Wine

“Wine! You’re drinkin’ goddamn wine!”

Mom on my left, with Dwayne on the right, sitting on the sofa in the house Dwayne shared with his mother and his screaming younger sister. Her high-pitched words were brutal. Dwayne is an alcoholic, and my mother never seemed to care.

Years later, she admitted she was one, only because she thought about drinking all the time. I did not believe her. At least she kept it private; I never saw her drink in front of me.

Perhaps in my dimmed memory she did, or I was inattentive. I nodded in acknowledgment, moving on, which I did for real several months later, one month short of my nineteenth birthday.

I only saw her 20 times before her stroke nearly 15 years later.

That aside, this was a situation I never asked to be involved in. The sister yelled “Goddamn wine!” again before flinging the quart bottle of MD 20-20 into the fireplace, glass shattering against the brick, shards flying onto the carpeted floor.

This trinity of mom, boyfriend, and me in the middle, someone else’s son—another drunk—sitting quietly, heads down in shame.

I leaned over and gathered the pieces I could reach, getting up to gather the rest. I pulled open my shirt and dropped them in, harvesting Dwayne’s sorrows.

Mom’s as well.

After getting all the glass I could find, I passed the raging sister, tossing the shards into the kitchen garbage.

Dwayne died two years later. I was fourteen. Mom got the call late at night during a snowstorm. The phone awakened me.

It was a bad year for her.

I did not go to the funeral.

Instead, I shone his boots; they would bury him wearing them. His aged mother watched, understanding.

BIO: Mike Lee is an editor, writer and photographer at a trade union in New York City. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Blood+Honey, Wallstrait, The Brussels Review, BULL, Literary Garage, Literally Stories, Bristol Noir, The Airgonaut and elsewhere. His story collection, The Northern Line, is available in many online booksellers.

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