addresses? Hmm?” She raised her eyebrows in cynical expectation, “course not I haven’t told you yet, and your father, well, he’s far too happy leaving all this crap to me.” Her mother drained the mug again and stood wobbling a moment before finding her drunken balance and headed out of the door. Lilith had just enough time to wonder what Maria was up to when she returned with a bottle of scotch, her hand rock steady while she poured then stood, considering a moment, before sitting down again and placing the bottle of scotch beside the one of Irish Cream. She kept her left hand curled around the bottle while the other motioned Lilith over, glanced up when Lilith didn’t move, the expression in her eyes leaps and bounds beyond resigned, “I won’t peek out the window, I don’t want to get the mail anymore anyway, just come over here and look at this with me.”
Lilith hesitated (something is really wrong here) feeling compelled and mildly unsettled by her mothers gaze. Maria had always been a strong woman, taking pretty much everything in stride. Even Adrian’s departure hadn’t fazed their mother, nor the argument years before which might have prompted it. The drinking was a recent thing and despite the constant sweet smell of Irish Cream that followed Maria these days, she still handled the ten thousand tiny things necessary as head of the household without a second thought. Lilith admired her mother, despite the recent (descent into drunkenness) downslide she was strong and capable, taking care of the house, Lilith and her mostly absent father while finding time to write what seemed like thousands of letters daily and still she’d never seen her mother so (completely used up, squeezed and rolled like a tube of toothpaste…) tired.
“Mom…” her voice came out small and strained, the voice of a small child calling for its mother to make the monsters under the bed go away. She was so disgusted herself she, almost, didn’t blame her mother when she rolled her eyes and snapped, “here, now!” Lilith almost didn’t blame her – almost. She shot her mother a dirty look and switched chairs settling into a good pout with her arms crossed before her.
Her mother ignored the look and the pout beginning to flip through the album again. Lilith found curiosity getting the better of her and tried glancing at the album out of the corner of her eye, but all she saw was nearly the same meaningless jumble of color she had seen on the other side of the table though this time she refused to give her mother the satisfaction of seeing her interest, finding her own eyes staring out the window and towards the mailbox instead.
Their mailbox was shaped nothing like a mailbox, not even like any of the recent novelty boxes designed to resemble homes, fish and the ever popular dog chasing a cat up a mailbox. Nope, theirs was shaped like a clown. Baggy yellow wooden paints and purple polka-dots, gloved right hand lifted and clutching eternally floating plastic balloons, left hand beckoning.
She couldn’t view its face from where she sat and she was glad of it, though she knew what it looked like more than well enough. The eyes were glass and would shine amber when hit with a light, its exaggerated red clown smile revealed jagged wooden teeth. When the mailman finally came he’d push the balloon arm down and the mouth would open, nutcracker like, eager to swallow the day’s load of letters. Her mother’s latest load of outgoing mail was already resting in the beckoning hand and when the mailman came Lilith would have the pleasure of marching out and opening the baggy seat to retrieve the mail.
She found the clown both clever and decidedly (insane, a perfect example of a person not playing with a full deck!) off center. She remembered when her father had bought the thing home after one business trip or other and replaced their nice normal (sane) mailbox with the grinning monstrosity, he’d called it, “a present from a cousin, with woodworking talent and far too much of an interest in Steven King.” As she stared out at the hungry clown she found herself feeling sorry for the poor mailman who had to face that thing everyday and stick his hand into that jagged red mouth.
“Your father leaves all the family stuff to me,” her mother’s voice and the sound of ceramic against wood brought Lilith’s attention back to the older woman. “Did you know we’re cousins? Don’t worry, we’re many, many, times removed.” Her mother glanced up in time to catch the horror on her face and giggle snorted. “Fine worry then,” pause for a swallow of scotch, “not the best news to get early in the morning I suppose. That’s not the important thing, an incidental little something that is maybe tied to the letters, and what’s in this album here.” She paused to pat the album, her touch almost loving now she was thinking about Lilith’s father (oh so beyond gross, please don’t let her wax sentimental about her husband/cousin, my father) and Lilith just tried to hold herself still and restrain her rising gorge in the face of her mother’s revelations and the mixing reek of Scotch and Irish Cream on her mother’s breath.
