I pulled into Mom’s driveway in my rented Hyundai Elantra and a pill bottle full of  edibles in my backpack. It was Thanksgiving, and I was in an itch to get high because eating  with my family is always stressful for some reason. It’s not because we disagree on politics or  anything, but because, when I’m around my family, something always comes up that puts me on  edge. But Mom always makes good food, so I figured I would have a good time. It was also my  birthday, and she told me she’d made me a pumpkin cheesecake. I parked the car and got my  bags out to set in the room I use at her house. I don’t like to call it my room because I’d fully  moved out of there three months ago, when I moved to a place where someone punctured a hole  in my Honda Civic’s bumper because he couldn’t keep his foot on the brake.  

I was thankful Mom was off. She’d recently had to take a second job because she  couldn’t afford her house payment on the money she was making as a data analyst with only a  high school diploma. I set my bags down in the room and popped half the edible before heading  to the kitchen. Normally, we’d have had more people over for Thanksgiving. We had Dad’s  family over last year, and my uncle Alejandro, on Dad’s side, invited us over this year. But I’d  always felt guilty over the fact I don’t speak enough Spanish to converse with Dad’s family  fluently, unlike my cousins, who were full Mexican as opposed to my half, and who had grown  up speaking both languages. Today, it was just Mom, Dad, and my brother. There were my  grandma Virginia and my aunt Tami in their urns on the kitchen island in the front room, where  Mom worked at her day job, but they were only here in spirit. 

We’ve got a picture of Tami on the kitchen island. She and Mom both have a good tussle  of brown hair and the same smile. But Mom’s had her hair dyed blonde as long as I’ve known  her. She usually wears a cardigan and some comfy-looking utility pants. That’s what she was  wearing when I walked into the kitchen.  

“Is the food ready?” I asked, the edible working its way through my system. 

“Only if you give me a hug first,” Mom said, and we hugged.  

Thanksgiving dinner was the usual: a whole turkey, baked macaroni and cheese, rolls,  stuffing (with onions), green beans, and mash potatoes with gravy. It was all her cooking because  she had always been the one who cooked. I can’t remember the last time I helped. I was good at  getting food in and out of the oven and even better at getting food in and out of the container.  Whenever I was home, I would focus on washing the dishes. I had a knack for slotting them in  the right place in the dishwasher. My brother and Dad were good at putting them in the sink, and  Dad had gotten better at washing the dishes when he was mad at my brother for not washing  them; it was progress. I downed a tall boy of Hell Yes Ma’am beer that Mom got for me (it’s my  favorite beer because it tastes great and gets me fucked up the fastest) and went about putting  some food on my plate.  

Sitting around the table, eating together, it was hard to believe that my parents had  divorced ten years ago. They’d been back together for four years by now. Nice things happen,  sometimes. My brother and I are iterations of our parents. Matthew has Mom’s hair—thick and  wavy. I have Dad’s face—round. Growing up, people said Dad and I looked like twins. I’m not  sure if that meant I looked older or that he looked younger. Mom has always said she felt I look  like her—that is to say, white. She is one of the few white people to have said so.  

I ate while Mom talked. Dad ate while Mom talked. She was talking about how happy  she was to have us here as a family, how not everyone got to do that. When I finished, I felt full,  but I didn’t feel high, so I went back to my room to get the other half of the edible. It had only  been thirty minutes, not enough to feel the full effects. I should have realized that.  

The first time I smoked weed was when my friend had me huff on a bong. He had come  back from spending time with family in Oklahoma, where he earned his nuke med degree while  working at a Wal-Mart. He said all the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek Indians hung out at the  Wal-Mart, and they were tall, taller than he was. Anyway, he told me to huff through the bong  like I was eating ass. Never mind the fact that I’d never eaten ass up to that point in my life. Then  I remembered I was huffing it after he did, and I thought, “oh, wait.”  

