. The rawness of my sobs, each of them foully rising like stomach bile, halts the ceremony completely. There is still a cord binding us together, and it is not manmade, it is made of man, it is made of something internal and gutless and unquestioning.

Later, when I am sure my dad and Aunt Shannon are both asleep, I make my slow way down from my attic room to the ground floor, stepping on just the right spots on the spiral staircase to make my silent descent. Opie is sleeping next to the washing machine. I scuff my feet across the bare linoleum and lay down on the musty dog bed beside him.

The thing about Opie is that he really is the fattest beagle you’ve ever seen. He has a belly that rumbles constantly. When you rest your ear against it, it’s like a conch shell. You can hear the ocean. It’s a gentle sound. There’s a slight rocking of breath, in and out, and a grumbling. Secret tremors. Disturbances in the deep beneath.

His big floppy ear is the softest part of him and the most complicated to pet. I take it gently between my thumb and forefinger and extend it to its full height. There is the hole. Already it has almost completely healed. The tear, which used to be raw and red and seeping, has crusted into black skin. A few scattered hairs are trying to grow through it, like weeds after a forest fire. 

He doesn’t move as I flop it gently over my face. I blink my eye open. I can see right through. There’s the lid of the washing machine, and there’s the peeling paint on the windowsill. There’s a singular gray cloud, a barely visible omen of rain. There’s the turret of the house across the street. And in the window of the turret, there's Michael Phelps at his kitchen table, sitting at a feast. On his left is thin crust Margherita pizza, perfectly round. Next to the pizza, Italian subs dripping with salami, fettuccini alfredo heaped in mounds, thick hamburgers glistening under sesame buns. On his right, stacks of chocolate chip pancakes sodden with syrup, cheesy grits hardening in cereal bowls, fluffy omelets studded with green pepper and onion, and slabs of egg sandwiches stacked liked bricks. He nods at someone across the room, and I look to see my mother standing there in an apron holding a mixing bowl to her chest, cradling it like a newborn baby. Around her neck is one of his medals, a gold from Beijing, that rests gently against her softest cashmere sweater. She is singing something to herself. She is making him dessert.