Sleep On It
By Kathryn S. Gardiner

The television went blank for the span of a few seconds, then blinked back to the generic menu screen. ‘Play’ was the only option.

Brandon swallowed and said nothing. He looked at the coffee table in front of him, at the tiny porcelain figure of a fox in trousers playing the banjo. Beside him, his mother silently touched a tissue to her eyes.

“That’s total bullshit,” his brother said.

“Greg.” His sister’s voice already sounded pleading. She wiped her eyes with the cuff of her sweatshirt; the dark grey looked almost black at her wrists. “Please just don’t.”

“What? It’s fucking bullshit, Molly. They shouldn’t have given us that. We shouldn’t have had to see that.”

“We have to have all the facts. Stop cussing about everything. God, can you—just try to talk like you’ve been to college. Please.”

“Fuck that. I’m calling it like I see it and it’s bullshit.”

Brandon watched his brother and sister, but all his attention was on his mother, just at the edge of his peripheral vision. Her hands rested neatly in her lap, tissues closed gently in frail fingers. Blue veins showed through her skin. She looked so skinny to him these days.

“So what?” Molly said. “It’s still ‘bullshit’ we need to talk about and I don’t want to hear you dropping the F-bomb every three words while we discuss it.”

“Whatever, Molly. Fuck, bullshit, fuck.” Greg kicked the coffee table and shoved himself up from the recliner.

The fox with the banjo shuddered and fell over. Brandon expected his mother to lean forward and fix it, tell Molly and Greg to stop fighting, make them hug and say something nice about each other like she did when they were kids. But she didn’t. She stared at the toppled little fox, at its crooked little smile and said nothing. Brandon swallowed against the knot in his throat. He leaned forward himself and set the fox back on its hind porcelain paws.

Greg slammed the front door behind him. Outside, a muted crash, followed by another and another and Brandon knew Greg was kicking the potted plants off the porch. His mother said nothing. She acted like she didn’t even notice.

“So what are we going to do?” Molly asked, and turned decisively toward Brandon. She glanced at their mother beside him, but her eyes stayed more steadily on Brandon’s.

“Molly, c’mon.” Brandon tried to keep his voice light.

“C’mon, what, Brandon? They’re going to call us in the morning and ask what we want. I think we should have at least talked about it.”

“We have time to talk about it. Just—let everyone breathe a second, okay?”

Molly’s jaw tightened and Brandon knew a speech was coming. Molly knew she was right—she always knew she was right, even when she was wrong—and she was excellent at explaining it to everyone.

“Sleep on it,” their mother said, and stopped Molly’s torrent with a whisper. “It’s an important decision.” She stood on unsteady legs and pulled her baggy sweater tighter around slumped shoulders. “We should all sleep on it.” She bent over and kissed Molly on her head, then leaned to Brandon and he felt that familiar press of lips on his forehead.

“Where’s your brother?” she asked.

“On the porch.”

“Destroying things,” Molly added.

Their mother nodded and put a hand on the recliner to balance herself as she walked toward the front door. She stood a moment in the porch light, hand against the glass door, eyes looking out but vacant. Brandon felt a chill. She looked like a ghost, like those widows in white dresses forever watching for husbands killed at sea.

She walked out the door and it clicked shut behind her.

“We should decide what we want to do,” Molly said. “We can go over the pros and cons and then whatever Mom and Greg decide, we can talk about it in the morning. But you and I can be, like, a unified front.”

Brandon looked at the fox in trousers playing the banjo. Dad had bought it as a joke. It had been a Valentine’s Day present probably ten years ago. “I love you like this dumb-ass fox loves playing the banjo, sugar-nipples.” That’s what he’d written on the card.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Brandon said.

“Brandon,” Molly said sternly.

Brandon shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it, Molly.”

Molly might implode, he knew that. She didn’t do well with silences and hated making decisions by herself, but this wasn’t the sort of decision that worked with pros and cons lists. It wasn’t the sort of decision that could be made that way, not by him anyway.

