“Christ Almighty, Mary Pat. That dead cat’s still in your freezer,” Sister Kate said, swirling the dregs of her vodka cranberry and downing the last bit. She chomped the feeble remaining ice cubes as she offered the Tom Collins glass to Mary Pat, who filled her back up and shook her head.
“Some language for a nun. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
The three old ladies stared out at the azure lawn from the ochre-stained porch, latticed from the back of Mary Pat’s two-story and ending at the green space in long stairs. Lifelong friends ensconced around a wide wicker table, wiling away the hottest day in August with lies and admonitions and vodka.
It was so hot light itself was warped at a distance, everything above the dark green a swirling, humid question mark. A young deer plucked at the wild blackberries that fringed the property line before it gave way to cornfields. The fawn moved languidly, sapped by the heat and unafraid of the company.
“Oh-kay Mary so there’s no plan dere?” Sister Kate asked, lighting a cigarette and giggling softly, brushing an ash off her black habit. She always sounded a mixture of Irish and Norwegian to Mary Pat, though she’d lived neither place. It was as if her very genes had acquired a voice. Or perhaps it was merely a lifetime of Minnesota leaking out of her.
“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” Mary Pat said, pouring herself a shot from the Smirnoff liter, remnants of ice froth drifting on the bottom from its life lived in the freezer. She gulped and slammed the little glass on the table, her powerful arms jiggling with fat. Halfway through her drink she laughed, which made her cough, lungs burning. Cackles came from Sister Kate and a high whine from Kitty. Mary Pat hunched over, hands on her knees, and hacked it all out, her back wide from decades of hard farming.
“You’re a goddamned mess,” Kitty said, laughing as she balanced her teacup.
Kitty was dainty but kept the sharp, dark eyes of a killer. Her spells of day drinking were long gone, hell drinking at all’d been off the table for at least the last five years, as far as any of them could tell. That was for the best anyway, and everybody knew it.
“How many years ago’d that damn thing die?” Sister Kate asked.
Mary Pat exhaled and sat carefully in her chair. She bore her size with a nimble, easy grace.
“Ten, I guess it must be now.”
“Jeee-sus.”
“Do ya think the Lord takes kindly to you using his name all over the place, now Sister Kate?” Kitty asked, darting her black Irish stare. Equal parts mischief and mirth.
“We’ve come to an understanding,” Sister Kate said.
“Yah, what’s that?” Kitty asked.
“I get to say whatever the hell I want after a life spent serving no other man but Him.”
They all laughed and had another round, but Sister Kate wasn’t ready to let it go. No, they all knew she had a moral obligation to upend rocks, and there was something underneath that boulder of Mary Pat’s. More than a dead cat. Even though they knew good and damn well why that thing was still in the freezer.
“Ten years is a long time, there Mary Pat,” Sister Kate started up again and Mary Pat thought of punching her in her pointy face, but she was one of God’s spokespersons and she loved her too much, even though she hated Kate something terrible sometimes.
“Yep,” she said, sighing and sitting down and pointing her face in her drink.
“What you been you waiting for?” Kitty asked.
“Supposed to bury Vernon at Carl’s farm. What she wanted to do.” Mary Pat said.
“Still nothing from Grace then?” Kitty said after a long silence.
“Nope.”
There was another long empty space, the one that echoed Mary Pat and her estranged daughter’s years of silence. Kitty sipped her tea and clinked the saucer on the glass table neatly.
“Well. I say you throw that ole cat out. Say three Hail Mary’s over the garbage can. Get some closure.” Kitty said.
Mary Pat snorted. “Closure. Tell us how that’s going for you and Charlie,” she said, and Sister Kate laughed, and Mary Pat laughed and finally Kitty did too, even though that one cut too close. They kept drinking until everyone forgot and didn’t bring it up again. Irish secrets and late nights with old ladies always moved on like weary cattle, grazing wet grass with heads down and mouths open.
The next morning, before the late summer sun had punched its way over the horizon, Mary Pat heard the garbage trucks a half mile off. The squealing of the brakes cut through the blue-grey Minnesota air like a warning bell.
She crawled over Larry, kept in the plastic cocoon of his CPAP machine, and looked out the window. She could see the lights blossom on the other side of the highway, a full ten minutes away. The whole fleet was advancing, sent ungodly early to punish the drunks every Saturday morning.
