by Nancy Lines
She had forgotten how miserable August could be in the Midwest. By the time she had wrestled her luggage to the taxi stand, her blouse was sticking to her lower back, and her hair was limp and damp. Everyone she passed was coated with a sheen of sweat, their clothes wilted. Even the cabbies, who jockeyed for position in the taxi lane, were impatient and irritable.
“Hey, Lady, if you wanna a cab, let’s GO!”
“Welcome, home,” Ann thought to herself. It was both hotter than she remembered and angrier. The cabbie tossed her bags into the trunk, jerked open the passenger door, and climbed into the driver’s seat, anxious to take off before she even closed her own door.
The last time Ann had been home was over a year ago when her father was dying. It was winter then, cold and windy, but she preferred that weather to the heavy, muggy air that made it hard to breathe. You can always add more clothing when it is cold, but . . .
She gave the cabbie the address of a hotel near her childhood home. She could not face going home tonight, walking into a dark and, probably, stifling house. She would take a taxi there in the morning, pick up her mother’s car, and then go to the funeral home to make arrangements.
It had all been so sudden. Her mother had been in good health, according to their twice-weekly telephone calls. Every time Ann called her mother, Nella said she felt fine, had been eating and sleeping well. She would recount Reverend David’s sermon at church on Sunday and what songs the choir sang. Then this morning, Diane, her mother’s neighbor, called to say her mother was dead.
After she hung up the phone, Ann felt an irrational sense of urgency to get home, irrational because she was not going to be at her mother’s bedside to say goodbye. She was not going to be able to scream at the doctor: “Do something!”
She called the airline and was lucky enough to get a seat on an early afternoon flight. She arranged for dog care and for someone to pick up her mail and newspaper. Her supervisor assured her someone would cover her job, and she shouldn’t worry about missing work. She drove home from work in a fog, all without shedding a tear. She packed suitcases hurriedly, not really knowing or caring what she was packing. And then she drove to the airport.
On the plane ride, she had tried to sleep. More than anything, she wanted oblivion. Her seatmate tried to start up a conversation but gave up quickly when Ann closed her eyes.
She had assumed she and her mother had years ahead of them, even if they only saw each other once or twice a year – in good years – and talked on the telephone. Now she would still expect her mother to call, thinking every time the phone rang it would be Nella.
After her father died, Ann took a leave of absence from her job and spent a month with her mother. When she had to go back home and back to work, neither she nor her mother was ready. She still cried when she thought about her father. The pain was visceral, a layer of sadness and regret that wrapped around her bones and made her want to scream. Sometimes she and her mother cried together on the telephone. One of them would say how much she missed him, and then they both would be in tears. She had felt guilty leaving her mother to grieve alone in a house where every piece of furniture and every dish held memories of her father, but her job was in Boston.
She had begged her mother to sell the house and move to Boston, not necessarily with her but near her, but her mother said giving up her house would be like losing another piece of her husband. Her life was here. And she didn’t want to burden her daughter, although Ann promised that she would be glad to have her mother close by. They were extraordinarily close. Being an only child, and a shy one at that, Ann spent most of her time as a child with her parents or with her parents’ friends. She shared her secrets with her mother, while her friends with brothers and sisters had an outlet she did not have. Sometimes, she was jealous that she did not have a sister to trade clothes with or talk about boys with, but she never regretted the special bond she had with her parents. Now, what would she do when she needed comforting, the kind that only a mother can provide?
The year since her father’s death had flown by, not happily, not quickly. When Jeff announced he was leaving, she was not surprised – and in a way she was relieved one of them had the courage to end a relationship that was going nowhere – but she felt the loss. Holding their relationship together had taken so much of her energy and attention, when it was finally over, she felt bereft.
Then, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent months of debilitating chemotherapy. Between the nausea and fatigue, there was no way she could have gotten on a plane. Her mother offered to go to Boston to be with her, but Ann felt having her mother in her home might be more work than help. She was afraid she might feel the need to comfort her mother, to assure her she was going to be okay, even when she doubted it herself.
