Enjoy Being Alone and Broke
I received the email at the exact moment my plane landed in Chicago. I was still on the jet bridge, the handle of my suitcase biting into my palm, moving with the slow shuffle of two hundred tired people who all wanted to be somewhere they weren’t, when my phone came back to life and the notification appeared. I almost didn’t open it.
I was exhausted from nine days on the road, from meetings and presentations and client dinners where I smiled until my face ached, and all I wanted was a taxi and a quiet house and twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. Then I saw my mother’s name in the subject line. From: Diane Collins.
To: Avery Collins. Subject: Enjoy your empty house. Your sister and I are going to Hawaii.
Enjoy being alone and broke. We took your $500,000 in savings and everything worth anything in the house. You can keep the walls.
I stood there while people streamed past me with their carry-ons and their conversations about hotel check-ins and baggage claim, and I read it again. Then again. The words kept performing the same trick in the second reading and the third, arranging themselves into a sentence that looked like English but refused to mean anything.
I started walking. My mother had never done anything quietly. She had turned cruelty into performance art for as long as I could remember, always with an audience, always with perfect timing, always with the instinct for when a blow would land hardest.
When I was a child, this quality made her interesting in the way that unpredictable people can seem interesting when you are too young to identify what is actually unsettling about them. As I got older, it became something I had to navigate the way you navigate a room with unreliable footing, carefully, always aware of where you were placing your weight. My younger sister Brittany had always been Diane’s collaborator in these things.
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