Until Death

by Mary Berman

Genres: Black Humor; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

In this fresh, darkly funny horror debut, a woman finally agrees to marry the man of her mother’s dreams . . . only to discover that wedding planning eats you alive. 

If Ophelia Cohen learned one thing from her parents, it’s that getting married is a bad idea. But if she’s learning anything from her widowed mother’s dementia, it’s that dying alone is even worse. So when she meets Luke, the handsome heir to a local vineyard, dating him makes sense. And when he asks her to marry him, well. It’s what her mother always wanted.

But none of Ophelia’s obsessive scrolling on wedding forums can prepare her for the nightmare of planning her own. Why is her mother-in-law so worried about every single detail, right down to the color scheme? Why does it feel like Ophelia is losing track of days, weeks, even months? Why is Luke’s family so eager to host the wedding in the vineyard’s ancient chapel — and why does it feel, sometimes, like the chapel has a heartbeat?

This wedding is supposed to be the thing that saves Ophelia from a lifetime of loneliness. So how is it that the more Ophelia sacrifices, the more alone she is?

Shot through with wicked humor, pitch-black horror, and unexpected romance, Until Death is a deliciously dark send-up of the wedding industrial complex — and a mother-daughter story unlike any you’ve read before.

Release date: May 19, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

IN JANUARY I LOOKED AT my mother and thought, Someone should kill her.

But how do you kill someone? Probably the fastest and most straightforward method would be to buy a gun and shoot her in the head. But I couldn’t think of a way to do that without getting caught and thrown in jail, which would ruin my life, which would defeat the purpose of killing my mother. I could shoot her up with morphine, but where was I supposed to get morphine? In theory I could ask Hildy to ask her fiancé to steal it from the hospital, but then she’d ask why I wanted it, and then I’d have to tell her I was planning to kill my mother.

I could suffocate my mother with a pillow. Or I could hold her down in the bathtub and drown her. Either way, she would probably just yell at me to stop, like she did when she caught me in fifth grade taping Backstreet Boys posters on my freshly painted bedroom walls. I’m not actually sure I could drown her—my mother, even or especially in her dotage, is a scrappy old broad—but even if we pretend I’m scrappier, do I really have the guts to pin my mother underwater while she claws at me and screams and begs me not to kill her? Watch the light fade from her eyes, watch the betrayal register on her face? Christ. It’d be worse than when I went to grad school.

Oh, sure—sometimes, like right now, she still looks like she’s okay, provided she’s propped up by the mundane objects of her life. Her red suede couch, her collection of martini glasses. Her four-room carpeted condo, with the door to the basement always closed so she doesn’t fall and wreck her bad knee. Her hair blown into the same bowling-ball shape it’s held all my life (but only on one side; she forgot the other this morning). Her eyebrows colored in with red pencil (but crooked). Her feet thrust into a pair of sparkly platform sandals (the worst possible shoe for a woman with a bad knee).

But she’s hunched now, desiccated-looking, curling like a dried-up old leaf. My mother, hunched! After telling me all through middle school to sit up straight and stick my boobs out so the boys would like me! Her skin is deeply creased around the eyes and mouth, yanked down at the cheekbones and chin. She purses and smacks her lips in a way that makes her look toothless, even though she’s not.

It was January and I hadn’t visited her in three months. I was having too much fun in Philadelphia, living my own life, God forbid. Grabbing after-work drinks with Hildy, taking long solo walks through Clark Park and splurging once a month on fancy cheese from the farmers’ market. Idly drafting curricula for classes that, someday if I ever make full-time, I’ll hopefully get to teach: like Tales from the Crypt: The Undead in Nineteenth-Century Victorian Literature, or Teenage Girls in Horror Fiction (which I actually pitched, and which the department chair is begrudgingly supposed to let me offer in the fall). Devising new ways to make my students laugh. Settling in on the weekends, bracing myself to maybe, finally, four years out of grad school, finish my goddamn novel.

Then the police called and told me Mom had been found wandering Lincoln Highway in her nightgown at two o’clock in the morning.

She told them she was on her way to Wilhelmina’s house. I informed the police that Aunt Wilhelmina lives ninety miles away in New Jersey. I drove to Lancaster in a panic and found my mother gone. In her place, this resentful terrified husk. And then my mother called me Wilhelmina, and I watched her smack her lips around her teeth, and I realized that the only other person I’d ever known to move their mouth that way was my Nan. And all at once I knew how this was going to go.

But I couldn’t figure out how to kill her.