She was relieved her mother was healthy and active. From their phone calls, it sounded like Diane spent a lot of time with Nella, so she wasn’t lonely. Ann imagined that they went to lunch and out shopping together. Diane was such a good neighbor and friend.
The taxi dropped Ann at the house the next morning. There were many decisions and arrangements to make, but she was bone tired. She had not slept well at the hotel, going over everything she had to do – paying medical bills and utility bills, closing accounts, arranging for an estate sale, and, finally, selling the car and the house.
She had forgotten in her haste to bring her key to the house, so she cut across the yard and knocked on Diane’s door, bracing herself to hear details of her mother’s death. Diane pulled her into a warm embrace, her face red and swollen from crying.
“How did you find her?” Ann asked.
“I went to check on her, as usual, about 8:00 yesterday morning, and she was gone. She died all alone.” She spoke as if she felt guilty that she was not by Nella’s bedside when she died.
“What did she die of? Every time I talked to her, she seemed fine.”
“She had a slight stroke just after you went back to Boston. She had some paralysis on the left side, but she got along pretty well for a while, then she just kept getting weaker and weaker. At the end, she could not walk on her own, and hospice came in to bathe her and give her physical therapy.”
“But I never noticed any problems with her speech. She was maybe a little bit slower – and her voice was a bit softer – but–”
“She didn’t want to worry you. She said you had too much on your plate the way it was. And she knew you were not getting over your father’s death.”
“Sherry, the hospice nurse that took care of your father, wants you to call her. She will explain it all to you. A truck will come over so they can pick up their equipment.”
The words stabbed Ann like a shard of ice.
“Every time I talked to Mom, she said she was feeling fine and going places with you. I assumed that she was, anyway. She said she had lunch with you, and you went shopping together.”
“She had lunch with me because I made her lunch every day, and we ate together. She sat in her recliner, and I sat beside her and helped her cut up her food.”
“What are you talking about? She talked about her garden and about church . . .”
“Your mother hadn’t been out of the house in months except to go to the doctor. A van picked her up when we had to go to the doctor or hospital because it was hard getting her wheelchair in my car. And she listened to the sermon on the computer. I planted flowers right outside her window so she could see them from her chair. She loved her garden and watching the birds at the feeder. I planted tomatoes, too. She loved fresh tomatoes.”
She asked if Ann wanted her to go with her to the house, but Ann shook her head no. She needed to do this by herself. She was trying hard to keep her composure so she could get through the day. She needed to get busy and stay busy to avoid being sucked under by the reality of not seeing Nella again. She wanted desperately to hug her mother and to lay her head on her shoulder as she used to do when they watched T.V. together. How could she ever stop missing the smell on mother’s skin of her lavender soap, the way they giggled together over some silly remark, sitting at the breakfast table, her mother working the crossword puzzle, while she tackled the Cryptogram. The month Ann spent at home after her father’s death had brought them even closer than before, united in their pain.
She opened the door slowly, as if afraid her mother’s spirit would escape. She felt frightened to go in, frightened of the emptiness. She still had a hard time imaging the house without her father. Now, without her mother, it was no longer home.
The house smelled close, as if no windows had been opened for years. Ann knew Nella was frightened of open windows at night once she was living alone, but now the house smelled of sickness and isolation.
Ann felt her legs begin to give way, so she sat down on the porch swing before she fell, the door to the house standing open. She stayed seated on the porch swing, and even that brought back painful memories of sitting with her mother on the porch just before twilight, sipping a glass of wine or lemonade, watching the neighbors walk their dogs.
After Diane’s call telling her Nella was dead, Ann had been too stunned to react. She had realized after her uncle’s death and then, shortly afterward, her father’s death, that death did not ever happen as you thought it would. You always thought you would have more time to say how much you loved someone. Those scenes where the dying says “I love you,” and then gently closes his eyes, turns his head to the side, and dies – strictly Hollywood. But still, she felt cheated out of being at her mother’s bedside holding her hand, kissing her eyelids.
