My parents collect junk. Back when they were still married they ran an unsuccessful antique store. It was as much a business venture as it was a source for their fix of knickknacks, like a drug dealer who cuts sugar into his coke and skims the extra for himself. They would go to estate sales, buy the entire contents of a dead person’s life, and carefully sort out which items they deemed valuable. But nothing was worth much money. It was all just junk.

The first thing I remember my mother collecting is baskets. Half the kitchen cupboards held only baskets, and baskets hung from the living room walls. When she divorced my father and we moved into an apartment, all the baskets had to go. But then came the washboards, these corrugated planks my sister and I never completely understood, and did not at all mourn when my mother’s second marriage ended and they too disappeared.

Now she’s on her third husband, and her new obsession is ceramic donkey planters. She says they’re part of our Italian heritage, these hideous animals pulling hollow carts, painted garish colors and glaring at me from every tabletop whenever I visit. “Apparently,” my sister told me one night on the phone, “Our heritage is ass.”

I inherited my parents’ love for ‘antiques’ that would be better defined as ‘garbage’. I took broken chairs out of dumpsters and re-upholstered them with Goodwill sweaters. Bulk garbage day, a semi-annual event when a town’s refuse service picks up furniture for disposal, was my shopping mall. I furnished a two-bedroom apartment without spending any money at all. Every chair wobbled, every bookcase leaned to one side, and it all smelled like someone else’s basement.

One night when I was sanding down a small rocking chair to complete my living room, my father called me. “Honey,” he said. “I have some bad news.”

“Grandpa died?” My father only calls me for two reasons: someone is pissing him off, or someone died. Since he wasn’t using his ‘Neighbor’s Dog Crapped on my Lawn’ voice, I guessed death.

“I’m so sorry, honey.”

“It’s fine.” I dropped the sandpaper onto the floor, where it landed half inside a can of acrylic stain. “Current biological theory is that consciousness is just chemical systems that can easily be replicated with artificial intelligence.”

He didn’t respond.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have got premium cable. There are all these weird channels.”

The death didn’t bother me all that much. I rarely spoke to my grandfather, because he was getting senile, and it was depressing, and he was all the way in Florida, living with my aunt.

Since my mother’s house was the closest to the local funeral home, we made plans to assemble there. I took a few days off work, my sister flew in from college, and a handful of old family friends got hotels in the area and spent their evenings sitting in my mother’s living room, sipping coffee so strong it was no longer considered a liquid and complimenting her collection of regional spoons.

My aunt, however, did not come. Instead she phoned all the relatives and told them there would be no funeral. Then she phoned the airport and had the coffin removed from the plane. Then she phoned my father and accused him of neglecting his aging parents, an argument he related to me in detail when he called one evening and began the conversation with, “Do you know who’s out to get me?”

I hazarded a guess with, “Everyone?”

“Your rat bastard uncle. He wants your grandfather’s house. When I grew up there it was an immigrant neighborhood, and everyone spit on me. They spit on me!”

I pulled the phone away from my ear.

“Now it’s all yuppies and that house is worth a fortune. And your rat bastard uncle thinks he’s entitled to everything just because they took care of him for a few years. They think if they have the funeral, they can manage the estate.”

“So where’s the coffin?” I asked.

“They’ll have that funeral over my dead body.”

As my father and my aunt argued over the corpse of my grandfather, the rest of us planned the tentative funeral. Our family’s pack rat nature came into good use for once, and my sister and I went through old family photos in my mother’s garage as we secretly smoked cigarettes and gossiped about which cousins we hated the most. The next morning I drove some of the photos to the funeral home, where the funeral director stood on the front steps and asked me what the hell was wrong with my family. The funeral, scheduled for two days from then, had been put on hold indefinitely. The body, scheduled to arrive two days ago, was missing. The daughter, my aunt, had hung up on him. The son, my father, had called the daughter, my aunt, a cunt, and then also hung up on him.

That night my sister and I were helping my mother prepare dinner when my mother launched into her regular series of speeches. Number one: You never call me; you could be dead in an alley somewhere and I wouldn’t know for weeks. Number two: Why don’t you pull your hair back; no one can see your pretty face. Number three: Did you hear that your cousin Jenny had a baby; isn’t that wonderful?

My sister chopped a tomato in half so hard that the whole counter shook.

“Any news on when I’m going to have grandchildren?” my mother asked.

“Jenny was eight months pregnant at her wedding,” my sister said as she continued her assault on the tomato. “What I lack in babies I make up for in having the class to not be pregnant at my own wedding.”

“At least Jenny didn’t waste any time.”

“Oh my god!” My sister dropped the knife on top of the cutting board and turned to me. “I left the coffee pot on at your place.” She gave my mother a quick smile, grabbed my hand, and pulled me toward the door.

“You weren’t even at my place today,” I told my sister as I unlocked the door of my building.

“I got the same baby lecture last week from John’s parents.” She ran ahead of me on the stairs, as if racing me to the door. “I’ve never had so many people interested in my twat. It’s like high school all over again.”

