At the time, his response seemed harsh, but I grew to see it as protective, part of the scaffolding he constructed to hold himself upright through those long, dark winter weeks as our numbness and shock slowly thawed with the muddy earth and green of spring into this new way of living. He dreaded winter and all the memories it brought, and I loved it; I felt closer to her when I felt close to those final days. I still do. November weather reports always fill me with anticipation.

A few months later, I overheard my father talking to my mother’s friend Janie, a woman he had once thought was a bad influence (he’d said she aspired to too much), but there he was inviting her into our living room and talking to her, saying things that he had not said to me, revealing things about my mother’s clothes and what he had discovered in her drawer, like a receipt for money she still owed the local dress shop where Janie worked (for a new coat on layaway). They didn’t know that I was in the hallway, holding my breath so that I could hear. “Why was she hiding things from me?” he asked. “There were things in her drawer I had never seen before. A lacy slip, some handkerchiefs.”

“Just because someone is dead doesn’t mean you should tell their secrets,” I was thinking.

“Do you know who she was with?” he asked, and Janie said, no, she didn’t, but she had her suspicions. Then the two sat there for what felt like an unbearable amount of time. It seemed Janie was about to explain more, but before she could say it, I came into the room.

I said that maybe my mother was helping to plan a surprise. “For you,” I said, and turned to Janie, her shell left cracked and vulnerable. “Or maybe something nice for you.” I turned back to my father, who was not as easily cracked. “Or maybe she was earning extra money so she could have those nice things without having to ask you; maybe she was afraid you would say no, because you usually say no.” That one got him, and so I kept going, about how maybe just maybe she was earning extra money so they would have a big Christmas. “So I would have a big Christmas! Maybe, she was doing it all for me.”

“Let it stop,” I thought. “Let her just be my mother.”

They were quiet, and finally they both nodded, as if to say I could be right, and then, in a strange distant way, they simply closed the door on it all.