So instead I put her on the wait list at Happy Endings Assisted Living.

And now here we are, almost five months later, on my mother’s move-in day, the twenty-second of May. Sitting on her precious goddamn couch while she looks at me, as Nan would say, with her teeth in her mouth.

“How’s your knee?” I ask conversationally, like maybe I can have one more pleasant afternoon with her before I rip her from all she holds dear.

My mom scowls and sticks her right knee out as though it just sprouted from her body.

“Your left knee. The one you smashed at Cordelia’s wedding. Remember? She had a twelve-piece cover band and two videographers and an industrial floral arch and an open bar?” I actually wasn’t at that wedding, although both my parents were. Everyone was terrified of how my father would behave and it had been a monthslong battle to get Cordelia, a cousin so distant I don’t even know how I’m related to her, to invite him, and my father was so sulky about it that even though he’d won, he refused to dance, just sat at table fourteen and glowered at my mother as she danced ever more defiantly, as she downed a second old-fashioned and a third and a fourth, twisted and shouted to “September” and “Mr. Brightside,” until her leg slipped and she collapsed on the parquet dance floor and smashed the full force of her middle-aged body into her left patella.

Then she got up and danced some more. Ten years later, the knee’s never healed right. She blamed my father. She said he should have made her stop dancing, taken her home. As if anybody, even Dad, could possibly make Imogen Cohen do something she didn’t want to do.

But there’s a first time for everything.

I crack my knuckles.

Happily, though, my mother has brightened at the mention of Cordelia’s wedding. “Oh, her dress was hideous,” she says. It was a two-piece ball gown with a hoop skirt, and frankly my mother is correct. “Don’t worry, doll, I would never let you wear a dress like that.”

“I wasn’t worried.”

“Don’t you talk that way to your old mother. The least you could do is come and visit me. Where have you been?” And then, brightening again, and sly: “Did you finally get a boyfriend?”

“No, Mommy. I’ve been busy with work.”

“Work! What have they got you so busy with at the B and B that you can’t come visit your old mother!”

There is a B and B in Lancaster that I worked at for one year after college. That was nine years ago. “My job in Philly, Mom. My teaching job.”

My mother frowns. It’s not the you’re-full-of-shit frown or the I’m-disappointed-in-your-choices-but-if-you-want-to-go-ahead-and-make-your-own-mistakes-then-I-can’t-stop-you frown, both of which I am eminently used to. This is the I-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about-but-I-feel-like-I-should-and-so-I’m-trying-to-hide-it frown. It’s a new one since January.

“Where I work with Hildy,” I add optimistically. “My friend Hildy? The medievalist?”

Amazingly, this sunbeam shafts through the sewer of her mind. “The one who’s getting married?”

“Yes!” I seize this with both hands. “At the end of September. It’s at the Ballroom at the Ben, they’re having three hundred people.” I have to take my bridesmaid’s dress for alterations when I get back to the city. It is a shade of burnt orange that my mother would not approve of, and frankly neither do I, but Hildy’s wild for it.

“I thought she was getting married at that wine place,” says my mother.

“What wine place?”

“Where that girl got married. You know. The one who died. The body’s missing.”

I have no fucking idea what she’s talking about. But already my mother has lost interest, switching back to her favorite subject: “When are you going to get married?”

“Mommy, come on. You lose your entire mind and this is the part that sticks?”

“I have not lost my mind. You’re the one who can never remember to visit your old mother.”

“I’m not getting married. If you wanted me to get married, you and Dad shouldn’t have fought so much.”

“Just don’t make the same mistake I made,” she declares. “Marry someone who can take care of you.”

“Like a banker?” Mom always says banker, like it’s the year 1950.

“Yes! A nice banker.”

“Like Aunt Wilhelmina did?”

“Don’t get smart. And make sure you’re married before I die. I don’t want you to be alone after I’m gone.”

A little spike of panic in my heart. “You’re not going to die. You’re going to go to the assisted living and be fine.”

Five months is an unhingedly short time to get off the assisted living wait list. But, it turned out, several people ahead of her on the wait list had already entered other facilities, and two had died! So lucky! I got the call three weeks ago and I agonized over it for four days. I tried to talk to Mom, but my sentences slipped into the sewer. I wished guiltily that Dad were still alive. Hildy tried to help, she took me out for margaritas, but she didn’t really know what to say, and I only wanted to talk about her wedding anyway, instead of dwelling on the in-progress shipwreck of my mother’s mind.

And I panicked over my novel. When, now, would I have time to work on it?

