I never knew my mother until she cried in front of us kids for the first time. We had met many years ago but lost touch as our lives layered out and spread apart. It was on a somber Sunday afternoon of my eighteenth year that a woman was delivered to my mother's house that would inspire us to meet again. I had heard and seen stories recorded in photo books and verbal archives stacked fifty three years high depicting how she climbed trees, how she almost won homecoming queen, and how she never learned to swim, but it was difficult to tell looking at this stranger if all tails were true even though I had been to the top of her family tree and could see the roots that connected Nashville to Michigan to Rome. The woman had been in the house a time or two and even cried before, but those where my tears to, but this moisture that ran down her chin was different. It was all her own, from a world only she knew.
I walked slowly in my socks, balancing on my bear toes, they always get eaten by the yard first, and not be heard as I made my way toward the stairs up to my room. I would save the introductions for later. The funeral would begin at noon.
Five steps to the top floor skipping one after the other, I had never thought of walking up the stairs one at a time because there was no reason to, and even the sleeping cat on the edge of the top floor didn't budge from its spot when she heard me coming.
Down the hall from the bottom of my sister's room I could hear her speaking on the phone. She had been at it for what seemed like hours. As I passed by I could hear her. She wasn't sad or crying, merely making her way through another conversation. I wondered if she thought of the woman down stairs in our living room and if she knew how she would make her introduction. The feeling she hadn't thought of it yet was annoying but I wouldn't ever say anything, being younger she wouldn't listen if I had.
Resting my legs on a folded shirt and khaki pants I sat up when sounds come from the bathroom. I opened the door and saw my sister against the sink, looking at herself in the mirror. She had the same face as the woman alone in the living room and the moisture puddled in the same places.
“Will everything be alright?” she asked. I had no idea but I knew what she wanted to hear.
“Yes.”
“I wish Dad was home,” she said.
I agreed but I didn't need to say anything, she knew I felt the same.
As Danielle cleared her eyes and pushed over her hair to the left side, something she had done since the first grade, I went into my room, put on the khakis that had been lade out, combed my hair, and walked the stairs, only my heart skipping a step.
The woman who had sat in the living room was replaced by a young girl barely eighteen years old. She was holding a plate of dried ham and waiting for her mother to take her out to the park. I came down the stairs a man aged as well as tall. Its time to go I said, I helped her up and I stood firmly with my arms around her, my feet planted strong, and an assortment of holes in my socks.
http://www.npr.org/series/105660765/three-minute-fiction
