Unremarried Widow Read Online Free PDF Page B

what I could not remember during the day.
    In the months that followed, my father’s presence in our life remained untouched. My mother kept the sheets he had slept in on their bed. His toothbrush stayed by the bathroom sink. His comb and electric razor lay where he had left them. His clothes hung in the closet and his pictures stayed fixed to the wall. His chair at the head of the table remained empty, and no one—not me, not my mother, not the friends or neighbors who passed through—sat in my father’s seat while the table remained in the house.
    But two years after the plane crash my mother performed an impossible feat: she made my father disappear. She decided to move us to Florida, near what she considered home, and in coming home she erased my father from our lives. She donated his clothes to the Salvation Army and she threw out the toothbrush and the toothpaste that had sat for so long beside the bathroom sink. She sold all the furniturein the house, including the table where my father had once sat at the head, and she kept almost nothing that belonged to him but a wool winter coat, his Eastern Airlines cap, the bear claw necklace, his shotgun, and two bottles of his cologne.
    We moved first to my grandmother’s house in Clewiston, then one hundred miles west to the shrimping community where my mother had spent her summers growing up. She found a job teaching at the local elementary school and she planted papaya trees and yellow hibiscus bushes in the front yard of our house. If she missed the acres of farmland in north Georgia, she never said as much. Except for the scar on my back and the shallow dent at my hairline, little evidence of the crash remained. My mother kept my father’s pictures in the study, where she would not have to look at them every day. She stored his coat in the back of her closet and put the bear claw necklace in a safety-deposit box at the bank along with both their wedding rings. She wrapped the shotgun in a towel that she hid on the top shelf of my closet. She stored the cologne in the cabinet by her bed.
    By silent agreement, we never talked about my father. More than anything I wanted to protect my mother, and I knew that to ask about him would hurt her. So I pretended like he never existed. I let him fade from my memory until I could not remember him at all. I could not have told you if he smelled like lemon or leather or smoke, if his hair grew in thick or fine, if his hands were rough or smooth. I could not have described the sound of his voice.
    And yet, the first time I brought Miles home to meet my mother, she put her hand to her chest, shook her head, and smiled.
    â€œHe’s so much like your father,” she said.

2005

4
    When Miles and I decided to move in together, I asked him if his mother, Terry, would be upset. We sat at the beat-up kitchen table in his apartment near Fort Rucker while the warm fall evening pressed against the sliding glass doors. Miles would graduate from flight school in December and the Army would be sending him to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The senator was set to retire and the office in Tallahassee would be closing around the same time. The move felt right to both of us.
    â€œDon’t worry about it,” he said. He leaned back in his wooden chair and propped a foot against the leg of the table. “She’ll probably want to send us a housewarming gift. Go ahead and think of something.”
    I thought place mats would be nice.
    While Southeast Asia reeled from the tsunami that had washed ashore Christmas Eve and Iraq prepared for its first free Parliamentary electionsin almost fifty years, Miles and I left for Fort Bragg. A cold front had worked its way across lower Alabama in the night and heavy clouds hung above the cotton fields. We slipped on roads patched with ice as we headed east but the front stayed behind us as we made our way north. We pulled into the flatlands of central North Carolina and I nervously