The living room looked just as Ann last saw it a year ago. Everything was in its place. Her mother was obsessively neat. The recliner was there, facing the television, and her mother’s pride and joy, a sofa, upholstered in a blue-green brocade, sat in front of the window. Ann and her mother had an ongoing argument about what color the sofa was: Ann said it was “peacock blue.” Her mother saw more green than blue. Her father’s electric lift chair, where he spent most of his last days, was still next to her mother’s recliner, and she touched it, half expecting it to be warm from his body.
But when she got to her mother’s bedroom, she felt as if she had stepped into a hospital room. There was a hospital bed with rails next to the window, while Nella’s bed had been shoved against a wall. A potty chair sat next to the bed. Yards of plastic tubing snaked around two green metal canisters of oxygen near the head of the bed. The dresser was lined with bottles of drugs, prescription and over-the-counter meds, tubes of ointment for bed sores among them. A wheelchair was propped next to the wall. Almost every inch of the room was filled with medical equipment.
Ann felt as if she was in an alternate universe. Some of the equipment had been her father’s, and she and her mother had stored it in the basement after his death, unable to face it after he was gone. She had never imagined her mother would be using the same equipment.
She was still shaking and lay down on the bed where her mother died, the plastic sheets crinkling under her. She knew how her mother must have felt shamed to have to live like this, dependent and without privacy for even the most personal moments. Her father had endured this last phase of his life without complaining or self-pity, and she knew her mother would have reacted the same way, which made her feel all the more guilty that she had not been here to care for her instead of the neighbor seeing her at her most vulnerable.
She felt weak. She had not had anything to eat in many hours, but the thought of food made her nauseous. She closed her eyes to rest for a few minutes before she called hospice and before she needed to go to the mortuary.
The telephone woke her out of a sound sleep a couple hours later, and she was startled to see it was after noon.
“Ann, it’s Sherry from hospice. How are you doing – I know that is a stupid question – but I wanted to tell you how sorry I am about your mother. I know how close the two of you were.”
“Thank you, Sherry. This was all such a surprise, a shock. I didn’t know about the stroke or about any of this. I’m glad you were Mom’s nurse. She wrote me a note and Diane said she told you not to call me, but I feel cheated out of the last days of her life. I really don’t feel that you had any right not to let me know.”
“I understand how you must feel, Ann, but I had to respect your mother’s wishes. Actually, legally I had to respect her wishes. Do you have a few minutes? I’d like to come over, but I won’t stay long. Is that okay?”
The mortuary could wait. Ann wanted answers, so maybe her visit with Sherry would be a good thing. She found some plastic cups of pudding in the fridge, enough to get her through until she could get a meal somewhere. She washed her face and straightened her clothes, as much as she felt capable of doing to prepare for company.
Sherry knocked on the door about half an hour later. Sherry pulled her into a big embrace, kissing her cheek. She had always been affectionate with her father, sitting next to his recliner and holding his hand while they talked. She was as much counselor as nurse, and her father looked forward to her visits. Ann knew she would have been as comforting to Nella.
Sherry explained about the stroke and the heart failure that gradually limited Nella’s activities to scooting from her recliner to her wheelchair to her bed. At the end, breathing became difficult, even when Nella was sitting upright in her chair.
“I planned to call you when I knew the end was near, regardless of your mother’s wishes, but she went very quickly. The day before she died, I was here, and I would not have guessed she was so close to death.”
“Did she say anything to me before she died?”
“She talked about you all the time, Ann, but toward the end she didn’t really talk. She just slept. There was nothing anyone could have done for her that was not done. If you had been here a couple days before she died, I don’t know if she would have known you were here.” Ann had to think back to last week. It had been a hectic, exhausting time at work. Maybe the time had gotten away from her, and she had missed her calls to her mother.