I don’t use a bong because it’s too big to hide. Instead, I use my pipe—it’s a green  Gandalf pipe, except you can smoke weed in it. When I rip, it hurts my lungs and makes my eyes  feel like they’re on fire. But it’s worth it for just to feel like I’m sitting on a cloud when I sit on  the couch. I didn’t bring the pipe, though, because I didn’t want Mom to suspect anything. She  says she has a hound’s sense of smell. Instead, I dropped by this place called iHemp just before I  got home. It was on Stratford Road, just down the way from the Enterprise where I’d picked up  the Hyundai Elantra. At that Enterprise, I’d met a cute girl who, it turned out, was dating a  classmate of mine from back when. Like mine, his name was Nicholas, only he went by  Harrison. I remember the last time I saw him was in this cluster of auto shops beside a tree  barrier that separates Dad’s neighborhood from the rest of the city. I was riding bikes with a  neighbor once, back before my parents divorced, and that neighbor went crashing through the trees on his bike, making sounds like he was on a motorcycle. He rode in front of one of the auto  shops, and this lady, who looked a lot like Kathy Bates from Misery, came out holding a tiny  black revolver. I stood on my own bike, my fat thighs straddling the bar because the skinny little seat hurt my ass, and jumped when she looked at me. She went back inside like nothing  happened.  

Anyway, the iHemp was closing early because of the holiday. It turns out the store had  been open a few years, yet I had never bothered to come in. That’s mostly because weed isn’t  fully legal here in North Carolina, and I know that whatever I get here will be dogshit compared  to the edibles I had in Denver the previous spring. I bought four Delta 9 indica gummies for  eleven dollars, but the clerk packed five on accident, and I didn’t bother to correct her. She told  me to make sure I only take half the edible, so I could get a feel for how it made me feel. I said I fully intended on doing that, as that’s what I did in Denver, and that was a great fucking time. 

“No one wants to green out,” she said.  

Greening out is essentially an overdose on weed that, most of the time, people don’t die  from.  

“Oh, yeah, I know that’s like,” I told her, but what I didn’t tell her is that the last time I greened out, which was the first time, I had five shots of cannabis-infused cashew milk in one  hour. My heart pounded like a jackhammer, and it got hard to breathe. A friend who was there  with me walked me around my apartment neighborhood until we found a stoner friend of ours  who put me in his car and took us to the BestWay down the street. I hid in the backseat. The lights stretched as he drove down the hill. He put on some Chopin as he went inside the  convenience store for some whole black peppercorns. When we got back, he told me eat the  peppercorns and make a pizza for myself. He also had me throw out the beer I’d been drinking. I  eventually mellowed out after telling them “thank you for being here with me” ten times each.  

For me, a green out starts with a pounding heartbeat, followed by a sense of panic, which  is exactly what I felt when Mom told me she was going to die.  

“I think about Tami, and I know I’m going to die like that,” she said.  

To which I responded “wait, what?” Because Tami died of an overdose on some pain pills  and maybe a little cocaine. She’d died three years before this Thanksgiving, but in October,  which was her birth month. Mom had texted to wish her a happy birthday, but Tami never  responded. That was odd, considering she loved to talk. Mom later went and found Tami alone in  her bed, her finger pointing up to the ceiling.  

“What do you mean you’re going to die like that? Like an overdose?” I asked Mom. 

“Oh, no,” Mom said. “But I just realized that one day I’ll die.”  

Mom looked at me like what she was saying wasn’t any big deal. I felt my heart start to  beat faster, and I had to take a deep breath. The white fluorescents showed the lines on her  forehead and, all the sudden, I had second thoughts about finishing my second Hell Yes Ma’am. I  couldn’t figure out how to tell her this was the worse thing she could say to her lightweight  almost-thirty-year-old-son who was tripping his balls off, so instead I just nodded like it was an  every day thing she was telling me.  

“I’m going to take a nap. When I get up, do you want to take a walk?” I asked her this  because walking was what we did whenever I was home. I like walking with my mom. 

“Ok,” Mom said. “But it’s cold out.”  

I went to my room. For the most part, I just lay in my bed, trying to get some sleep. I  would occasionally go out to get some water, not trying to talk to anybody as I’d never been this  cross-faded in front of my family before. My heart was pounding too fast for me to count. I tried  to calm myself down, so I put on some YouTube. But I couldn’t stand anything in my algorithm  as it all had to do with the development of different nuclear bombs, so I put on a peaceful music  stream. I slowed my breathing, trying to listen to the music, and drank water. The worst type of  trip is where you lose your appetite, and that’s exactly what happened to me. I kept breathing and  checking my heartbeat, holding my hand to my chest. The guy kept thumping and thumping, and  I kept tossing and turning, trying to find the position where I wouldn’t feel my blood pulsing in  my ears. I hate hearing it beat like that.  

