Deedee was just stirring her sweet potatoes, and Naomi braced for the next salvo.
"It's just the waste of the thing, Mama--your inheritance. And Phil and I don't mind you coming to live with us, but you had to know--"
"Your father never told me exactly how much he was putting into it. It was his family's cabin after all and his weekend place. "
"But he had to have showed you! It's not like you never went. He had the whole family up there for Big Mom's 90th birthday! And you weren't curious?"
Naomi considered what she was going to say next, because she knew it would come out.
"For thirty years I knew he was prepping, ok? Is that what you want me to say, sister? He showed me what he had dug out in there and the fortifications and promised me it was for all of us..."
"Then you saw that little manhole we all were going to have climb in?"
There it was. Dee on her size bullshit. Here it comes.
"What was that thing, Mom? 26 inches in diameter?"
"Thirty."
Then Deedee stood up all of the sudden. "Mom, since when after I was 13 years old would I have fit down that? How?
D always was pear-shaped. "Your father always did tell you about that..."
"My SCALE told me about that! My PANTS told me about that! Daddy can tell me about my weight, but did he tell my big ass genes? Half of which he gave me?"
Naomi didn't have an answer for that. She was lean but not all of her family's side was either.
So she decided to try ameliorating the thing: "He never intended to exclude you. He just wasn't thinking right."
"He had eyes in his head. And what about little Roddy?"
Naomi recoiled. "Don't you start that, he loved that child, no matter what."
"How was a chair going to fit down there? For a grown disabled man?"
"He had a chair..."
"For Roddy--we lower him down that ladder--how? and then what?"
Naomi knew that collapsible medical catalogue piece of shit chair wasn't going to accommodate her grandson, D just wasn't right defaming her father like this.
"He was doing the best he could!"
"What were we going to do for water Mom?"
"It was by the pond."
"The potentially irradiated pond, Ma! So how was he tapping it? More digging? Some fucked up filtration system? What did he spend on freeze dried food? That needed water?"
Naomi had been down there, and Dee didn't fit. She knew. Bill never cooked a day in his life and never knew how the budget worked. He counted on someone else to make those vats of disaster chow work and he never understood bottled water in plastic would only go so far.
"Did he even have like, a Geiger counter down there?"
Naomi shook her head It wasn't something she'd have thought of, herself.
"So more than half the family would never even fit down there, to go ahead and eat freeze-dried bullshit and watch one another die?"
"I'll sit under your roof, but I won't hear you talk about your father like this again."
Dee picked at a biscuit and thought about that. "We'll agree to disagree."
But she thought about that unauthorized development her Dad made for them, and maybe it was a little bit illegal and maybe they would have a problem selling that, actually, if they actually needed money in the real world, instead of the part of his retirement he fucked up on meme coins. But out of respect for her Mom, she wasn't saying anything about that, either.
There was a lot left unsaid.
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