Most of Florence's family lived in Livermore. Her oldest daughter Sheri was closest, or she had sought to move the least more likely, but she was furthest in the sense that they rarely spoke. I met the bitch in the Wal-Mart parking lot, in passing. She was with one of her daughters, who worked at Wal-Mart. We barely said hi, and she seemed shameful in some way. Here, was a stranger, who spent more hours in a day with her dying mother than she did in a year. The situation was shameful, as was her plump unkempt appearance.
"Sheri, this is XXXX, the man who takes wonderful care of me," Florence said proudly.
Sheri squeezed out some fake pleasantry and said she'd better get back home. Home to what, I thought. Home to the idiot box you spend your entire days hugging? Home to your potato chips and ranch dip?
At some point Florence and Sheri stopped speaking to one another. It had to do with Sheri's oldest daughter, the one person in the family that regularly visited Florence. Eventually it led to Sheri not speaking to Florence at all.
Florence's other daughter Vikki was better than Sheri, but that wasn't saying a lot. She would at least talk to Florence on the phone, if only to watch the same TV program over the phone for 5 minutes.
"Oh, you’re watchin' that? Lemmie turn it on for a second."
"Oh, yeah. There he is. I don't like him."
"Well, I suppose we all...have our path in life."
"--He chose his. We all do."
"So whatcha been doin'?"
"Oh, ok. I'll talk to you later honey."
Vikki received workers compensation for a back injury she'd gotten working at one store or another. Eventually she'd start coming over to Florence's more regularly when she herself was hired to be one of the care providers.
Both daughters had their own children, who, as far as I could tell were all mediocre. The shining star was the aforementioned daughter of Sheri, who had an office job, and at 19, like Florence, like Sheri, like Vikki, had a daughter.
"I did it, they did, and their kids do it," Florence told me. "And now Sheri's second daughter is pregnant. When's it going to stop?" she asked me in a purely rhetorically way. "When are people goin' to figure it out?" She stared at the TV.
"You know, we all used to live together," she told me, "I had a two bedroom apartment on the other side of town where I lived with my Mom. I used to live there with my husband, but I kicked him out. So anyway, my Mom moved in, and then Sheri and her first husband got divorced. She met Jim and they moved in. So I slept on the couch. Then, Vikki and her boyfriend at the time moved in. None of them were workin.' Me and my Mom were working. Eventually, Jim got a job."
Florence told me this slowly and, like most things she said, in a monotone voice. She let them unfold. But they weren't so much stories as they were recountings.
"Sheri had a daughter by then, I forgot to say that. But she mostly lived with her Dad...and I didn't like that. He wasn't a good guy...you could say. But we didn't have any room. Finally, we got a bigger apartment, but then Vikki had her boys...and my Mom died," she emphasized the irony of that. That while two people had moved in, one had moved out, or on anyway.
"What was the biggest number of people you had living there at one time?" I asked.
"Oh...I think we had....eight, maybe nine people there. Too many." she had again emphasized the irony. "In a two and a half bedroom apartment. Sometimes I just can't believe what people do to themselves."
There were photos of most of her grandchildren. The first few anyway. When the time was getting slow I stared at the photos, so often they became quite friendly to me. There were Jarred and Jerry, Vikki's twin boys, posing in front of a blue background. They had thin faces that slightly resembled their mothers. "They're good boys...most of the time," was the extent of what I learned about them. One was a used car salesman, the other a mechanic at the same auto dealership. "Jared’s girlfriend lives with them, but I don't like her at all," Florence had told me. "She's just...not good. I just don't like her." There was Sheri's oldest daughter's high school portrait. In the corner was a smaller, touched up photo, of her holding her daughter. There was a picture of Sheri and Vikki, taken at the same place as Jarred and Jerry's photos, with the same blue background. In Vikki's photo was a black and white picture of the girls..."That's when Sheri was eight and Vikki was seven," she told me. "Sheri was always really quiet...just like now. She never had very many friends. Vikki was more popular in high school because she was so pretty. But Sheri never really had that. I've always thought that's why she's like she is. I wish she wasn't."