She breathes a sigh and once again finds the promise of that voice from long ago: You will be fine. You will be fine. And since she is already there, across the street from the courthouse waiting, she has plenty of time. She goes and looks in the mirror over the produce to check her hair and then leaves her cart in the paper products aisle. It can’t be helped; she’s in a hurry. She will switch to Lowes Foods in the future, or she will tell the Food Lion people it was an emergency. And it is.

Lil

August 2016 (remembering)
Southern Pines

The wall phone rang once that long-ago day: a signal. “That is so annoying,” I said, and your father agreed; he was reading the paper and talking about how they feared rats might infest the city because of the Big Dig, or that they might once again uncover graves, as they had years before when building the subway, long-buried bones of undocumented dead, and wondering how such a thing can even happen, and yet it has, and it does.

Your father was wearing my favorite shirt of his, a soft pinwale corduroy in forest green that I’d given him one Christmas. He said sometimes the phone rings when the phone company is working on the lines. We talked about that a little. We talked about the mouse problem we had had years before in our tiny first apartment, and the way it was not uncommon for squirrels to get stuck in the walls and slam around for a couple of days. And then the phone rang again, a shrill ring there from the kitchen, and then we talked about you, Becca, and how you and Alan seemed very happy together, and we talked about you, Jeff, and how relieved we were that you had really found your strength there in those business courses. And then your father stood suddenly, and in a voice I had heard only when he was rounding you kids up for some outing years before, he said: “I know what!” He clapped his hands. “I am going to get us takeout Chinese.”