“I don’t think you and Diane had a right to keep this from me. I could have held her and talked to her even if you don’t think she would have heard me. I missed telling my mother I love her.”
“I did what I thought was right. I’m sorry if you couldn’t be here, but death is never that predictable, you know. And she knew you loved her, Ann. There is no doubt about that.”
Ann slept poorly that night, awakening every few minutes, imaging her mother was near the bed. She didn’t have the energy to go to the store so she scavenged in the refrigerator for something to eat, finding mostly protein drinks. Toward the end, Diane had told her, that’s all her mother could swallow.
There were not many decisions to be made at the funeral home. Her parents had bought adjoining plots years ago. She took a dress her mother looked especially good in—a red dress with gold buttons. She was certain the dress would be much too big, but the undertakers could pin it to fit.
They decided on the order of the service at the mortuary chapel, which is where her mother wanted her funeral to be. At her age, she said, there were few friends and family still left to fill a church, so the chapel would be more appropriate. Ann chose her mother’s favorite hymns. The mortuary would arrange for someone to play the organ. Her mother would share a tombstone with her husband; all that remained to do was add her date of death.
Clearing out the house was going to be the biggest obstacle since she lived so far away and could not do it gradually. Sherry told her about an estate sale company that would come in — after Ann had set aside everything she wanted to take back to Boston with her – and organize and price everything that was left. They would hold a two or three-day sale – her choice – and cart all the remainders to another site for a multi-household sale. Once they cleared the house, Ann could determine what needed to be done to the house to get it ready to be sold.
Selling the house was, she knew, going to be like losing another family member. She had grown up in the house, she had dogs and cats that had lived and died here and were buried in the backyard. Every memory she had of her childhood took place here – on the backyard swing set, in the kitchen when there were family reunions of aunts and uncles and cousins, the sleepovers in her bedroom with its lilac walls and flowered curtains, in the basement when she had friends from school listening to music and dancing. But she had no plans to move back in the near future, and she did not want to rent the house to strangers. Being a landlord is challenging enough, but to be a long-distance landlord would be asking for trouble.
The funeral was hard, but greeting the mourners and listening to their memories of her mother kept her somewhat safe from the grief that threatened to overwhelm her. She guided the older friends and neighbors to chairs, reminded everyone to sign the remembrance book, accepted flowers and cards. She had written a goodbye to her mother, which she read in a quivering voice. A lay minister and neighbor recited a few prayers and noted what a warm and kind women her mother was. The organist played her mother’s favorite hymns, and those who knew the words sang along. Then, those able to walk without aid followed the casket to the grave that would be her mother’s final home.
She had made arrangements for the estate sale staff to be at the house the next day to start organizing and pricing. She separated the good jewelry from the costume jewelry her mother had bought to match each of her outfits, and packed the jewelry in her carry-on. She gathered all the photo albums with pictures of the family and their innumerable car trips and put those with her suitcases. The estate staff provided her with a few large boxes for dishes and knickknacks, which would be shipped before she left. Since clothes did not sell well at estate sales, or so she was told anyway, she gave the majority to her mother’s church. By the end of the second day, the staff had everything out of drawers and sitting on tables and counters. She silently blessed her mother for not being someone that hung on to every card or letter she had ever received. Ann could tell she had been preparing her home for this day for years.
The day of the sale, a line extended around the corner. Those first in line were usually the professional antique dealers that honed in on announcements of estate sales published in the newspaper and, these days, online. They were chatting, newspapers folded under their arms, and holding cups of hot coffee despite the unbearable heat. They could spot bargains in a matter of minutes, grab what they wanted to buy, and then be off to the next sale. The estate sale agent called them “the vultures.” She had to agree.
The rest in line might have something in particular they were looking for – duck decoys or old lawn mowers they could repair and resell – or they might just be browsing. Some came looking for furniture for their first house, tables and cabinets they could use until they were able to afford something better and newer. Some were just nosy, wondering what the inside of the house they passed daily looked like. Some were looking at the house in case in came up for sale soon.
