Death, Taxes, and Bodega Sushi

Welcome home to widowhood.

I am not a tax cheat.

After opening a letter from my county’s Department of Taxpayer Services, I check the address again. It’s mine. But the message is clearly intended for someone else: some shady landlord, or the guy three houses down who never pays his share when it comes time to collect for alley plowing.

I read it again.

“Penalties have been assessed.” Why? By whom?

The unknown entity is concealed behind the bureaucratic passive voice. The tone is officious and cowardly, a windowless facade of hardened gray office silt. I call my bank. Someone named Donna answers. She’s concerned, then regretful. Polite.

“May 13? No. I don’t see a record of that payment. Sorry.”

No? I log into my account. Donna’s right. The three thousand and seventy-nine dollars I thought I’d sent to the county are still there.

Wheels of outrage start spinning. I paid online instead of by check. Two days ahead of the May 15th deadline, just to avoid this penalty! One hundred and three dollars. When it was their mistake? No way am I paying this.

I’ve saved the confirmation notice to my computer desktop. Ha. Not my fault. I call my accusers.

“Taxpayer services; please hold.” A woman’s voice, gruff and abrupt, loops into a recorded one: unctuous, male. Please continue to hold, your call is important to us. All representatives are currently busy serving other customers. I’ve reached the Office of the County Naysayer, Department of Nope. I’m determined to track down the person who will say yes.

This woman is not that person. She cuts me off.

“We didn't receive a payment on time. You owe taxes and penalties.”

“But I tried to pay. I’ll email you the document.”

I attach it, hit Send, and hang up. Within seconds, I get a boilerplate response.

As the payment was not received by the date it was due, you are required to pay the full amount . . . The penalty will not be waived . . . You may pay either by mail with a check, or online using our convenient e-payment service.

I make my way up three levels of supervision. On hold for nine minutes. Fifteen. Forty-eight. She just stepped away from her desk. Left for the day. No. You owe.

My indignation crests at a level just below rage. What is wrong with you people, I want to scream. But I stay within the four walls of my indoor voice.

“I’ll pay my taxes. I’m only questioning the penalty. Your system —”

No.

I pace, gesture, slash the air with my phone, look out at the back yard. I’m trapped indoors on a perfect, sunny day. These people are wasting it —

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mini, my cat.

Hunched under a kitchen stool, ears flattened, her blue eyes are cloudy with animal sadness. My throat constricts. I’ve spent an entire afternoon betraying her trust. For that, there is no penalty large enough.

At that moment, it hits me. The commotion I’ve created has nothing to do with taxes or timeliness. These people — the ones I’m been harassing so relentlessly — are tasked with the difficult job of saying no to everyone, all day. They do not have the privilege of saying yes. Of telling someone We’ll forgive that amount. Give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s my pleasure. To make someone’s day is not part of their job description. What joyless work.

I look again at the notice. What is it that I can’t bear to see?

His name.

Only now do I notice the pain that is expanding from the bottom of my ribcage, up through my chest, sagging heavily against the hollow space above my heart.

“I’ll pay,” I say to the middle manager I’ve cornered, of whom I’ve just inquired Are you calling me a liar?

“I’m sorry. I was out of line.” I am more than that. I am the worst person in the world, and have spent the last three hours proving it. “But please, can you do me one favor?”

I open the door to the cupboard where I keep Mini’s food. I meant to buy some today.

“Take my husband’s name off of this property. Because —”

My voice thins to a raw whisper as I speak the words I’ve held back for more than a year.

“My husband is dead.”

I write a check for the full amount, seal and stamp the envelope. I walk to the mailbox, three miles away, where he liked to send his letters. Stopping on his way home from work, pulling off the road near a thoughtfully planted glade of pines. Reaching out through the car window. It’s a comforting image. And yet, I sob the entire way there. With each step as I return, I utter the words I haven’t spoken since the night they became a fact.

My husband is dead. My husband is dead. My husband is dead.

---

At the age of twenty-two, Mini has four teeth and a mouth that smells like the grave. Kibble disappeared from her diet long ago. I fed her Friskies from cans the size of a hockey puck until I started buying Fancy Feast. Shreds, Gravy, Grill, Gourmet: these descriptors repeat and recombine on petite tins until they reach their target market: the old woman with the ancient cat. I am completely out of Fancy Feast.

On my way home after mailing the check, I push open the door to Speedy Mart. At the end of a row filled with bottles of water imbued with energy fields and electrolytes, I find a stack of dusty, dubious cans marked with generic outlines of fish. My choices are Tuna Tuesday and Sunday Surprise. I take one of each. At the register I grab a bag of potato chips. I need it to justify the thin plastic sack to carry the tins home in. I don’t want to hold one in each hand, like castanets. I don’t feel like dancing.

---

Mini is ravenous. I scoop an entire can of Tuna Tuesday into her dish. Normally, I’d give her half, but she is purring and I’m in a state of grace, forgiven. I get into my robe and pajamas and sit down with a cup of orange-ginger tea. My hand finds something wet; she’s thrown up every bit of her dinner on the loveseat.

I head to the kitchen for a rag. No wonder she’s emptied her stomach. Tuna Tuesday seems comprised of wood chips and rancid fish oil.

As I blot the cushion — knowing it’s pointless, it will stain — I think of the scene in the last season of Succession, in which Tom reams out Cousin Greg for bringing him bodega sushi.

“Remember that?” I say, out loud, unabashed.

“Cousin Greg brought Tom bodega sushi! ATM was covering the election, and Tom says, ‘Bodega sushi? My digestive system is basically part of the Constitution tonight!’ What if Greg had poisoned Tom? That would have ruined the ending —”

And I remember. My husband died five weeks before the final episode. How could he know how critical it was for Tom — the St. Paul lad who married the laird’s daughter — to stay alive? Someone had to take over the company and tank it.

“It was Tom! I told you in the first episode that Tom would win. Mondale the dog was such an obvious red herring.”

I blot the cushion a while longer, then go upstairs.

---

I curl up with Mini on the daybed in our daughter’s room. It’s tucked into an alcove under the pitched roof. The space was part of the attic in 1986, the year we moved in. He reclaimed it. Our daughter slept there, tended by the benign slope above her, until moving out for college.

Over the years, he transformed the house. Every inch of it shows his touch. A closet turned reading nook; patios built of rescued bricks, a sunroom summoned from nowhere. Our son’s loft. A well-stocked pantry. Built-in shelves for the books I promised him I’d write.

It doesn’t matter whether or not his name is on the records. He’s not dead. This home that he made with such love and care is where he still lives.

I look up at the ceiling. The stars our daughter pasted there as a child glow after I turn out the lights.

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