Mom, I still talk to you. I'm Sandra, forty-six, and for twelve years now I've lived with my husband and kids in Dayton, Ohio, in the little house with the cherry tree out front that you helped me pick out. Some people would think it strange, talking to someone who isn't here anymore. To me, it's the most ordinary thing in the world.
In the evenings, once the dishwasher's running and the kids are upstairs supposedly cleaning their rooms and definitely not doing it, I sit at the kitchen table, and sooner or later your name falls out of my mouth, barely louder than a breath.
Some nights I tell you everything you'd want to know. How Jake already needs a bigger shoe size than mine. How Emma read out loud at back-to-school night last month — no, wait, that was September, not last month, time's gotten away from me again — and I sat there twisting my napkin into a tight little rope under the table the whole time she was up there. How I try to keep the garden the way you always kept it — the perennials not spaced too far apart, the tomatoes trained along the fence, though I still can't get the roses to do what yours did. Little things that would've made you prop your chin on your hand and laugh.
Part of me is still stuck on that November afternoon when I had to say goodbye to you, way too soon. I remember the wind cutting across the hospital parking lot, and I remember I'd left my good coat in the car because I thought we had more time than we did. And then, right in the middle of an ordinary day, something will catch me off guard — a gust of wind while I'm hanging laundry on the line, the smell of the roses by the back gate after it rains, that one song on the radio playing at exactly the moment I'm thinking of you, and I'll just stand there with a wet sheet in my hands, not moving, until the dog starts barking at nothing and snaps me out of it.
What you didn't live to see was the fight with my brother Danny over the auto shop on Route 4, the one you two owned together. After your funeral, he claimed you'd promised him verbally that he'd inherit it outright — the shop where you kept the books for thirty years, plus the lot behind it. He even hired a sign guy to swap out the business sign without talking to me first, without waiting for probate to clear. I stood out front of that shop on a Tuesday morning in March — April, actually, the Tuesday after Easter, I remember because I'd missed church for it — with the appointment card from the lawyer's office still in my purse, and told him that according to the will, half of it was legally mine, signed by you the summer before, notarized and everything. He got right up in my face and said I was selling off your memory for cash, said it loud enough that a customer pumping gas next door turned around to look. I handed him a copy of the will anyway and told him I'd already set up a meeting at the law office downtown on Main to work out buying out his half — forty-eight thousand dollars, paid in three installments over a year — or he could pay me the same for my half and keep the business himself. He didn't say a word to me for three days.
Then he showed up with the signed buyout agreement, set the keys to the front office down on my kitchen table, and said, "Hope this makes you feel like you won something," before he let himself back out the screen door. I still turn that one over some nights, trying to decide if he meant it the way it sounded.
Things have been quieter between us since then. Not warm, but quiet. He pays on the fifteenth of the month, usually a day or two late, always with some excuse about the bank. He hasn't asked us over for Thanksgiving either year since. Sometimes in the afternoon I'll drive past the shop on purpose, slower than I need to, and through the window I'll see the sign with our last name on it, freshly painted, the bolts still shiny. The lights are on inside, somebody's running an impact wrench, and the sound carries all the way out to the street, and there's that burnt-rubber smell from the tire place next door that gets into everything. I keep driving, past it, past the cherry tree, into my own kitchen, where the coffee's gone cold in the pot because nobody remembered to turn it off.