I opened the door to my cramped apartment and switched on the light, as my sister tossed her ridiculously heavy purse onto the floor. “First show me the new stuff, then show me the old stuff.”

The new stuff was an antique bookshelf from Goodwill, an antique lamp from the neighbor’s garbage, and some Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. ‘The old stuff’ was a game my sister played whenever she visited me, when she’d ask about some random artifact from our childhood, confident that I hadn’t thrown anything out in the past fifteen years.

“Where’s the plastic necklace I gave you for Christmas when I was eight?” she said, and I produced it from one of the jewelry boxes on my dresser.

“Where’s the jacket we shoplifted from the mall when we were in high school?” In a pile on the top shelf of my closet.

“Where’s the Def Leppard T-shirt you were wearing when you lost your virginity?” In a box underneath my bed.

We ordered a pizza, made margaritas, and reminisced over my collection of flyers from the all-ages club, my photo album of all our now-deceased pets, and a small box of hair clippings my sister collected during a brief, odd phase when she wanted to be a voodoo high priestess. We ended up sitting on the floor in front of the television as Buffy fought the living dead on mute.

“I have a cool picture to show you,” my sister said as she looked through her huge purse. “You’re gonna love it.” She pulled out her wallet and cell phone, set them to the side, and continued rummaging. She removed a PDA, her passport, a handful of Wet Naps, a fortune cookie, a ticket stub, a prescription pill bottle, an MP3 player, three pens, a mini bottle of hand lotion, a makeup compact, a hairbrush, two tubes of Chapstick, five tampons, and a condom.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told her.

“No, you have to see it. That guy you dated in ninth grade? He got really fat.” She turned her bag upside down and a cluster of papers and receipts fell out. “Damn, I must’ve left it at home.”

There was one photo in her pile, but it wasn’t of the guy I dated in ninth grade. It was a picture of my grandfather, one that hadn’t made it into the pile handed over to the funeral home. I took it before it could be shoveled back inside the giant purse.

In the photo, my grandfather was standing in his living room, holding an infant and smiling. I couldn’t tell if it was my father, my aunt, or even me in his arms. I studied the other parts of the picture, trying to find some clue to help date it, but the room was shockingly bare. There were no decorations on the wall, no end tables or accent furniture, no boxes of stuff in the corners, no picture frames, baskets, or statues. Just a man holding a baby who would grow up and lose his coffin.

I traced my finger across the top of the photo, leaving smudges on the bare white walls. “Do you notice anything weird about this picture?”

My sister leaned over to look at it. “Yeah. That’s your couch.”

The DVD ended and she inserted the next disc. She lay down on her back and stretched her leg to kick the miniature rocking chair wedged between the entertainment center and a CD rack. “This is new.”

“It’s a kid’s chair. For my future hypothetical children.”

“Mom will be thrilled.” She kicked the chair again and a large wooden splinter broke off the bottom of it. “You realize you’re giving your hypothetical children a bunch of hypothetical crap, right?”

I stared at the wall behind her, where the flickering light of the television created shadows of broken furniture that stretched up to the ceiling. “Where’s Grandpa’s body?” I asked, but neither of us had an answer.

The next day, the coffin didn’t arrive. The day after, we had a memorial service without it. The lawsuits between my father, my aunt, and my rat bastard uncle have gone on for years now, and I’ve never asked what became of my grandfather’s body. Maybe he’s still at the hospital, refrigerated in the morgue until some predetermined amount of time passes, he’s declared public property, and donated to the medical school. Maybe he’s rotting in the airport, in some warehouse where they keep lost luggage and nail files confiscated at the metal detectors, stored like someone else’s garbage.

A week after the memorial I applied to college. I took out student loans for more than what I needed to cover tuition. I took out subsidized and unsubsidized, PLUS and FFELP loans, and had the deferment forms printed up four years in advance. I used the extra money as a down-payment on a condo, and got an interest-only mortgage. I got a credit card and bought clothes from an actual store instead of someone’s front yard.

So that’s what I’m doing here. I’m drinking. I’m sleeping late. I’m taking an extra semester. I’m studying theoretical biology for a degree which will enable me to produce theories on semiotic metaphor, perform abstract analysis of host-parasite co-evolution, and continue working at Starbucks.

But most importantly, I’m here spending my children’s inheritance before they’re even born. There will be no antiques, no houses, and no rocking chairs. I’ll leave them with nothing but my crippling debt. I’m sure they’ll appreciate the arguments I’ve spared them. And if not, to hell with them; I won’t care. By then my biology will have theoretically ended. I’ll be dead, and hopefully buried.

The night of the memorial service my sister and I stayed up late. We sat in my mother’s kitchen and drank two cups of her thick black coffee before it started making us dizzy. Then my sister looked at the top of the cupboards, where no less than fifty ceramic donkey planters were lined up in a parade of tackiness.

“One day,” she said. “All of this will be ours.”

And I would’ve laughed, if I wasn’t busy crying.