1st Chapter Mummy Why

      “Thank God she’s dead!” A harsh realism, but one I still felt, none-the-less, and continued to dwell on while driving past the white gas tanks down route 93 from Boston to Braintree on the way to the funeral parlor.  My adoptive father Dino was burying his wife Natalie, my adoptive mother.

     On July 26, 2002, my husband, Bill, got the call Natalie passed away. Passed away. I hated the term. What is its meaning really? Where did she pass? I thought maybe over a broken yellow line the kind you see painted on the street.

    I always seem to cry at weddings and everyone knew I never controlled my emotions. Bill knew not to call me at work because friends and family were aware that my relationship with Natalie was a pathetic excuse for love.

    Even after a harsh childhood, I managed to do the right thing by earning a degree in nursing to better myself. I rode the subway to Boston City Hospital for 23 years caring for the patients on a geriatric floor. 

    Granted I had not spoken to Natalie for about two years, but thought it inconsiderate no one called me about the cancer until three weeks before her death. No one told me until Dino rushed her to the hospital with pneumonia. I called her every day, sometimes twice a day, but she was too sick or too spiteful to spend her last remaining days talking to me.

    Natalie and Dino moved to Florida 20 years before her death, but because the family still lived here, Dino flew Natalie’s body to Boston for the funeral. Bill, who I was happily married to for 11 years, never attended the funeral. Dino forbid him from showing his face and I always held Natalie responsible because she never hid the fact how much she disliked Bill, but now the evil she caused will lay buried with her forever. It was a chance, finally, for me to spend quality time with Dino without Natalie’s manipulating influence and it meant the world to me to mend what Natalie tried so hard to destroy.