Part 17
Part 17 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
I went to the house on Kenwood that night and I took the kitchen apart.
I am not proud of it. I emptied every drawer onto the floor. I pulled the shelf paper up. I got the step stool and went through the cabinet over the refrigerator where she kept the turkey platter and the good gravy boat, and I broke the gravy boat, and I left it.
I was looking for more of it. That was all. Eleven years of a second life in a hatbox meant there was more, there had to be more, and I was going to find every piece of it and hold it up and be right.
It was in the file box in the hall closet, where anybody would have looked on day one.
A green accordion folder with FUNERAL written on the tab in marker. Inside it: her cemetery deed, the paid receipt for the plot, a typed page of instructions for her own service dated 2019 including which hymn and which reading and a note that she did not want anyone to say she had gone home to be with the Lord because she found it presumptuous.
And behind that, an envelope with my name on it.
It was not sealed. That detail matters to me. She had not sealed it, which means she had opened it and looked at it again at some point, and had decided it was still what she wanted to say, and had put it back.
It was one page. I have it. I will put it down exactly.
Claire,
Rent is $600 the first week, cash only, Ray Kozak, 414 Brandt, do not mail it. He does not want it in an envelope with anything written on it.
Dr. Nadine Feld, Wayne Ave, first Tuesday of the month, 8:15. The number is in my address book under F. If they ask, you are on the release, I did it in 2021.
He needs the windmill cookies in the paper package. Not the plastic. Patty gets them, ask her, she knows.
He will not take money from you. Buy groceries instead and leave them, do not make it a discussion.
Thursdays at two. Not Friday.
The green blanket is in the cedar chest. He knows I have it. I could not make myself give it back.
Don’t do it the way I did it.
Mom
That is the whole letter. Seven lines of instructions and one line of anything.
I sat on the floor of my mother’s hall with my back against the closet door and a broken gravy boat in the kitchen and I was so angry I could not see the paper, and then I was not angry, and then I was doing something with my face and my throat that I have never done before or since.
Eleven years. Her whole second life. A dead husband, a living son, a daughter who was never told, a notebook full of ate half, and at the end of it she sat down at that table and what she had to give me was a grocery instruction and a warning.
I opened the cedar chest before I left.
The green blanket was on top, folded, and it smelled like a nineteen year old boy, and that is not possible. Eleven years. It is not possible, and I put my face in it anyway, and it did.