Denise figured the mom was dead; she had to be. The dad did the shopping now, and unless the mom was traveling for work for, like, a month or something, it was the only explanation.
Point of fact: Just last month the daughter and the mom had been talking while checking out at Denise’s register, and the daughter had asked for Lunchables, and the mom had said, “You will eat those over my dead body.”
Now the dad was buying five of them a week.
Denise had become increasingly fixated on this particular mom during the year that she’d been working at the Food Emporium in Astoria, Queens, for reasons she couldn’t explain beyond the fact that the woman seemed like a good mom. She usually had her daughter with her, and the daughter, who was eleven or twelve, would always ask for extras by the checkout—vitaminwaters or organic peanut-butter cups—and the mom always let her get them. She also made the girl bag the treats, which seemed fair.
Sometimes the mom would come in twice during one of Denise’s shifts. The second trips were always solo and usually for one forgotten item: an onion, french fries, tortilla chips. Occasionally the mom would seem embarrassed.
“I know I was just here,” she’d say. “In case you thought you were going crazy.”
“No worries,” Denise would tell her.
The mom would grab her purchase and say, “At least I live right around the corner.”
One time when the mom came in alone, Denise and Mario, who was working the next register over, had been talking about how old they looked, because someone had guessed that Mario was sixteen—three years younger than he actually was—and he was incensed. When the mom came to Denise’s register, Mario asked her, “How old do you think we are?”
The mom stopped unloading her basket onto the moving belt. She studied them closely—back and forth, back and forth. “I’m going to say nineteen.”
“Yes!” Mario said, smiling widely and holding his hands up, palms raised, as if to praise God. “Thank you!”
Denise had started scanning the mom’s stuff—clearly it was stir-fry night—but she paused when the mom said, “How old do you think I am?”
Denise, still holding a slender sleeve of green-tea noodles, locked eyes with Mario. He was sipping iced coffee through a straw, and his eyebrows shot up to signal, Uh-oh.
“Well?” The mom turned to include him.
Denise did some quick math. With a kid around twelve, the mom could be anywhere between . . . twenty-eight and sixty? Denise examined her more thoroughly than she ever had before: a funky haircut; cool boots; jeans and a T-shirt under a military-style jacket. There were some wrinkles by her eyes, but only when she smiled.
“Forty-five?” Denise guessed with an apologetic lilt, in case she was off base in the wrong direction.
Mario said, “Yeah, I was gonna say forty-three?”
“I love you both,” the mom said, then continued taking items from her basket and putting them on the belt.
“Well?” Denise said as she scanned soy sauce, ginger, and garlic. “Are we close?”
The mom opened her jacket so Denise could see that her T-shirt read, “Vintage 1970.”
Denise did some math again. “Fifty-four?”
“Afraid so!” the mom said.
“Wow,” Mario said. “You don’t look it. At all.”
That had been months ago, and now it had been at least a month since Denise had seen the mom—only the dad and the daughter and those Lunchables—so yeah, she was absolutely dead.
Denise’s mother was also dead, but in a different way: dead inside.
You wouldn’t know it to look at her or from her Facebook posts, where she was always dolled up and out with friends, but ever since Denise’s father had left to move in with his new girlfriend last year, Denise’s mom had been pretending so hard to be fine that the effort was clearly exhausting her. Most days Denise had to get her mother out of bed so she wouldn’t be late for work. Most evenings her mom just doomscrolled or watched makeup tutorials on her phone with the volume too high.
It’s not aging, ladies! It’s living!
Denise’s mom didn’t really cook anymore—not the way the dead mom did (had?)—so on days when Denise knew her mother would be out, she’d sometimes copy the mom’s grocery purchases and try to figure out, with the help of the internet, how to turn them into a meal. Mario would make fun of her when he was ringing her up (“Tofu? Really?”), but Denise didn’t care. She was pretty sure no one was cooking for Mario either. Maybe one day she’d invite him over. He was working his way through college too and living at home like she was, and he had a way about him that Denise just found easy.
