Amanda receives her Dead Mother Card when she’s nine and uses it to stay home for two weeks and eat nothing but spaghetti. At eleven, she uses it to end her father’s new relationship, at fifteen, plays it to bump a B+ to an A-, at seventeen, uses it to buy alcohol, because it turns out the card makes her look older.
In college, Amanda uses the DMC to buy drugs and she racks up enough points to win prizes: her first F, lots of sex, 26 stitches on her thigh, lots of beer, an experience in a boathouse she can’t remember but wants to forget, lots of cake, briefly a baby, and eventually, an affair with a man old enough to have dated her mother.
She uses the card to get a job and leave a job and get another job and leave that job, and the card is getting worn, but she still whips it out on dates and at parties and in the ER, and once to a bartender in India who says, “It’s worthless here, lady,” and he points to a wall where hundreds of DMCs are stapled like fish scales, crooked and overlapping.
And then one day, Amanda reaches for the card and it’s not there. She tries to remember when she last had it–the AA meeting, the weed store, her mammogram. Then she remembers the restaurant where her husband said it was over, how he called her restless, or maybe reckless, or maybe careless, something that ended in less anyway, and yes, she remembers pulling out the card, its edges worn, its color unevenly faded, decades of scratches spreading like wrinkles. She remembers throwing it on the table between them and saying “Here,” and saying, “Go,” and saying, “I always knew you would.”