"Fatty"

I sat at the dinning room table waiting for my mother to return from the doctor's visit. She had a lump on the side of her cheek, it was more under her right cheek as my mother would have corrected me. Tomato tomato it's all the same. I was anxious to hear what the doctor's diagnosis was when she arrived. She came into the dinning room with a scowl on her face, "Well it's cancer are you happy?" Typical mother never knew what to say in times like this. Of course it wasn't my fault she had cancer she smoked one to two packs of cigarettes a day. None the less it was my fault and she had her illogical reasons as to why. All through my school yers she had her nasty comments, "You'll never finish school, you'll end being a dish washer." Her snide remarks are what made me leave home at the age of eighteen. As soon as I finished High School I moved away, got a good job and a nice apartment. It was the wrong job for me, it didn't pay good enough and the apartment was on the wrong side of town, there wasn't much validation or commendation from her. The older I got the easier it was to ignore her rude remarks, I'd come to the conclussion that it was just her way of showing she cared and wanting the best for me.

My mother went into the hospital to have her tumor removed. When she came out of surgery and had recovered enough to talk she immediately started dealing out all of her possesions as if she would be dying in the next few days. The house, the car, the furniture, beds, she had everything earmarked for each of her four daughters. She even had small nicknacks that were to go to grand kids and other relatives. She gave me the pleasure of giving me her ten pound fat cat named "Fatty". Thanks mom. She said I moved around too much and this way, by giving me the cat, I would have to find a good man not one of my bar romances and settle down in one place. Every man was bar trash to her, the only place to meet a good man was in church, funny we weren't religious and didn't attend any church. Well she did used to send us four sisters, heathens she called us, to bible school every Sunday. If that counts as going to church. The bible school lasted only a short while, the pastor required that the parents attend the sermon while the children were attending bible school and that was the end of that. No church was going to tell my mother what to do.
My mother did die. The cancer spread rapidly and attacked her main veins leading to her brain. Typical mother she told the doctor "don't save me". The walls of the veins were eaten up by the cancer and they collapsed and then exploded. She actually bled to death.

Fatty became known as Skinny due to his change in diet. I'm sure he wasn't happy about having to eat cat food, but I wasn't going to feed him expensive cans of tuna or raw chicken breast. My mother used to lovingly chop up small bits of the raw chicken so he could easily eat them and warm up the tuna because her Fatty didn't like cold food.
Maybe, just maybe I should have been her cat.

This story is in response to Alice Munro's "The Moon's of Jupiter".

Susan