The Reminders by Val Emmich

Author:Val Emmich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Literary
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

My mother wants to go for a walk, another one of her hobbies. Before we can leave the house, she has to equip herself with ankle weights, a visor, and a wristband pedometer. “How far are we walking?” I ask.

“Around the block,” she says.

It’s not a stroll, it’s a speed walk. Had I known, I wouldn’t have eaten all that bread.

We go by the same houses I used to ride my bike past as a kid. Many have changed colors, some have added extensions, and a few seem to have been demolished and rebuilt. My mother waves to a couple I don’t recognize and announces loudly that I’m her son. All of our old neighbors have moved away. Every single one of them.

“You never wanted to move, Mom?”

“Why? I like it here.”

But I’m asking a slightly different question. “I mean, after Dad died?”

She doesn’t break her stride. “I thought about it,” she says between heavy breaths. “But where was I going to go?” Breath. “I had two kids.” Breath. “One was just a baby.” Breath. “I had to work and keep everything going. I didn’t have time to sit and think about it.” Breath. Breath. Breath. “Actually, that’s probably what saved me.”

I’m still going over those words when we come around the block and I spot our house up ahead. It doesn’t look nearly as ominous as it did this morning, when it seemed to speak of only one single event: the news, arriving as a phone call, that my father had been sideswiped on the highway, all the relatives I barely knew suddenly visiting, pitching in, supporting, until the helping hands dwindled down to just four, my mother’s and mine, caring for the baby who was soon walking and getting into things and whose welfare took precedence over my preteen needs and desires (and hurt) and, later, my teenage needs and desires (and hurt), and through it all, my mother was busy, busy, busy.

Now, I return to the house less as the put-upon boy who was convinced that he alone carried the family’s sorrow and more as the man who’s only now learning the many tricky shapes pain can take, who just heard his mother confess, finally, that it wasn’t a given that she’d make it this far, that it had been a hard and daily struggle. And somehow she, unlike me, managed this feat without changing her name and while keeping the reminders on the walls and protecting the house from unruly backyard bonfires.

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