Chapter 23: Gary

My mother's street in Gary looked smaller than I remembered, and darker.

Half the streetlights were out.

The house stood on the corner, with a sagging porch and a yellow storm door.

The snow in the yard had not been touched since the last time I paid a man to come.

I had the key on my ring.

I'd carried it for two years without once turning it.

"Do you want me to wait in the car?" Emlyn said.

"No."

"Good."

He came up the steps with me and a bunch of grocery tulips in his fist, and his hand on my back.

The door stuck, the way it always had.

I put my shoulder to it, and it gave, and the smell hit me.

Furniture polish and fried onions and the radiator, still there after two years of nobody.

I stood in the front hall and shook.

He didn't say anything.

He just put his arms around me from behind and held on.

We went to the cemetery first, in the dark, because he could.

My mother's stone was small and gray in the snow on the south side of the churchyard, with her name cut deep.

I told her about the plow, and about Dewey, and about the man beside me in the camel coat.

"He asks first," I said. "Every time. He wouldn't take a drop until I told him I wanted him to."

Emlyn laid the tulips on the snow.

"Mrs. Doyle," he said. "I am extremely sorry I did not know you."

I laughed out loud, and it turned into crying halfway through.

She would have hit me with a spoon for the first, and held me for the second.

When I could breathe, I told him what she used to say.

"She'd stand at the stove on Sundays and ask, what do you want, Lavinia? What do you want?"

"And?"

"And I'd say whatever was easiest. Whatever she was having. I was eleven years old, and I already knew nobody wanted the answer."

I wiped my face. "I think she knew too, and she kept asking anyway."

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