Because what no one knows besides me and Hildy is that I need to write the novel. Not just for personal satisfaction, or, I don’t know, the fulfillment of my lifelong dreams. I need to write it to keep my job.

I’ve been at the college for six years, going on seven. When I was hired as an adjunct, it was with the expectation that I’d publish a book-length work and get into the full-time pipeline. That was my plan, too. The whole point of ditching my parents and running off to Oklahoma in the first place was to write and sell a book and never have to come back.

Obviously that hasn’t happened. And Hildy, who is full-time, did me a solid and gave me a discreet heads-up that our department chair, who hates me, is looking to let me go if I don’t at least get literary representation soon.

That gives me until mid-September—Hildy’s wedding weekend, in fact—when the college finalizes contracts for the spring.

But I have one shot. An agent visited my MFA program when I was graduating and asked me to reach out when I had a novel. And I do have one. It just doesn’t have an ending.

But instead of finishing it, I’ve spent two weeks driving daily back and forth between Philly and Lancaster, teaching in the morning and then racing to meet the facility director at the assisted living, or to hover while someone was sent to Mom’s condo to assess her, or to fill out the move-in paperwork, or to pay the deposit out of my own savings, which are now drained almost to the floor, because I was supposed to get access to Mom’s money to pay the deposit, but she’s gotten a lot more recalcitrant since our initial conversation with the assisted living in January—more recalcitrant, angrier, more forgetful.

Speaking of which… “Mom, your bills are on auto-pay, right?”

“Ha! As if I’d let the bank control how much money I have.”

“Mom… the bank already has your money.” A nubbly headache has formed in my forehead and is now crawling into my eyeballs, like a cockroach. “Where’s your checkbook?”

“None of your business, doll.”

“I’m not stealing from you, Mom, I want to pack it for your move.” This is a lie, but Mom’s always used carbon-copy checks, so hopefully having her checkbook will give me a record of her payment history. Do I have time today to call her financial advisor? I can’t do it tomorrow, I have faculty orientation for summer term. I’m teaching two summer classes, not just one, which they don’t normally let you do because summer classes are so condensed, but I’m a really good teacher and I need the money, and also the instructor for Composition 101 dropped out at the last second so the department chair really had no choice. Then I have to start packing Mom’s condo. I have to figure out this insurance situation. I have to lesson-plan for Monday. I have to rewrite the almost-ending of my novel, the problem part, where I can tell I’m really failing to stick the landing, emotionally.

Hildy would tell me to take a deep breath. Easy for her to say. Her parents are still lucid and they like each other.

“I’m not moving to an assisted living,” my mother says indignantly.

“Yes, you are. Come on, Mommy, I can’t deal with this. We’ve talked about this like eighteen thousand times.”

“I didn’t talk about it,” my mother says stoutly, which is categorically untrue. “Where are you going? You’re leaving your old mother already, is that it?”

“I’m going to the bathroom!”

In the bathroom I lay my face on the closed toilet lid and scroll through wedding planning forums. There are a hundred and seven replies to a thread wherein a woman expresses dissatisfaction over how much her mother-in-law is not paying for her wedding. Another poster complains about how her fiancé wants a two-hundred-person wedding but won’t help plan it; the commenters all agree that this is a huge red flag and she should dump his ass now. Someone else has started a thread begging for a solution to their save-the-date misprint, to which somebody has advised, “You should 100% take the printer to small claims court.”

My mother will get a kick out of that last one. I wander out and find her. She’s moved to the kitchen, which is a mess: dishes piled in the sink, dust on top of the mixing spoons and the sugar jar. When I was growing up, our house was meticulously clean. If my mother could see herself now, she’d tell me to run her over with my car. That’s another idea, I could run her over with the car.

But I read her the forum post, and she laughs so hard it makes me laugh. Then she says, “Don’t worry, doll, we won’t let that happen to your invitations. Oh, you should have seen the invites when I married your father—horrifying!”

I sigh.

“Don’t sigh at your mother. The cheap sonofabitch wouldn’t even use the nice stationery.”

“I know, Mommy. Come on, let’s go.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Mom insists.

“Yes, you are! You just don’t remember!”

“I remember fine. I remember how you never come to visit your old mother.”

“I actually can’t deal with this. Go get your purse.” I leave her yelping in the kitchen and clomp down to the basement.