Her morning dress felt stiff and icy as she smoothed it over her aching body and walked down the stairs. She stood lost in the middle of the kitchen, her head caving in on itself, as if there was a pocket of absolute emptiness in the center, a black hole devouring everything around it. That special kind of vodka hangover.
“God damn you Kitty.”
She opened the fridge and took out a can of PBR, sucking a long, shaky swallow, and found herself in the garage, standing in front of the tall freezer. The whines from the garbage trucks were louder. She pulled the door open, taking another draw of beer with the other hand, and bent down, her knees and hips cracking. Reached blind all the way back on the bottom shelf, as if she didn’t have to look for it, because she sure didn’t. That infernal thing was where her mind’s eye knew it was, always. Resting right where those dreams kept her memory sharp.
She had to yank hard on the tied top to dislodge the cat in its double plastic. It gave way with a snap from the bed of ice that had formed around it. Beer slopped on her slippers and ice chunks clanked on the concrete before the cat flew free and swung around past her.
Mary Pat shut the freezer and stood up with more clicking from her knees and ankles and had a good look at the thing. It was shaped like a giant overcooked shrimp, curled up and white-ish pink. Completely covered in ice except for the very tip, the whiskers and mouth and left eye of Vernon butted up against the hazy plastic bunched by the thick red twist tie she’d stolen from Grace’s old sleeping bag.
She stared for a great while, waiting for the eye to blink or the teeth to chomp, to complete the mid-hiss that Vernon had been perpetually frozen in.
“Jesus.” She downed half the beer and stared again. “Jesus, Mary Pat.” She drained the rest.
The garage door opened with its own aged clicking and rumbling and Mary Pat stood waiting. The blue light made her an impressive shadow, like a wide, stooped warrior awaiting her last battle. The air was cool and thick, the grass and edges of the driveway wet as if it had rained, but it was only the dew of late August. Fall was in the air for the early morning, but summer remained everywhere else. She walked out to her row of receptacles lined at the curb. The empty beer can goes in the blue, and the cat goes in the grey. Today, dammit. Today.
She looked at all the bottles and spoils from last night and debated whether to go back inside and stuff Vernon back in the freezer, past the old hams and roasts. Go back to bed to be lulled to sleep by the awful rhythm of Larry’s CPAP.
The trucks’ brakes screeched closer again and she held her breath and tossed the freezer burned cat from her daughter that she’d never see again on top of the week’s refuse. She threw it like a heavy hammer, suddenly too much for her, heavier than anything she remembered since maybe her first bale of hay she’d heaved onto her dad’s truck bed as a young girl. It made her sway and crash into the garbage bin. She steadied herself and closed the top and stood there, panting and crying now, she hadn’t done that about Grace for so long, and here she was again.
The trucks were close, and she waited. Grace had gone missing, that she knew and had never told her old drinking buddies. No reason to. Gone out of touch, gone missing, dead, there’s not a lick of difference between them except when you find out for sure. When you get closure. But Grace’s ex Carl was dead five years now, and there was no one else who knew jack shit and no one else who was still looking. Mary Pat knew damn good and well what had happened to her daughter. A mother knows, and for ten years there’d been that same emptiness in her chest that was in her head, but that one never went away with a cold beer in the morning.
The first truck was always the recycling, and its great mechanical arm sloshed all the empties into its belly like a broken chandelier of shame, reminding everyone the professional kind of drunks they were. The driver winked and made way for the garbage truck behind him. Smears of dark filth showed on its back as it clutched her garbage and Vernon, the only thing left of Grace. Her daughter’s cat that was supposed to be lying in peace at that Iowa farm where Carl had shot himself and she could never bear to set foot again.
Mary Pat watched the truck shake everything into its back and saw a white flash of poor frozen Vernon and felt lightheaded, like she might pass out. Her hands rested on her knees for a moment before she could right the ship and turn back into the house, cinching her bitter dress tight.
She said three Hail Mary’s for Kitty’s sake over another Pabst. It did nothing. As if there was such a silly thing as closure.
–
Matthew Green was raised in the Midwest, cut his teeth as a film editor in Boston and L.A., and received his MFA in creative writing at Antioch University in L.A. He now lives in the central coast of California with his wife, two daughters, and superhero bulldog.
© 2026, Matthew Green
Halfway Down the Stairs 