Mary | Edie Meade
We didn’t see Josh’s mother Mary before she died. We hadn’t seen her or his brother Doug since we were trying to get clean. His family was too unstable to keep our own balance as long as we were offering hands to them. The last time we saw his mother she grabbed Josh by his shirt pockets and screamed that I was taking him away from her. Josh put his hands around hers and lifted them away, dry and light as corn husks, and we walked to the car without looking back. I felt like crying but he didn’t, so I couldn’t. I let the feeling scorch my throat and waited for him to talk about it, if he wanted to. He didn’t. We were clean for three months after that, “clean-cut and cut clean” from our families, we said.
The morning after Easter, Josh got a call from his brother Doug, who never called unless he was in trouble. I could tell by his volume that he was calling from a pay phone on a street, probably near the bus station where he bought, sold, fought about drugs. Josh spoke to him for only a minute, hung up without saying goodbye, then returned to lie directly on top of me on the twin mattress on the floor. “What did he want?” I asked. He choked out two words: “Momma died.”
On the night she died, she had been turned away from two different drug stores for hassling the pharmacists for psychiatric drugs without a prescription. They knew her – everybody knew Mary. The store clerk at the second place called the police. The police, in an act of either mercy or indifference, put her in a cab rather than the back of their patrol car where she had been several times before.
The cab driver was probably the last person on this Earth to speak to her. “Have a good one,” he might have said as he let her out at a pull-off near a highway overpass bridge. As he pulled away, he probably saw her tiny frame mount the concrete wall to sit alone in the dark. Passing motorists probably called the police to report a frail woman rocking on the bridge and talking to herself. They probably saw her long salt-and-pepper hair floating, wild as seaweed under the streetlights, before she plummeted onto the train tracks below.
Edie Meade is a writer, artist, and mother of four in Huntington, West Virginia. She is passionate about literacy and collects books like they’re going out of style. Say hi on Twitter @ediemeade or https://ediemeade.com/.