The mom’s core meal rotation, in addition to the stir-fry, included spaghetti Bolognese, chicken fajitas with rice and beans, pasta with broccoli rabe and sausage, pasta with chicken and mushrooms, kielbasa and pierogi and a vegetable, and linguini with clams. Almost every day she bought a salad kit. Every third day she bought milk and cereal and Coke and one or two cans of dog food.
Denise’s attempts at cooking these meals had at first been hit-or-miss. She didn’t know what Better Than Bouillon was for, but she took note of it one time when the mom bought it and figured out how to use it. She hadn’t thought much about spices until the mom bought chili powder on a fajita night.
She’d sometimes hear her own mother come home late, and when Denise went to the kitchen to check on her, her mom would be at the table eating leftovers. “This is pretty good,” she’d say. “You made this?” Like it was hard to believe.
The dead mom was, of course, only one of many Astoria residents that Denise’s life bumped edges with. There were lots of other people who came into the store every day or two—like the gay couple who owned the dog-grooming place down the street, and the tall dad who’d arrive after school with two kids and act like he deserved a round of applause—and outside of the store she saw familiar faces everywhere. There was the man who sold flowers in front of the bodega and always said hello to her. There was the guy who lived across the street from her apartment, who drank too much and whom Denise had seen pissing behind a car more than once. Most notably there was a woman who walked down Denise’s street in the afternoons singing “Linger,” by the Cranberries, poorly and at the top of her lungs.
Denise had told Mario about her during a lull at work. “And it’s always ‘Linger’?” Mario wanted to know. Denise nodded. “Makes me sad, that song,” Mario said.
“Why?” Denise asked. Then: “Oh, right. The singer died.”
An older woman appeared at Denise’s register with eggs and Canadian bacon. Breakfast for dinner. The dead mom never sank so low.
The dad did not let the daughter buy organic peanut-butter cups or vitaminwater. He never once bought a salad kit—always fresh greens, tomatoes, and cucumbers—and he made return trips for forgotten items with alarming frequency, usually for those Lunchables.
Denise couldn’t get past them. Over my dead body.
Whenever she saw the dad and daughter now, Denise tried to make eye contact with the girl. She had seemed friendly when she was with her mom; now, not so much. On top of that, her hair sometimes looked unkempt, and one day Denise was sure she was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the day before. Denise couldn’t contain her growing worry any longer. When she and Mario were clocking out that afternoon, she confessed that she thought the mom was dead.
“What mom?” he said.
It was true there were an awful lot of moms. Denise didn’t know any of their names or where they lived, just that they pretty much kept the Food Emporium in business. She wasn’t sure how to explain to Mario which one she was talking about, but then she remembered.
“The one who guessed our ages right,” she said. “The one who was fifty-four but didn’t look it.”
“Oh!” he said. “Nah. No way. She’s not dead. Why would she be dead?”
Denise didn’t feel like explaining about the Lunchables, so she said, “There’s a million reasons she could be dead.” Then she set out to prove it.
Attempts to read the name on the dad’s credit card when he tapped it were futile. Denise tried at least four times. She suggested to him once that he should get his groceries delivered—he’d have to write down his name and address—but he didn’t fall for it.
One day, when traffic in the store was slow, she said to Mario, “Watch my register,” and followed the dad out onto the street. Looking up and down the sidewalk, she saw him pass the halal food truck on the corner and turn left. She racewalked to the corner so she wouldn’t lose sight of him, following him along a long line of row houses until he climbed a set of steps and disappeared inside.
Of course the dead mom lived there. It was the nicest house on the block, which was an achievement considering the houses were mostly identical—big red-brick boxes forming an impenetrable wall. This one had large potted plants on the stoop, tall grasses and soft ferns that looked like they came from far-off plains and that Denise’s mother could kill in under a month. A string of clear light bulbs with golden filaments ran from one side of the house to the other. The door, instead of being painted white or black like most on the block, was a glossy royal blue.
Soft lights lit windows on all three floors, but the closed curtains left Denise with nothing but shadows to study. The wrought-iron railings on the stoop were wrapped in fake white spiderwebs, and a surprisingly menacing ghost with the face of Mickey Mouse hung from an awning and blinked purple into the night. Halloween was two weeks away.