“Okay. Way, way back in the day, our family started out over seas somewhere. Our ancestors where a very tight and loving bunch, so when the opportunity came to travel to this brave new world, Jacob Small (we’ll call him the founding father for lack of a better term) both eager and distressed at the thought of losing touch with the family.” Maria hadn’t had a drink in a while so she paused to take a long pull on the mug. Lilith saw her eyes stray to the window and that stupid clown, fog was rolling in and Lilith spared a moment to hope it would get thick enough to obscure the thing all together.
“The solution - letters of course,” her mother continued, her voice going flat and distant as her eyes locked on the fog pale image of the clown. “Jacob left but promised to stay in touch by mail as often as he could, at least once a year with the unreliable and slow post in those days,” another gulp of scotch. “That would be fine and dandy and have nothing to do with us ‘cept he also went ahead and promised all of his descendants would keep in touch too. His family, the ones that stayed in the ‘old country’ promised about the same.” Pause for more scotch and a final flip in the album. “Things were alright at first but some of his children, doing that wonderful rebellion thing children do, refused to send letters. So old Jacob came up with another wonderful idea; and right before he died old Jacob held the first family picnic at his homestead.” She sighed and started to reach for the mug, then realizing it was empty, tipped the bottle to her lips instead. She took three big swallows and passed the album across the table towards Lilith at the same time, without looking at it, open handed, touching it with just her palm like something she had been eating and discovered was full of maggots, her face behind the bottle thick with her disgust.
She’d pushed the album hard enough to send it off the table but Lilith was ready for it, eager to finely see whatever the album contained. The page it opened to was, as far as she could tell from her snatched glimpses, typical, a jumble of the really old and the only slightly old. The newest pictures seemed to contain either or both of her parents though the older ones held the browning faces of people she had little hope of recognizing. The people in the newest ones showed little to no resemblance, here her strawberry-blond mother standing next to a rather tired mulano man. There her father, gazing blankly at the camera and holding a plate of barbecue up to a man who appeared to be in a strait jacket… Lilith looked up and opened her mouth to speak but her mother anticipated the question and cut her off.
“When a family picnic is called everyone goes, no ones exempt, and at this point the families so big and - well placed - that small miracles can be arranged. We don’t have them very often, maybe once or twice in a lifetime. They’re not as happy an event as they sound. Pray you never have to go.” Lilith glanced at another picture, a row of children sitting on a stone wall with plates in their laps, glazed expressions in their eyes and no smiles on their faces and decided her mother was probably right. “We have it on the family homestead, it’s actually not far from here in central PA, nestled in the Blue Mountains - mountain man country,” her mother gave her a lopsided smile a clear sign she was well past drunk.
“Some of the family is doing quite well for themselves and they help to cover the cost for the ones th
at are far away; you haven’t gotten to the addresses in Australia and China yet, but you got cousins there. Which leads back to your father; the family is really, really big you’d be surprised how often you’re likely to date one of us before you get married. Hopefully they’ll be as distantly related to you as your father is to me.” Her smile wasn’t lopsided anymore, both sides of her mouth stretched upwards reaching for her ears in a grotesque parody that reminded Lilith of the clown outside. “Of course if he isn’t a distant cousin none of us will judge you harshly, they’re quite a few of us with webbed toes and skeletons in our closets - you can’t hide that stuff from the family.”
Lilith squirmed in her seat suddenly uncomfortable under her mother’s drunken red gaze; she saw something in her mother’s eyes which wasn’t tied down as tight as it should be, it rolled around unrestrained, more than willing to crush anything that got in its path.
A grinding squeak outside the window and Lilith found herself more than happy to turn her gaze toward the mailbox (saved by the accursed mailman) in time to