Most of Mom’s condo is on one floor, but there’s an unfinished basement for storage and mechanicals. Dad always said you should have access to your own mechanicals. Last week, after an earlier iteration of this fight, Mom finally condescended to let me pack some of her things, and I hid the suitcases down here afterward. She didn’t let me pack anything important, not her favorite clothes or her jewelry or any of the martini glasses, and to be honest I suspected at the time that she was just kind of putting me off, but frankly I also figured she’d forget about the whole thing and then at least the suitcases would be packed.

The basement is a damp, dark cavern, the ductwork like stalactites or a rat maze. The light bulb is broken. I stand on the wooden stairs for a moment, listening to the nearly imperceptible high-pitched mosquito hum of my mother’s HVAC, the creak of my own sneaker soles against the stair, the slow, maddening drip of condensation.

I clomp down in one fast, jolting motion.

Mom’s suitcases are not where I left them.

The bottom drops out of my stomach so fast that for a split second, I wonder genuinely if I am dreaming.

Then I see: They are empty, yawning, in the middle of the damp cement floor.

I take a deep, shuddering breath. Then I scream. I can’t help it. “MOM!”

“Don’t you dare raise your voice at me!” she screams back. Her uneven footsteps thud on the top stair.

“DON’T COME DOWN THE STAIRS! How many times do I have to remind you about your own goddamn knee!” I’m running back up. I’m so furious I almost knock her over. I spent an entire day last week fighting with her about this, finding all the shit she needed in the various drawers where she’d squirreled away her bajillion sandals and old-lady bras, packing everything neatly and tenderly while she hounded me about how I fold sleeves. “Where did you put your clothes?”

“I put them away,” she says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Where is away? Because last time, your stuff was hidden all over the house instead of in your bedroom closet like a normal person, because you’re nuts and you need to be in a home. God! Don’t talk to me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t talk to me.” I’m walking back into the murky hollow basement to get the suitcases. She’s following me. She’s saying, Don’t turn your back on me, doll. She’s saying, So you ignore me for months even though you live right up the road, and then you come here just to force me into a home because you think it’ll get me out of your hair. You’re just like your father, you want me around to cook your meals and wash your dishes and bring in a steady paycheck, but as soon as I need something I’m a burden—

“I don’t live up the road! I live in Philadelphia! Phil-a-del-phi-a!”

My mother slaps me.

Unbelievably, I burst into tears.

And instead of looking stricken, or apologizing, or touching my face where she hit me, my mother screams, “That’s what you get for trying to put me in a home!!!” and flees upstairs, leaving me in the basement, sobbing.

As a matter of fact I can’t stop sobbing.

Which is stupid. I’m not upset she hit me. I can’t be; I know full well she’s not in her right mind. It didn’t hurt. She’s seventy years old, for Christ’s sake. Yet my body is jerking like a bird’s neck and I’m crying and crying and crying. I keep trying to swallow the sobs and then they burst out of me like there’s a fist in my lungs. Eventually I sit on the cold cement and wait for it to be over.

But even after my body has calmed down, I still have to face my mother.

I lug the suitcases upstairs, lay them open in the sun in the little driveway to air out. In short straight lines like I’m playing a game of Snake, maneuvering around the vortex of my mother as she sits hunched and furious in the living room watching TV, I retrieve her clothes from where they’ve been stuffed in drawers and under the bed and in the bathroom cubby that normally holds toilet paper. I bring the suitcases back indoors—I’m making a racket, but still, not a word from Mom—and I pack neatly, tucking in her small statue of the Blessed Mother. By the end of the whole charade I’m sick to my stomach.

Finally I have nothing left to do but sit on the couch beside her. She turns her face from me. A little chill thrums through the base of my stomach: From this angle, with the blazing sunlight from the bay window on the back of her head and the front of her face cast almost entirely in darkness, she looks like she’s been stripped down to the skull, her skin peeled off, the bone waxed over. My mother.

I say, “You can’t even see the TV with your face like that.”

No answer.

“Mom, listen. Remember Nan?”

“I’m not so far gone I’d forget my own mother.”

“I know, Mommy. Remember when you moved her out of her house? Into the nursing home? Do you remember what you said to me, after that?”

Another pause. Then, surprisingly, my mother answers, “I told you I would never be a burden to you.”

I swallow around the sudden egg in my chest. That’s actually not what she said. But it’s close. “Dad’s gone. You’re all I have left. I can’t take care of you here. You have to let me move you.”

“I wouldn’t be all you had left if you’d find a man.”

I take a deep breath through my nose. “I’m sorry I called you nuts.”

“You should be sorry, talking to me like that. You get that from your father.” She stands up, wobbling defiantly in her sandals. She shuffles out to the car. I watch her from the window. I can feel my eyes in my own head like rocks.

