Удушье (Choke)

And I say, 'So?'

And Paige Marshall says, 'So I have to do dental hygiene all day. What do you need?'

I need to know what it says in my Mom's diary.

'Oh, that,' she says. She's snapping off her latex gloves and stuffing them into a hazardous-waste canister. 'The only thing that diary proves is your mother was delusional since before you were born.'

Delusional how?

Paige Marshall looks at a clock on the wall. She waves at the chair, the vinyl leather-look recliner Mrs. Wintower just left, and says, 'Take a seat.' She's stretching on a new pair of latex gloves.

She wants to floss my teeth?

'It will help with your breath,' she says. She spools out a length of dental floss, and says, 'Sit, and I'll tell you what's in the diary.'

So I sit, and my weight pushes a cloud of bad stink out of the recliner.

'That wasn't me,' I say. 'That smell, I mean. I didn't do that.'

And Paige Marshall says, 'Before you were born, your mother spent some time in Italy, right?'

'So that's the big secret?' I say.

And Paige says, 'What?'

That I'm Italian?

'No,' Paige says. She leans into my mouth. 'But your mother is Catholic, isn't she?'

The string hurts as she snaps it between a couple teeth.

'Please be joking,' I say. Around her fingers, I say, 'I'm not Italian and Catholic! This is too much to bear.'

I tell her I already know all this.

And Paige says, 'Shut up.' She leans back.

'So who's my father?' I say.

She leans into my mouth, and the string snaps between two back teeth. The taste of blood pools around the base of my tongue. She's squinting her attention deep into me, and says, 'Well, if you believe in the Holy Trinity, you're your own father.'

I'm my own father?

Paige says, 'My point is that your mother's dementia appears to go back to before you were born. According to what's written in her diary, she's been deluded since at least her late thirties.'

She twangs the string out and bits of mouth food flick onto her coat.

And I ask, what does she mean the Holy Trinity?

'You know,' Paige says. 'The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost. Three in one. Saint Patrick and the shamrock.' She says, 'Could you open a little wider?'

So just frigging tell me, flat out, I ask her, what does my mom's diary say about me?

She looks at the bloody string just yanked out of my mouth, and she looks down at my bits of blood and food flicked onto her lab coat and says, 'It's a fairly common delusion among moth­ers.' She leans in with the string and loops it around another tooth.