Denise hustled back to the store, where a line for the registers had started to form.
“What was that about?” Mario asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Right,” he said, like he knew exactly what she’d been up to. “You know what your problem is?”
“Enlighten me.”
“You care too much,” he said.
At home that night Denise googled the dead mom’s address, but she couldn’t find who lived there, only that the house was worth more money than Denise would make in ten years once she started working a real job. She searched phrases like “Queens mom dead at fifty-four” to see if there had been a car accident or something like that, but nothing came up. Why was it so hard to find out if someone in your neighborhood was dead?
“What are you doing on Halloween?” Denise’s mother asked a few days later.
“I don’t know,” Denise said. “Why?”
“I’m doing a thing,” her mother said, “and I thought maybe you could come and take a video.”
“I might be going to a party,” Denise said. “I’ll let you know.”
The “thing” her mom was doing was a group dance to “Thriller,” part of a Halloween block party being held a few neighborhoods away. Denise’s mom’s friend Annie had apparently roped her into it, and now her mom spent every night in the living room with the Michael Jackson video on YouTube, practicing the big zombie dance sequence. She was more focused on this than she’d been on pretty much anything in years, and Denise felt loving admiration and crushing disappointment in equal measure. Why couldn’t her mother have thrown herself into her career? Her self-esteem? Her daughter? Anything but this?
The dad, meanwhile, came into the Food Emporium every day or two as usual. He bought candy corn once. He shopped for stir-fry, but with beef instead of tofu. He bought an Old El Paso taco kit and all the fixings. One day he brought the daughter and let her pick out a snack while he shopped. She disappeared down one aisle, then emerged from another and beelined for an endcap of rice rolls near the checkout.
She stood just feet from Denise’s register, scrolling on her phone while she waited for the dad. How hard would it be to just ask, Hey, how come I never see you with your mom anymore?
But then the dad arrived with his basket—hot dogs and buns, pickles, napkins, and, this time, a salad kit—and he said, “Over here, Becca,” as he started to put items down on Denise’s belt.
Denise started scanning. For a minute she thought about casually saying, I haven’t seen your wife in a while! But my God, if she was right about all of this, these poor people—what would they even say?
Oh! She’s dead!
It was true that Denise had been invited to a Halloween party, at the apartment of a guy from her Patient Care II class at CUNY, where she was studying to be a radiology tech. Adam seemed nice enough, except that he was the only guy in the class and talked disproportionately often and also with outsize bravado considering he was the only student who’d gotten lightheaded during a venipuncture demonstration a few weeks ago. In the lead-up to Halloween some of the girls in Denise’s study group had started poking fun at Adam behind his back, saying the sight of costume blood might make him pass out at his own party and he probably should have chosen another career. Denise laughed along but mostly didn’t pay attention, because she’d grown preoccupied with learning everything she could about the radiation contrast agents they were discussing in imaging class that week. She could not get over the fact that radioactive dye could be injected into the body to light up tumors. She wished there were something she could shoot into her mother’s veins—or even into her own—that might light a way toward . . . maybe happiness? A dye that could flag low self-esteem and self-pity so they could be surgically removed?
Anyway, she told Adam she’d be at his party, and she told her mother she could not be at her “Thriller” dance to take a video. On October 30, after her shift at the Food Emporium, Denise headed into an overcrowded Spirit Halloween. She must have circled the store three times—sexy this, Marvel that—before settling on a skeleton bodysuit. If that wasn’t good radiology-tech humor, she didn’t know what was. She grabbed black and white face paints and some makeup sponges and also a skull mask, because she wasn’t sure she’d get the makeup right.
Adam texted while she was on a long line to pay: What’s up?
I’m in Spirit Halloween, Denise replied.
Wow. Nice to know you put a lot of thought into your costume, he said. You realize my party is tomorrow?
Yes, she said. I know.
I’m still not convinced you’re even coming.
At the register! Gotta go!