The last time I went to the doctor, the nurse told me my blood pressure was high. I told  her it was because I had white gown syndrome, which is when your blood pressure is elevated  when you visit the doctor. It’s a real thing, I swear. She told me I needed to eat healthier, and I  was reminded of all the times people called me fat when I was younger. I’ve spent a lot of time in front of mirrors, assessing the fat around my middle, torturing myself in trying to figure out  whether it’s growing or shrinking. When I jump rope in the gym, I watch each part of myself— cheeks, pecs, biceps, and stomach—move up and down with the rhythm of the exercise. I tell  myself I’ve come far, but I still check it afterward. I can never decide if I find it endearing or  hideous. Indulging myself in my vice is my way of forgetting about that, of not feeling guilt  about eating, if only for a few hours.  

My aunt Tami would take me to the Bagel Station on Stratford Road when I was younger,  all those carbs likely having something to do with my fatness. She loved to show me off at Pig  Pickins’, where she waitressed when I was a kid. Dad thinks the restaurant business is where she  got the things that killed her. In her later years, she worked for these jerks at a place on  Cloverdale. Mom said the manager treated Tami like shit. I remember going in there to say hello,  and her manager eyed us. Well, I eyed the fucker right back, and he went back into his hidey hole.  

When Mom came to see Tami, it was in this far-flung corner of Forsyth, bordering Yadkin  County. Tami had been living with her husband, this guy named Harold who really didn’t have  his wits about him. Mom said there were all these women in the house, unrelated to anyone who  lived there, and they were wearing big cowboy boots. In my daydreams, I call them the Coyote  Ugly Reject Crew. They all looked at my mother with disgust or scorn, the way she tells it.  Harold’s son led Mom to Tami’s room, and that’s where she found Tami, lying on the bed and  pointing up to the ceiling. No one had checked on her for a full day before they realized she was  dead. If I could trade Tami for anyone in that house, I would, if only just to talk to her again. The  thing is, Tami asked me to lunch the month she died. “My treat,” she’d said. I neglected to  answer her.  

Anyway, I got up because I knew I was greening out since I was thinking about death. I  went outside to where Mom was playing with our dogs and feeding the chickens. We have two  dogs, and God knows how many chickens. Our German Shepherd hates them. He’s always  barking at them and trying to kill them. The people on my parents’ neighborhood Facebook page are always complaining about the chickens, saying that residents are only allowed three chickens  per household per the HOA rules. I always want to complain about the renters who live next to  my parents. Over the past four years, three of them have died from drug overdoses or heart  attacks. And they’re all white guys with some Yadkin county accent. Instead of talking to me or  Dad, they just spit. Dad had some Yadkin county people over to get an estimate on building a  workshed. Once they left, they never returned his calls. If there’s a good Yadkin county person  out there, I haven’t met them.  

Anyway, I was trying to pet my German Shepherd because his fur was so damn soft, but  he was busy trying to tell the chickens who was sheriff around these parts, and he kept running  around. My pit bull was eating some leftover turkey, and a chicken was trying to get it from her. 

“They’re cannibals,” Mom said. “We have cannibal chickens.”  

I scratched my head, “we sure do.”  

I thought for a moment that maybe I should tell Mom what I was going through, but I  figured she’d panic worse than I was and take me to the ER. She had to take my brother there  once, when he screamed at a video game so much he burst a blood vessel in his eye. 

I thought better and said “do we have any whole black peppercorns?”  

“Yeah,” she nodded. “Why?”  

“The beer I drank is messing with me a bit.”  

“Oh,” she said. “What does it do? Help you not get drunk?”  

“Yeah.”  

“Ok, help me get the dogs in.”  

We got the dogs in after they chased the chickens back into their coop. Mom was talking  about how she’d have to go to work on Black Friday, but that we could still do some shopping  together. I had things I wanted to get, but I wasn’t thinking about those things, then. We went inside and, as Mom turned the corner to her room, I asked, “Can I get those peppercorns?” 

“Oh yeah, just look in the lazy Susan in the kitchen.”  

I went for it. I passed Dad, who was sitting on the couch watching TV, on my way there. I  eyed him in a way to see if he was watching me. Dad’s default look is to glare so that you see the  whites of his eyes, so it looks like he’s angry. I’ve been told I have the same look. I spun the  Susan until I found the peppercorns and took them to my room. I ate a handful, and my mouth  went dry in an instant. I drank some water, put the peaceful music stream back on, and tried to  take a nap. That’s when my brother Matthew came into the room.  

“You left your food on the table,” he said.  

“Oh, yeah?”  

“Clean it up.”  

“I will.”  

