I was the hard-ass New Yorker. A slap on the back, and a jovial Fuck you. Translation: You pissed me off, but we’re okay now, right? She was from North Carolina, where you couldn’t leave a store without them saying Y’all come back now. There were the syrupy classics, Aren’t you precious and Bless your heart. Translation: Fuck you.
A perfectly matched improbable pair. We aged. We changed. We met in the middle.
My rickety body, put through the paces on soccer fields, tennis courts and marathon races, rebelled, said it had had enough. I wished there were a devil I could cut a deal with—continue playing sports in trade for my firstborn. Fortunately, that wasn’t an option. Anyway, I didn’t really mean it. I found yoga. Its woo-woo trappings sunk in.
When she owned her restaurant, she became the hard-ass enforcer dealing with angry customers; waitstaff stealing shrimp to trade for drugs in the back alley; staff schedules and continual no-shows; long hours expediting plates from the chaotic kitchen to linen-covered tables in the serene dining room. All of it.
But she never stopped calling the kids Sweet Girl. She hated it when strangers called her Sir. Yet when the kids asked if she was a boy or a girl, she softly, sweetly, placed palms to cheeks, told them she was indeed a girl, their Momma A. She loved with ferocity, completely and unconditionally.
Years go by. Memories blur. Then, I envision her clearly, vividly. Summers at the beach at The Admiral Hotel. Lights on as she sleeps through our raucous shenanigans—talking, laughing, jumping about. She opens her eyes, sits up, mutters something. Uh oh, did we wake her? we whisper; sit still and silent as her eyes close, and her head sinks into the pillow. Then, back at it.
Back at it. That’s what do in the face of unfathomable loss. We cling to memories, grasp at magical thinking—conjure her in a dandelion poof floating by; in the smell of hot coffee; in the feel of warm sand on our feet; in the sun rising. We get back at it. When everything has changed. When she is longer. When there is no going back. When there is no it at all.
Judith Shapiro @judysmodernlife is a writer who spends half the year on the opposite coast, confused about which way is north and marveling at the sun that sets on the horizon instead of rising. When the novel she’s writing looks the other way, she secretly writes anything else. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in The Citron Review, Moss Piglet, The New York Times, The Sun and elsewhere. See more at PeaceInEveryLeaf.com.
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