Around 2 PM on Halloween the dad came in alone and bought chicken nuggets and white-cheddar mac and cheese, which Denise figured was a fast and easy dinner for Becca, who would surely need to be taken trick-or-treating, because presumably you had to do stuff like that even if your mother was dead. Life goes on, and candy and hoopla would prove it.
But also, surely, with a house decked out like theirs was, someone would stay home to give out candy to trick-or-treaters. Probably the dad. But if the mom was dead, then who was going to take Becca trick-or-treating?
The question suddenly seemed paramount, and as Denise watched the dad walk away, she felt an enormous surge of regret that she lived in a place where even neighbors you saw all the time were strangers. How was it possible that she didn’t know the dead mom’s name?
“That’s the dead mom’s husband,” she said to Mario as the dad reached the door.
“You’re obsessed!” he replied. “And not in a good way.”
So what if she was.
When she got off work at five, Denise went home and helped her mother with her zombie makeup: scoops of black under her eyes for a hollowed-out effect; gaunt shadows on her cheeks. Her mother had cut holes in an old black dress so it was hanging off her body, and she added a thin slash of fake blood across her neck.
“You look good,” Denise said, watching her mom in the mirror. Despite the deathly makeup, her mother appeared genuinely happy in a way she didn’t when she was wearing red lipstick and too much sparkly eye shadow on a girls’ night out. Something in the eyes.
“Thanks,” her mom said. Then, “What about you?”
“What about me?” Denise said.
“Dressing up for the party?”
“Oh, yeah,” Denise said. “It’s just too early to get ready.”
“What are you going as?”
“A skeleton.”
Her mother groaned, then checked her phone and said, “Shoot, I gotta go! Have fun,” and was out the door.
There were kids trick-or-treating in the apartment building, and answering the door made it hard for Denise to find time to shower and put on her dumb bodysuit and do her face makeup, but she was also procrastinating. When she’d bought the skeleton suit, she’d pictured herself wearing it at Adam’s party, not while walking down the street in her neighborhood or riding the subway to Adam’s apartment. She remembered as a kid hating to have to wear a coat on Halloween, but a switch had been flipped at some point, and now she didn’t want to be seen in costume. She wondered how many switches there were like that one—a fuse box of life that, once enough switches were flipped, meant you were a fully powered adult and no longer a child.
After finally getting dressed, she left the bucket of candy outside the apartment door with a note that said, “PLEASE TAKE JUST ONE!” and began walking to the subway. On the way she passed a group of Ghostbusters accompanied by a big green slime ghost. She saw an octopus baby, its meaty tentacles spilling over the frame of a stroller. She saw a couple of Wednesday Addamses, a couple of Barbies, at least one Chappell Roan, and a troupe of Disney princesses who couldn’t have been more than five years old.
The princesses and their parents were heading down the same block she was, toward the dead mom’s house. Denise tried to pass them, but she couldn’t get around. She crossed to the other side of the street instead.
As soon as she did, she realized that the gaggle of girls was about to climb the dead mom’s stoop. She stood near a tree and watched, mask in her hand, as anticipation burst like a confetti cannon in her gut.
The princesses went up the steps, and a Belle rang the doorbell. But something was wrong. The lights were all off; the menacing Mickey hid in the shadows. No one was home.
Or maybe they were. Maybe they’d canceled their Halloween, on account of the mom being dead. Maybe the darkened house was all the proof Denise needed.
The princesses left, but Denise could not will herself to continue to the subway to Adam’s place. She stood in the tree well, where an empty vodka bottle sat among weeds, and considered going home.
Just then the dad came walking down the block. He went up the front steps, opened the door, and turned the lights on inside. The purple Mickey blinked to life. Denise watched as another group of trick-or-treaters went up the steps and rang the bell. This time she heard a dog bark, and the blue door opened to reveal the dad holding a large orange bowl.
