The Sidewalk

It doesn’t blame her for thinking this is what’s best.

When presented with a bad situation, you consider the aspects of the situation to try and see what about it is making it so unbearable. She decided that what was so unbearable about living in a house with two children who had just lost their father was the house itself. To her, it represented something that was no longer present. A mother, a father, and two children living in a house. The father dies. The house is the problem. This is not logic, but it is grief logic. It’s the logic that arrives shortly after the funeral before the guests with casseroles.

She sold the house and moved the children to another house. This one was forty minutes away, which, in a small state, may as well be another country. The new house was on Pope Street, and it was smaller than the house they left, because this was a nicer area. It was by the ocean. That meant everything cost more, but she reasoned that being near the water would improve their quality of life. People who lived near the ocean lived longer and were happier. That was something she read in a magazine at the doctor’s office during one of the visits where they thought her husband was going to get better. Those were good visits. Now they seem cruel in retrospect. Were those visits even real? Did she dream them up? She was very imaginative. Her husband used to catch her daydreaming all the time. Their younger son was like that. Their older son was like his father. He did not find daydreaming amusing.

We live outside her house. And by live, we mean are located. We are the sidewalk alongside the Pope Street house. We know what we know about her, because the day she moved in, she sat out on the sidewalk and snuck a cigarette while she called her older sister and told her how great everything was. She tried to hide the fact that she was smoking again, but her sister could tell. Inside the boys were unpacking boxes and trying not to settle into their new reality. They did not like being in the new house, and the smell of the ocean was making them nauseous. Sitting upon us, the sidewalk, their mother ordered herself to smile.

“I think Richard would be so happy about all of this,” she told her sister, who lived in Montana and did something involving the dairy industry, maybe lobbying of some kind, “He loved this town. He always wanted to live here. We should have moved here a long time ago. I think--You know, I think by living here, we’re--You know, I think we’re actually honoring his memory by being here. It’s as though he’s not even gone. It’s like he’s not even dead. You know?”

Her sister had never heard any of this, but she agreed with everything, because she still felt guilty that she hadn’t been able to fly in for the funeral. She was, in fact, a lobbyist, and a big bill was about to be passed regarding cows and their upkeep. How do we know this? We know things, because we know things. We’re a sidewalk. We travel and we listen.

That night for dinner, she made her two sons pasta carbonara and the pasta was mushy. It was mushy, but nobody said it was mushy. They ate their mushy pasta, and they talked about going to the beach everyday until school started.

“Two and a half months of going to the beach,” their mother said, “Aren’t you so lucky your mom is a teacher? I know you didn’t like it when you were little and my friends were the ones teaching you in elementary school, but now that that’s over and we all get to be on vacation at the same time, isn’t it nice? I think it’s so nice.”

One of her sons would be starting the eighth grade in the Fall. The other was going to be a sophomore. Their father was good at helping with homework. He was good at juggling their hobbies. He knew that one was bad at science and that the other had the potential to play hockey in college and maybe even get a scholarship. He knew what not to say to them. He knew when to be strict and when to be silent. She knew all of this as well, but now it was all hers to know. Now there was nobody to share this information with, and nobody to look to when the information failed. When one son begins to pass science, but fail math, what then? When the other son declares that he’s quitting the hockey team, what should she do? The next time her sons surprised her, would she be able to manage the surprise all by herself? Could she continue to handle the unexpected?

“I think we’re going to be great,” she said, beginning to believe that the pasta wasn’t as mushy as she originally thought even as it was chalking up her mouth, “I think we’re going to be so great.”

Her sons went to bed early without being asked. They were tired, and what’s more, they were empty. She would need to spend the summer filling them back up. With what, she didn’t know. Maybe with beach sand. Maybe with ice cream from a spot on the way home from the beach. Maybe with promises that time would make it all better. Maybe with lies that this would all just be a moment in a life full of other moments that would bury this one until it didn’t wrench them tightly each time they thought of it. She sat on us, the sidewalk, and lit another cigarette.

As she was sitting, a woman walked by pushing a carriage. Inside the carriage was a sleeping baby that looked to be about six months old. It was late, but she remembered having to walk her sons when they were younger late at night, because they couldn’t sleep without a walk around the block, and she used it as an excuse to escape from the squalid air of a house that’s been taken over by a newborn. Back then, she would let her husband sleep. He would watch the children while she worked, because his job allowed him to be home. That’s how he got so close to them so fast. That’s why she was happy to take them for midnight strolls in a neighborhood she would never live in again.

Upon seeing the woman walking her child, she tried not to let the churning inside boil over. She looked down at us, the sidewalk, and saw scratches where children had tried to write their names and failed. She realized she was out of cigarettes and that she didn’t know which store would be open late so she could go buy another pack. Pope Street didn’t have a single house on it with the lights on.

Come on, she thought to herself, It’s still early.

Despite knowing otherwise, she continued to tell herself that the night had just begun.