IMOGENE
DAILY SPECIALS
Smoked Salmon Burgers and Potato Salad + Drink .75¢
Friday’s Pie - Apple & Peach Streusel .50¢
TIME HAD COME. The Coca-Cola clock chimed nine a.m. Rain turned to ice pellets that beat against the walls, the windows, and roof, bouncing upward from the sidewalk. The sky was dark as dusk. The cacophony of loud noises included Pearl beating bowls, pots, and pans in the kitchen making soup, baking cakes, and rolling dough. I leaned against the door frame and watched her work in a flurry of activity between the long stainless steel counter and the wood butcher’s block. Burlap bags of flour and potatoes were piled against the wall at her feet. The smell of maple sugar frosting coated the air. The headache I’d had all night returned and pricked at my brow. “Pearl,” I shouted. “I’m gonna be upstairs making room for Marge’s girl, okay?”
“Okay,” she said as she mixed and measured with her hands, tossing in fists of cinnamon, throwing flour, and smashing berries with her bare fists.
I hung my apron on the door hook and climbed the stairs to my apartment. In the mirror at the end of the hall I took myself in, recalling the many nasty things Tula May’s mother said about me through the years. Her with her tall, lean body and plump breasts that men stared at, in awe, watching them float about beneath her tight cotton blouses as if they came from another planet. I arched my back, thrusting what little I had forward. It didn’t help. I recalled her bright pink lipstick and hair so ratted in the back it looked like a nest. No wonder that child looks at me, who her mother called “plain as a pancake,” as if I were an alien. Suppose to her I was.
Oh well, I’d make room for her just the same. That wild witch of a mother has dumped her for the last time. Theo would find her a good home. A few nights with me would be fine.
The glass doorknob to Christina’s room was cold. I ran my other hand along the rim of the door, the edges of the molding I’d painted while still pregnant. I swallowed hard and then turned the handle, opening the door for the first time in three years. Then I sank to the floor, out of breath, my headache now like an ice pick at my temple. I reached up, pulled the door closed, leaned against the wall, and tried to catch my breath.
Suddenly Solomon appeared down the hall at the top of the stairs, an apparition slowly coming into focus. He had his medicine bundle in his hand. Pearl stood behind him. He dropped to the floor at my side. Pearl nodded and went back downstairs. He took my hand, breathed in deeply, and closed his eyes, my hand clenched tightly in his. He remained silent for a few minutes. I, too, closed my eyes, then felt a warm calm wash over me. He stood, reached his hands down for me to take, and said, “It is time.”
I took his old, strong hands and pulled myself up. He wiped my tears with his leathery thumbs and gripped my hand in his. He opened Christina’s door again and led me inside. I closed my eyes and followed into the pink-walled tomb.
Solomon had wanted to go inside her room with me for some time, he said I needed a ceremony, to grieve, but Thomas said it was nonsense, to just get past it, let it go. But I couldn’t let her go, so I closed the door and never opened it again. Then Da died, Theo went missing in Korea, and Mamaí got sick, then died. In the last three years, I’d never really said goodbye.
Solomon sat me in the chair Mamaí gave me for rocking Christina. Rain pummeled the roofline. The heaviness of the room pressed down on me. I sank into the chair; every bone, every muscle, every cell in my body ached—that thorny pincher crab pinched inside me again.
Solomon sat on the floor, opened his medicine bag, and took out bundles of sage and incense. The rain stopped. I watched him, avoiding her room and the many pictures, dolls, blankets, and soft pink clothes—all those tiny pink things, so heavy with longing.
He lit his incense, closed his crinkled eyes, and prayed to his Great Grandfather in that language I never understood but that soothed me just the same. I closed my eyes and fell into his voice—his incantations, his song of sorrow, his prayers to one greater than we. Solomon’s voice, like a hot bath of sea salts, gently tugged and pulled the sorrow from my body.