Denise put on her mask and hurried across the street, breathing hard. She did a small jog to reach the stoop and started to climb just as the group of chest-high ninjas and Spidermen were coming down. They parted lazily for her. At the top the dad stood with the orange bowl. She looked past him, into the house, where she’d surely see some kind of clue as to whether she was right about the mom or not: flowers, sympathy cards, anything. But all she could see was the corner of a golden couch, an end table overburdened with magazines, a shelf holding succulents in pots, and, on the coffee table, a half-empty bottle of Pepto Bismol.
Remembering why she was supposed to be here, she said, “Trick or treat!” and felt her own hot breath inside the mask.
“I’m holding the bowl right here,” the dad said with some irritation.
Denise said, “Right. Sorry. Mask.”
She pulled the chin of her mask away so she could look down. It was a good candy house—full-size Snickers and Twix—and she took one of each, then thanked him and turned to leave. Almost immediately her whole body broke out in a sweat of exhilaration and embarrassment.
An MRI taken right then would surely have revealed she’d lost her mind.
Adam texted: You coming? Or you gonna bail like I bet Maggie you would?
Well, that decided it.
The “Thriller” moms were gathered in front of a three-story house that had enormous inflatable demons and ghosts in the front yard. The street had been closed and cleared of cars, and the sidewalks were lined with people waiting for the performance to start. Having ditched her mask and touched up her face makeup in the bathroom of a restaurant around the corner, Denise spotted her mother among the dancers and moved to a better vantage point from which to take a video.
When the zombie horde started to dance, Denise hit record on her phone and watched, surprised by her own sense of wonder at what was happening. As her mother had explained it, the group was just a bunch of people who did this once a year, but as they jerked and clawed and shivered, Denise regretted not having joined them. She wished she had applied herself to learning the walking-dead moves alongside her mom.
Scanning the crowd of other spectators, she recognized a frequent flyer from the Food Emporium, dressed as an M&M. She saw the husband of her mom’s friend Annie, also taking a video. But apart from those two, these were all just neighbors whose paths might never again intersect with Denise’s—not the way the mom’s had, and now the mom was dead. She couldn’t prove it, but she knew it the way you could absolutely know things you cannot prove, like whether you’re in pain, whether you’re in love.
When the song was over and the applause had stopped, Denise tried to make her way to her mother, irritated by the zombie horde that just minutes ago had brought her such delight. The street was too dark, too crowded, too loud. And then she heard a voice she recognized so deep inside her that it didn’t make sense, saying, “And the timing really couldn’t have been any worse.”
She whirled around and saw her: The dead mom. Very much alive.
She was perched on crutches in the front garden of one of the houses, her leg in a cast. Dressed as a vampire, she wore a sash across her caped chest that read, “Broken bones suck.” Becca, dressed as Lydia from Beetlejuice, was sorting candy with a friend on a small patch of grass.
Denise’s own mother found her. “Denise! You came! Did you see? Wasn’t it amazing?” She pulled her daughter into a hug, and Denise could not stop the tears even though she knew they’d probably ruin her makeup. Her mom released her, looked at her in confusion, and said, “Oh my God, are you crying?”
Denise peeled off her skeleton suit while waiting on the subway platform for the train to take her home. Once aboard in just black leggings and a T-shirt, she sat next to a man dressed as Super Mario and thought about how her Mario would think it was hilarious that Denise had bumped into the dead mom in a horde of zombies. That the mom had only broken her leg. Maybe Denise would invite him over for dinner one night, and he could laugh at her expense all he wanted, so long as he ate whatever she cooked for him from the mom’s repertoire.
She imagined the day when the mom and the daughter would come back to the Food Emporium together. The daughter would get peanut-butter cups and vitaminwater, and the mom would make her bag them, and Denise would say, “Hey, good to see you! I thought you were dead!” and the mom would laugh, and so would Mario.
On the way home from the train, she passed the store and saw Mario still inside, closing up. She thought about going in to tell him the news, thought about inviting him over right then, but her mom would be home soon. She’d want to see the “Thriller” video, and Denise wanted to watch it with her.
Back at the apartment the candy was gone—the note too. Inside, Denise hung the skeleton bodysuit in the back of her closet. Then she went into the kitchen and heated up some leftover stir-fry—enough for her and her mom.
