Instincts

A mother possum crawled down the chimney the spring Donny came to us because both sets of his parents had kicked him out, the same April after your dad and I divorced when you kicked a hole in the dining room wall. The possum was swollen with young she would later carry, half-grown, on her back or hanging from her thick, hairless tail. “An oversized rat with maternal instincts,” your dad once said. Instead of one angry son, I now had two– fifteen and seventeen– two forged signatures on absence excuses, two discipline committee meetings, two conferences with the principal. While I worked, you shared contraband beer, as well as the basement bedroom with its fieldstone fireplace in which you found the possum one cool evening. Laughing and cheering, you teamed up to cage her with a trash can, carry her to the alley out back and dump her. The possum squeezed back down the chimney twice more. The third time you threw her out on Troost Avenue, screaming for a car to smash her beneath its tires. She must have been near her time, desperate for a nest, to crawl back down after that. The noise woke me after midnight. Donny had clubbed her with his nunchuks. You both kicked and stomped her head as she lurched, stumbled between your feet. Halfway down the basement steps I stopped, seeing your faces. The possum fell limp. I backed slowly up the stairs. In the morning, you couldn’t meet my eyes. I just made you clean up the mess.