Family Tradition by Chris Cocca

                        Ross Griff CC

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Family Tradition
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   My mother thinks to mention Joan, who I have never met, another phantom relative rendered hypothetical by some bullshit with my grandma. 
   “Boyd’s ex wife?” I say, then remember that was Linda. “Joan is Donnie’s widow, Don your grandma’s brother.”
   I know who she means. Uncle Don, another ghost. Uncle Boyd, who I’ve met, was a pedophile.
   Grandma talked a lot of shit. My cousin’s dad was Tom, he’d been married to my aunt, my mother’s sister. When Tom died drying out in    California, Grandma told my cousin, who was fucked up from the war, that Tom must have a great view up her ass from where he was.
   “Jesus, Grandma,” I said.
   “Boy, don’t be like that. You know it and I know it. He fooled around. He drank too much. Made life a living hell.”
   “I don’t believe in a retributive God.”
   “You should look around, then. We reap what we sow.”
   Outside, in the driveway, my cousin laughed it off. “She’s just old and angry, bro.” “I don’t care,” I said. “That shit pissed me off.”
   He lit a cigarette. “Bad habit,” he said, exhaling. “Picked up in Iraq.” “Well, sure.”
   “Over there, they said we’d learn to put some space around what you do and who you are. That’s the key, they said.”
   I looked at my shoes, the grass growing in the driveway.
   “The key,” he said through smoke rings. He was looking at the sky. Geese wedged south in tight formations. “To sleeping. To forgiving yourself. Surviving. Fucking drying out.”
   “You’ll make it, homie,” I said.
   “What if I don’t? What if I end up like my dad? And what if I do get to Heaven, you think it’d shock her shitless?” He nodded toward the house.
   “That assumes she’s got a case herself.”
   “That’s terrible,” he said.
   “Yeah, because it’s true.”

   So Joan, my mom says, Joan just died from Covid. Mom checked in with her cousin, Sharon, Joan and Donnie’s daughter, who she found on Facebook after Grandma died. My mother doesn’t try to justify the bullshit, but starts to catalog it. I scroll my feed to swat away the drama, the record of abuses Grandma kept like sacred texts in tiny boxes on her head. There was the brother Donnie, the spitting image, mom says, of their father when he smiled. There was her son, my mother’s brother, his second wife, the holy wars of etiquette, the principalities we all think we sacrifice for family. Was the territory worth it? When people die before their grudges, who gets whatever’s left?
  My cousin’s heart stopped the last time he tried getting sober. They couldn’t bring him back. Grandma died the year before, which my mom said was a mercy. “Losing someone she loved so much, well that would have killed her.”
   “Yeah,” I say, despite genetics. “Those things broke her heart.”

My work has been published at venues like Hobart, perhappened, elimae, mineral lit, Schuylkill Valley Journal, 8 Poems, Brevity, Rejection Letters, The Huffington Post, and others.  I studied Creative Writing at The New School (MFA, 2011).  I live and work in Pennsylvania.

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