The estate staff set up tables and cash drawers at the entrance to the house. It certainly was not a fool-proof system, Ann thought. There were all kinds of opportunities for those taking a “five-fingered” discount – slipping small objects into their pockets or purses, carrying dishes and books out the backdoor.
Ann insisted, much to the dismay of the estate staff, that she stay at the house throughout the sale. She felt very protective on her mother’s behalf. She had been warned it could be an emotional experience to see strangers pawing through things her mother had chosen or had loved, but she felt the need to be there. A few times, when she heard a particularly loud man or woman say, “You couldn’t GIVE me that!” or “They’re asking $5.00 for THAT!” she had to stop herself from responding. She couldn’t believe the disrespect, even if they didn’t know this was her childhood home and these were things her mother treasured.
Most of the furniture went quickly: the tables, the buffet, the chests of drawers, the beds. The only large piece of furniture left after the second day was her mother’s brocade sofa. Nella had seen the sofa in a furniture store that was going out of business, and she bought it on the spot. It was a joke in the family that no one could sit on the sofa unless he was dressed in his best clothes. No drinks were drunk or chips snacked on in the vicinity of the sofa. Nella said the sofa had come into the house pristine, and it would leave the same way. She had protected it and spoiled it like a member of the family.
Ann was making her rounds through the house when a family of three, mother, father, and a toddler headed for the living room. The parents turned their attention to a box of books near the fireplace, paperbacks, mostly. While their backs were turned, the infant climbed onto the sofa, drooling on the back and arms, wiping his running nose on the back of his little hand, his shoes caked with dried mud. (God, she hoped it was only mud!) He stood up, grabbing onto the seams of the upholstery. As soon as Ann saw the child on her mother’s sofa, she rushed to the child and quickly, unceremoniously, lifted him from the sofa and set him on the floor.
“Stay down.” She glared at him, but he seemed to think this was a game.
The boy looked her full in the face, stuck his tiny pink tongue out at her, and climbed back onto the sofa, starting to jump up and down.
“I said ‘Get down,’ you little brat.” Her voice came out much louder than she intended. She was flushed from rage.
“What’s wrong with you?” The mother rushed to her child and picked him up in her arms.
“He’s just a baby! He doesn’t know what he is doing!”
“But you do! Can’t you keep your child under control!”
“No one is going to want that hideous sofa anyway. All this is old lady stuff.” She grabbed her son’s hand, and the three of them headed for the door.
Ann followed them to the door, sobbing and screaming, “Get out! Get out.”
The woman in charge of the sale came running to see what was happening, while the couple rushed to their car with their child in tow.
“We’re going to call the police. That woman is crazy!” They slammed the doors to their car and peeled off.
There were only a few items left for sale and none that would bring in much money. Once she calmed down, Ann declared the sale was over. The staff hurriedly cleared out their money boxes and receipts, telling Ann they would be back the next day to start the process of hauling off the remainder.
Before she left, the woman who had been supervising the sale pulled Ann to her substantial bosom and wrapped her arms around her. “I’m so sorry. This is why we don’t want the family around. It’s too hard. Too hard.”
Once everyone was gone, and she was alone, Ann wondered what she would do with the sofa. Maybe Diane would take it. Maybe Sherry would want it. She felt overwhelming tired and as empty as the house itself. She kicked off her shoes and lay down on the sofa, its soft fabric soothing to her cheek.
The only place left for Ann to sleep that night was on her mother’s brocade sofa. She knew her mother would forgive her this one time.
About the Author:
Nancy Lines has been writing short stories and essays for several years. Several have been published, the most recent in The Blue Villa Magazine. Another short story is slated to be published in November. Nancy credits her masters in literature for helping her refine her writing and her years working as a legal assistant for helping her realize she desperately needed a creative outlet!