The House of Last Resort

by Christopher Golden

American culture seemed to be rotting from the inside out, manipulated by an amoral oligarchy whose worst enemy was young people who didn’t want to play their game, and Kate and Tommy were happy to be counted in that category. The irony had not been lost on them, that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been defined by people leaving the so-called Old World to seek their fortunes in the New World, and now she and Tommy were doing the opposite, seeking new life in the Old World. But they both believed that earlier generations had it right—a slower life, a smaller circle, a focus on home.

Mostly, Tommy had told Kate, his mother had wanted his affection for herself. After her death, grief and guilt had weighed on him. She had brainwashed him throughout his life to feel as if he were someone responsible for her emotional well-being, and though her death should have freed him from that, somehow it had done the opposite. His mother’s death had left Tommy feeling as if he had somehow let her down in ways he would now never be able to cure, even though he knew he had been a good son.

nobody nursed a grudge better than a Sicilian. It was their third-greatest skill, right behind gossip and cooking.

Things were quieter at night. Hurtful words hurt more, and doubts cut more deeply.

What a place for a party.” “You don’t even like people.”

Tommy’s mother had been a woman full of love and ambition who would do anything for her son, as long as it did not require her to admit her own flaws. Pushy and condescending, the old woman had fancied herself a masterful manipulator, and she tried to control everyone around her.

Dying was a process, something people did slowly in hospitals or in their beds at home. Death itself was something different. It could be sudden, often violent, but it could also arrive in the quiet way of otherwise ordinary people who destroyed themselves with alcohol and lost consciousness in lonely bus stations while their organs failed them.

There’s never been a better marketing campaign for God than the invention of the Devil, and demons are just little lowercase versions.”

Because somehow, in some real but ridiculous way, life had led him to believe that your spouse was supposed to be able to heal you, to find the hurts in you and root them out, and if they didn’t do that for you, that was just cruelty on their part. That if they couldn’t make you feel better, that meant they didn’t really love you, that they didn’t want you to feel better. He’d made his hurt into Kate’s problem.

She’d written a song called “The Gift of Grief” and was surprised by how many people couldn’t accept that the pain of losing loved ones could be a gift. It cut deeply, carved out bits of your heart that you could never get back, but that pain meant you had loved deeply and fiercely, and been loved in return. Without love, there was no grief, and despite the pain, that was beautiful.

People talked about the wisdom of age as if it were something every senior citizen acquired with time. Book thought that was bullshit—assholes and fools never grew wiser, they just became old assholes and old fools.