Free After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey Page A

never heard any of that,” she says.
    “But didn’t you wonder, when you saw the obits?”
    “I never saw the obits.”
    “You didn’t?”
    “Dad was dead. Why did I need to read a newspaper to tell me that?”
    The hissss-hohhhhh exhale of her iron.
    “I had work to do that day. Beginning with you and your brother. I didn’t have time
     to sit around and read the papers.”
    “But the ‘friend’? Or ‘friends’?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “The obits say he had been visiting friends. Do you know who they were?”
    “No.”
    “Isn’t that strange? That no one ever said they were with him the night he died?”
    “All I know is he got off work and some cops found him.”
    “But 3900 North Pine Grove is nowhere near his office.”
    She looks up from the ironing board. Her face a mask. She never betrays any emotion.
    “Let me ask you this,” I say. “How did you get Dad’s car home?”
    “Dick took care of everything. He identified the body and had it transferred to the
     funeral home. He told me where to go.”
    “What happened after Dick did all that?”
    “I went to Ryan-Parke with Grampa. Picked out the coffin. Gramma stayed with you and
     Chris.”
    “And what did Dick tell you about how he died?”
    “I don’t even remember what Dick told me. I think I was just in shock. It’s strange
     now to think about those days. I haven’t thought about them in forever.”
    “What else do you remember about that morning?”
    “All my friends started to come over. Lorraine. Mary Lee. Diane.”
    She puts down her iron. I hear water gurgle inside as it finds its level.
    “Did you know yesterday was Dad’s birthday?”
    “Yes,” I say.
    “He’d be almost seventy.”
    She reaches for another one of my shirts, pulls it tight across her board. For a moment
     the only sound is her iron. I watch her hand pass it over the material in smooth,
     strong movements, the wrinkles being erased, pushed out.
    “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
    “I guess so,” I say meekly. “But you’ll be seventy soon.”
    She turns her face back to the board.
    “If you want to,” she says, “we could take a little driving tour of the places Dad
     and I used to go when we were dating. Old haunts.”
    “Mom, I would love that.”
    And as I say it, I think about how I underestimate my mother. Maybe she wants answers
     as much as I do. Underestimating her. Isn’t that the last thing I should do? Just
     as when my father died, so many underestimated her.
    She brings her iron to a rest on its foot.
    A puff of steam emerges. A little cloud between us, rising. Ascending. Dissipating.
    #  #  #
    Driving the Northwest suburbs. The two of us, searching for places she and my father
     went when they were first dating. Joints like the Bit & Bridle.
    When we get to the corner, it’s gone. A Mobil station where it was.
    “Well, that takes care of that,” my mother says. The statement isclassic her. Concise. Unsentimental. Final. What I hear is the door closing. A closed,
     latched, bolted door with no handle.
    We sit silent as she executes a three-point turn and spins us back toward Dempster
     Street. I want to ask her more. This is why I came here this weekend. But I’m eight
     years old again, nervous to ask her questions. I’ve spent decades as a journalist—I
     get paid to ask people questions they don’t want to answer. But here I am, as intimidated
     as I’ve always been. Are all of us locked into a psychic age with our parents? Me,
     it’s somewhere between six and nine. I can’t even work up the courage to ask her a
     single opening question. So the silence congeals here in her Regal. Her Buick.
    My mother still drives a Buick. It’s all she’s ever driven, except for the Monarch
     that a husband of a friend persuaded her to buy because he could get a deal on it.
     It spent more time in the shop than it did on the road. Winter nights, she’d send
     me out of the house to put a blanket on the engine