I am surprised to see my cousins
when I show up on Saturday 
at my grandmother’s
house to play Go Fish with Aunt
Betty since Linda and Sue 
are both married ladies
with babies born a month apart.
Just like Sue and me.

Linda is sixteen and Sue 
and I just turned fifteen
and they are smoking Lucky
Strikes as they play poker
with Cousin Larry, complaining
because they had to give up
Schlitz and Scotch while
nursing their babies.

They invite me to play
with them but I’m a beginner
since I am busy writing
fiction and doing homework.
I feel like a fifth wheel since I’ve
never even tasted the lips
of a boy, alcohol or nicotine.

Just like I feel when my cheerleader
Homecoming Queen cousins play
pool and smoke cigarettes
with football players in their basement
while I read movie magazines.
and swing in the hammock.

To escape the swirling smoke,
Betty and I go in her bedroom
but she can’t remember how
to Go Fish and I wonder why
the family fell apart after Grandpa
died choking on a chicken bone.

If he was still fixing our lives
like he repaired his junk cars,
maybe Grandma and Aunt Geraldine
and Uncle Emil would be sitting
here burping their granddaughters
instead of boozing it up in Broadway Bar.

I would have played poker with my cousins,
held and burped their babies
and called them on Sundays if I knew
Linda would die in her forties
of asthma and Sue of emphysema
shortly after we reunite after forty years
and celebrate our 60th birthdays drinking
iced tea and playing scrabble at Lake Tahoe.
                        

Polio burst my dreams of being a ballerina
as a child, my Aunt Copaline says
as she lights a Lucky Strike and takes a drag
when I am twenty and living with her
in Billings until I get an apartment.

I started smoking when I was fifteen, 
right after you were born, says my mother’s 
baby sister. Her limbs aren’t twisted
but they are as thin and fragile
as a twig on a tree as she fries bacon
and French Toast for her three sons,

blonde, blue eyed and fresh faced
like their mother and the fourth son
with dark eyes and hair and a pointed
chin like his father. When she is forty-
two, she puffs on a Newport and sips
a Scotch in the San Francisco disco 
where she jitterbugs with Uncle Frank.

She swears she’s going to stop smoking
when they start a new life at the fishing lodge
on the Bitterroot River. But after he dies
at fifty-nine of a heart attack, she smokes
two packs a day of Camels as she manages
the lodge to support her teenage sons.

Back in San Francisco with her second
born son and granddaughter, she smokes
Winstons and then Virginia Slims 
until a policeman knocks on the door
at 3 am to say her youngest son
has been shot in the back of the head 
as he counts the money at Thrifty Drug.
That’s when she switches to Marlboros.

A cigarette dangles from her mouth
even as she drags an oxygen tank
but she finally quits on the ventilator.
Emphysema, the doctor writes
on her death certificate but I know
she died of a broken heart.
                        

Dummy, moron, idiot, retard, the bullies
chant as my Aunt Betty pulls the mufflers
tighter over her ears to shut out the insults
and the freezing Montana temperatures.
I can’t remember, she tells the teachers
in the 1930s who try and give up
and she drops out in the second grade. 
I read her Betty & Veronica comic books.
That’s me and you, she says laughing.

When the kids call me skinny stick 
and a creep because of my body
type, I go to my grandparents’
house and teach Betty her ABCS
and to play Go Fish. I don’t care
if she forgets and I have to repeat it
over and over because Betty
eighteen years older than me
doesn’t care if I am fat or skinny.

As long as we are in the safety
of her bedroom, Betty smiles
and sings silly songs but outside
she fidgets and frets and accuses
me of plotting behind her back
if I talk to anyone. Leave me alone,
she shrieks at strangers 
who she says shout and scream.
Speechless, they stop and stare.

When Grandpa drives her
to the doctor in his truck,
we put Betty in the middle
and I sit by the door to keep
her from grabbing the handle
and jumping out on the mountain
road and into the valley below.
See all those people, she says.
All I see is rocks and a river.

After Grandpa dies and we move
across the state, Grandma calls
and says Betty is in the Montana
State Home for the Insane. She tried
to strangle me after seeing Satan.
Later, we learn my beautiful sexy 
aunt with a habit of seducing men
was spayed like her calico.

I’m getting married and having
a baby, Betty says on the phone
when the nurses call with an update.
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans invited
me to dinner, she insists even after
Roy and Dale are dead as well as 
her parents and siblings. One day,
a nurse calls and says Betty died
at eighty-three, proving the doctors
wrong. People like her die young.