Matthew looks a little bit like Fernando Valenzuela, only lighter, enough to make him  pass. We’re different in that he doesn’t care about his whiteness or his Mexicanness. I think that’s  a good thing. Growing up, all the Mexicans I went to school with said I wasn’t Mexican. Even  my cousins in L.A. tell me I’m white. It’s usually white people who identify me as Mexican, my  overdosed neighbor who’d rather spit than talk to me, for example. My first girlfriend, who was  white, called me a short half-Mexican the first time we met, and I cried myself to sleep over that.  

We still got naked together, though, so I guess bygones are bygones. I remember how she  used to caress my stomach and tell me my body was perfect, and how I have never once had that  thought about myself. She eventually left me for this El Salvadoran guy whom we went to  college with. I guess she had the market cornered on chubby Latinos.  

There was a woman, a hardworking, intelligent woman, whom I got close to recently. I’d  flirt with her every chance I could get, and she’d flirt with me when she could get away with it.  Well, we both got way too drunk one time, and we were all over each other at a party. What I  remember is that she kissed me three times on my big cheek. Instead of kissing her back, though,  I asked her, leaning into her shoulder, “Am I Mexican? Tell me I’m Mexican,” and she said,  “you’re Mexican,” and then she went inside the house.  

Mom had said she was happy to celebrate Thanksgiving as a family, but I only ate one  plate before hiding in my room. We have a tendency in my family not to talk things unless  \they’re big issues that make us cry. Death, for instance. I hadn’t thought about Tami in years  before Mom mentioned her at the dinner table that day. I still remember her voice and her laugh;  I’ve caught myself laughing sometimes in the same way that she did. The last time I saw her was  at this house. She had come in from the basement on errands with Mom. She had grown older in  the years since I’d seen her last. She’d dyed her hair black, the way it was when I was younger.  Tami walked with a hunch and a shuffle on account of a car accident she was in as a teenager.  The windshield broke and some of it injured her uterus and hip, rendering her infertile. The only thing I remember about our interaction was my asking her if I was her favorite nephew. Only, I flipped it, saying “I’m your favorite nephew, aren’t I?” She pursed her lips and nodded, giving me a slight smile. I’ve wrestled with myself for years with my inability to answer her text. How  maybe if I had, we would have been able to do something.  

I thought about that as I lay in my bed. It didn’t occur to me, in that moment, that Tami  died in the same position. I now wonder what she got in using those pills. If she felt like laying in  her bed was like lying on a bed of clouds. I wonder if she felt the same strained heartbeat as I  did, if maybe she realized it had all come to a head, and if she realized she was dying as she did  so. Usually when I do things like this, I come to some realization about myself, vowing to be  better about something. By the time I wake up the next morning, though, I forget about it. This  was the one time I didn’t.  

My heart rate was finally lowering. I made sure the gummy capsule was locked up tight. I  remembered how Mom made a cheesecake and went for the kitchen. My body was on autopilot,  just searching for whatever could distract me from the slow drumbeat in my chest. When I  entered the dining room, though, my whole family was there. It was like they were waiting for  me.  

“Can we sing happy birthday, now?” Mom asked.  

“OK,” was all I could say.  

My family sang the song while I just kind of stared at the candles burning on the cake.  Mom loves to say “cha, cha, cha” between the verses of the song. I don’t remember what I  wished for as I blew out the candles. I thought about how Mom had texted “happy birthday”  down to the minute I was born, how we used to have so many more people over when I was  younger, and how that stopped happening as much. There was a Thanksgiving when all Mom’s relatives came over, and Dad got upset because they would eat and eat, but never help clean up.  Of all the people who helped clean, only my maternal grandmother Virginia did it, and she  wasn’t guilty of anything. Dad paid her back when he let her stay at his house as she was dying.  My parents had been divorced for six years by that point. I remember when Mom told Dad she  was divorcing him: it was because he wouldn’t take her seriously enough; it was because he  would never help the way he needed to; and it was because he wasn’t being a father. He told me  “I love you, mi’jo” as we sat in his truck while he drank a beer with the engine running. My  grandmother said he was her favorite son-in-law. He was only one who didn’t hit and wasn’t a  deadbeat. He had his issues, sure, but he worked past them in the way he could.  

Mom told me that as my grandmother was dying, she saw faces in the ceiling in the spare  bedroom at my father’s house, and would point out and name them for my mom: her brothers,  her mother, her father. Mom has told me she’s seen ghosts as well. I haven’t seen any myself yet.  

Mom cut the cake, handing out a slice to each of us. I bit into mine, and it was the best  damn thing I could have asked for. I continued to eat until I was full.