Halfway down the driveway, she hesitates. Even from here I can see the knowledge of where she’s going—the car!—flicker out of her mind like the light of a dying firefly.

Again I think: I should have just killed her.

Because I know how this goes. I was eleven when Mom dragged Nan, literally kicking and screaming, out of her house and into the nursing home. I was sixteen when Nan finally gave up the fucking ghost. The day before she died, she drew blood from the nurse with her nails. I watched my mother, my father, my aunt Wilhelmina, everyone Nan held dear, breathe a sigh of relief. That sigh is locked in my own chest now. I will exhale it when my mother dies.

Nan was a creature of spite, and my mother is her mother’s daughter.

But I’m my mother’s daughter, too. And I can tell you right now: No one’s ever going to do this to me. Because in order to get dragged out of your house, you have to have someone to do the dragging. But I’m never having children, and I’m never getting married. I watched my parents smash against each other like rocks in a tumbler for twenty-five years. Not me. I’m going to save myself.

I am going to write my books. I am going to get my promotion. I’m going to get Mom taken care of, and then I’m going to deal with my own shit and no one else’s. I’m going to live my own fucking life until my brain starts to slip its chains, and then I’ll drown myself in the bathtub. You can count on it.

WE DO NOT SPEAK ON the drive to Happy Endings.

Mom doesn’t get out of the car until the director of the facility, a robust dark-haired woman named Susie, comes outside to greet us. Susie welcomes my mother and then tells me, “Your move-in time was scheduled for three o’clock,” like I might not have noticed we’re forty-five minutes late.

We go to Mom’s room, which is curiously flat-looking. It’s not bad, I tell myself unconvincingly, but there’s nothing for the eye to rest on. The walls are smooth and cream-colored, the carpet smooth and beige, the furniture smooth and soft-cornered and tan.

Susie says to my mother, “I asked your neighbor Cynthia to be here to greet you, but since you’re an hour late”—a gross exaggeration!—“she went down to Scrabble. But I’m sure you’ll get along wonderfully. She and the previous occupant were fast friends.” I am afraid to ask what happened to the previous occupant. “You’ll like her, Imogen. She’s been with us for five years, knows all the ropes. She’ll help you get situated.”

“I’d like to see her try,” my mother and I say to Susie simultaneously, Mom defiant, me apologetic. Then we both giggle despite ourselves. Susie looks stiff and offended. Mom giggles harder, almost cheerful. I feel marginally better.

I make Mom watch me unpack, so she’ll know where her things are. I put the suitcases by the door so I can take them with me. I don’t want her getting any ideas. The only art in here is a print of van Gogh’s Sunflowers—again with the beige!—but Susie told me in January that we’d be welcome to hang things as long as we didn’t damage the walls. Except, I realize, the only picture I’ve packed is Mom and Dad’s wedding photo. Oops.

Their wedding took place before the days of professional photographers—Dad’s father took this picture, begrudgingly, on a Polaroid camera—and Mom hates now that she wore a short, informal white dress with a red belt, instead of something elegant and grand. But when I was a kid, I loved this picture. I used to bring it to Mom, and she would dress me up in a short white dress with a red ribbon in place of the belt, and I would process solemnly up the basement stairs and pretend I was marrying my father.

“What are you looking at?” Mom asks.

Susie’s watching, too. “Nothing.” I place the picture on Mom’s bedside table, tucked behind the lamp where God willing she won’t notice it. “Forget it. Ooh, look, a welcome basket.” It’s made of brown straw, and I resist saying that you practically can’t see it against all the beige in this room, but then Mom says, “You can’t even see it against all the beige in this room,” and I giggle again. Susie makes a huffing noise through her nostrils like a mule. I heft a small jar of lemon preserves from the basket. There’s no kitchen, of course, but the sentiment is nice.

“I hate lemon,” my mother says.

“Mommy, that’s not even true.”

“Is so.”

Susie hands my mom the room keys. My fingers itch.

“It’s okay,” I tell Mom. “I’ll visit. I’ll be in Lancaster for a few more days at least, and I can drive up from Philly anytime.”

She turns her face from me. I think of her doing the same thing in her own house, her waxen face in shadow. I swallow around the sting in my throat.

Susie walks me out. I had planned on asking her if we could talk about my mother’s care, but suddenly I’m so worn out I don’t think I could bear it. “Don’t worry,” Susie says.

“I’m not worried. It’s just—she wasn’t supposed to be here.”

Susie bounces up . . .