Thankless in Death

months. And you never paid us back, Jerry. Now this last job’s gone, too.”
    “I’m tired of you throwing the past in my face, and acting like it was all my fault.”
    “The past keeps repeating, Jerry, and seems to be getting worse.”
    Her lips pressed together as she added a handful of the Onion Doodles he liked to the plate. “You’re out of work again, and you can’t afford a place of your own. You took the rent money and the tip money Lori had saved up and went off to Las Vegas with Dave and that no-account Joe. And you came back broke.”
    “That’s a damn lie.” He shoved to his feet. “It was my money, and I’ve got a right to take a break with my friends, to have some goddamn fun.”
    There was a sheen in her eyes—not of tears, not of anger, but of disappointment. It made him want to punch, punch, punch that sheen away.
    “It was the rent money, Jerry, and the money Lori saved up from her tips. She told me.”
    “You’re going to take her word over mine?”
    On a sigh, she folded a napkin into a triangle as she had for him when he was a boy. Her dented heart came clearly through the sound, but all he heard was accusation.
    “You lie, Jerry, and you use people, and I’m worried we let you get away with it for too long. We keep giving you chances, and you keep throwing them away. Maybe some of that’s our fault, and maybe that’s part of the reason you think you can talk to me the way you are.”
    She set the plate on the table, poured a glass of the coffee-flavored drink he liked. “Your father and I were hoping you’d find a job today, or at least go out and look, make a real effort. We talked about it after you went out with your friends again last night. After you took fifty dollars out of my emergency cash without asking.”
    “What are you talking about?” He gave her his best shocked and insulted look. “I didn’t take anything from you. You’re saying I’m stealing now? Ma!”
    “It wouldn’t be the first time.” Her lips compressed when her voice wavered some, and she came back with the no-more-bullshit tone he knew drew a deep, hard line.
    “We talked it over, decided we had to take a stand, Jerry. We were going to tell you together when your father gets home, but I’ll tell you now so you’ll have that much more time. We’re giving you until the first of the month—that’s the first of December, Jerry—to find work. If you don’t get a job, you can’t stay here.”
    “I need some time.”
    “We’ve given you a month, Jerry, and you haven’t done anything except go out at night and sleep half the day. You haven’t tried to get work. You’re a grown man, but you act like a kid, and a spoiled, ungrateful one. If you want more time, if you want us behind you, you eat your lunch, then you go out and look for a job. You go down to the market and get that stock boy job, and as long as you’re working and show us you’re trying, you can stay.”
    “You don’t understand.” He forced tears into his eyes, a usual no-fail. “Lori dumped me. She was
everything
to me and she threw me over for some other guy.”
    “What other guy?”
    “I don’t know who the hell he is. She broke my heart, Ma. I need some time to get through it.”
    “You said she kicked you out because you lost your job.”
    “That was part of it, sure. That asshole at Americana had it in for me, from day one. But instead of taking my side, she flips me over because I can’t buy her stuff. Then she tells you all these lies about me, trying to turn my own mother against me.”
    “Eat your lunch,” Barbara said, wearily. “Then get cleaned up, get dressed, and go down to the market. If you do that, Jerry, we’ll give you more time.”
    “And if I don’t, you’ll kick me out? You’ll just boot me to the street like I’m nobody? My own parents.”
    “It hurts us to do it, but it’s for your own good, Jerry. It’s time you learned to do what’s right.”
    He stared at her, imagined her and his father plotting and planning against him. “Maybe you’re right.”
    “We want you to find your place, Jerry. We want you to be a man.”
    He nodded as he crossed to her. “To find my place. To be a man. Okay.” He picked up the knife she’d used to cut his sandwich, shoved it into her belly.
    Her eyes popped wide; her mouth fell open.
    He hadn’t planned to do it, hadn’t given it more than an instant’s conscious thought. But God! It felt amazing. Better than sex. Better than