He walked toward the stairs, past Dad’s chair. An empty bottle of beer still sat on the table beside it.

Greg came in the door with his arm around their mother’s shoulders. His eyes were red when they glanced at Brandon, but he didn’t say anything.

“Good night, boys. Good night, Molly,” their mother said and walked like a ghost to the stairs.

Brandon looked at his brother again. He wanted to ask “Is she okay?” but he knew the answer. He didn’t want to hear the answer out loud. They both knew she kept bottles in her room; they both knew they’d be checking on her all night. He and Greg just glanced at one another, and walked toward their separate bedrooms.

It was sick when he really thought about it. Everything Brandon passed had a memory attached to it. It wasn’t the pictures that hurt. It was the scuffed wood at the base of the stairs where Dad toed off his boots every night. It was the gas station he had passed coming back into town, the one where Dad bought them beef jerky and a lottery ticket after school on Fridays sometimes.

He walked slowly into his bedroom, feeling like a ghost himself. It was the leg on his desk that was a different wood than the rest of them because Dad had fixed it. It was the poster of a fighter jet that covered the hole Brandon had punched in the wall when they’d gotten into a fight over—Brandon couldn’t even remember why they’d been fighting. But he remembered his dad laughing about it and saying it was lucky he didn’t hit a stud and break his hand.

Brandon lay back on his bed. He stared at his ceiling. He wondered what memories her kids had. He’d seen their faces on the DVD, all of them young with round cheeks and teary eyes. The oldest said he was eleven. Eleven seemed so young to lose a mother.

But then, twenty-five felt young to lose a father.

“I want her to die.”

Brandon turned to the door where his mother stood. One frail hand gripped the doorframe. Her eyes looked glassy; he wondered how much she’d had to drink before they’d even gotten there. He stood carefully and felt like he did frightened at five years old.

“I think I want her to die.” She lifted her gaze, then, and looked Brandon straight in the eye. He felt cold inside.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, you can tell the lawyers that in the morning. That’s what they want to know. Okay, Mom? Me, Molly and Greg, we’ll go along with whatever you want.” He would make Molly and Greg go along with it.

“But her kids. They’re so young.” Her jaw trembled and tears slid out of her eyes on a blink. “But she killed your father for no reason.” Her voice rose to a weak, fragile pitch and Brandon crossed the room in two steps. “She killed him for no reason.”

“Sit down, Mom. C’mon.” He lead her toward his bed, still made up in the blue quilt and plaid sheets from before he’d left home. Her feet stumbled on the carpet and he kept her steady.

“He’s dead. He’s dead for no reason. I can’t sleep in that room without him. But it’s not right, is it? To take a mother away from her kids. That’s horrible.”

Brandon helped her lie down. “You don’t have to decide right now. Sleep on it, right? That’s what you said.”

“I can’t sleep in that room without him,” she said. Her tears soaked into Brandon’s pillow.

“Then sleep in here. It’s okay.”

“But where will you sleep?” she asked. She lifted her head like she was alert, ready to move, but he could see she wasn’t, probably couldn’t if she tried. He pulled the quilt up around the edges and folded it over her.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Her jaw trembled again and more tears fell, but she didn’t speak. She rested her head back on the pillow. Then, her face relaxed, the tears stopped and she passed out.

Brandon sat down on the floor, his back to the desk. That one odd leg pressed against his spine. Brandon watched his mother sleep, watched her and listened for her breath.

He thought about gas-station jerky and punched walls, a loud laugh he was already forgetting and round-faced kids he’d never met. The lawyers expected a call in the morning. The “victim’s family” had a rare opportunity, they said, to decide the legal punishment they’d seek—life or death.

Life or death. A loud laugh and kids he’d never met. A dumb-ass fox playing the banjo.

“Sleep on it,” he whispered to himself, even though he knew he wouldn’t sleep at all.