Free Heart and Home by Jennifer Melzer Page A

nap would help me make sense of things again, but I
doubted it. I closed my eyes and started to drift away, but several times
before I actually fell asleep, I jerked awake due to the flash of that blurred
face in the window of my mind.

Chapter Seven
     
     
     
    After taking the entire week
off of work, I had to convince myself the choice was the right one. As messed
up as I felt inside about my mother’s death, part of me wondered if maybe Cal
wasn’t right, and the real way to get over the grief was to just dive back into
work.
    Since I’d already made the
decisions, I planned to spend my time going through my mother’s things and
packing them up for my father. I could almost hear my mother urging me on in
the back of my head, insisting that there were women in need of her clothing
and the library would be happy to have any books we might want to pass on to
them. I woke up Monday morning determined to get straight to work, but as soon
as I finished breakfast I didn’t even know where to begin.
    As organized as my mother
was, the fact remained that no one is ever really prepared for their own death.
Despite twenty years of paying life insurance, eating healthy, exercising
regularly and maintaining a spotless driving record, death was probably the
furthest thing from my mother’s mind. The evidence was in the aftermath, and my
mother left behind a monument.
    Everywhere I turned there
was some project left undone.
    There were needlepoint
projects tucked into a basket on the left side of her chair, and a plastic tub
full yarn and knitting needles rested on the right. Inside that tub were a
half-knitted baby blanket and an assortment of hats and scarves she’d obviously
started knitting for the homeless. The dining room was littered with piles of
scrapbooking materials, articles and pictures half hanging out of the
overstuffed scrapbooks. It was almost like she’d planted it all that way to
make sure I didn’t forget about her.
    As if the world itself
wasn’t already groaning from the great void she’d left behind her.
    I lifted the first scrapbook
cover and studied the title page. “The History of Us” was spelled out in fancy,
curling letters, and underneath them were two bedecked, black and white
photographs. The photograph on the left was a little boy, his white blond hair
in defiant tufts and his grin unforgettable. It was the same grin that still
made my Daddy one of the most handsome men I’d ever known. On the right was a
freckled little girl who looked like she was about to come twirling out of the
photograph swinging the hem of her skirts with her hands. I walked through
their youth page by page and into their teen years.
    I’d seen all those pictures
before. My father’s senior prom, his date a toothsome brunette. On the opposite
page was my own mother, starry eyed and gazing up at her incredibly tall prom
escort. There were pictures of my father from his time in the military, and
then their wedding photos. They traveled all over before I’d come along, and
the following pages were a tribute to their carefree days in Venice, France,
Ireland, Norway and Scotland. Near the end of their trip to Spain you could
just see my mother’s pregnancy beginning to show.
    Funny how the furthest we’d
ever traveled after I’d been born had been Canada. Even after I moved out they
traveled within the states, but it seemed all of their great adventures were
already taken. I closed the scrapbook and rested my hand on the cover. Did she
ever miss the early freedom she and my father knew together? Had my coming
along put a damper on their carefree days? She’d never said as much, but they
spent many a dinner talking about the year my father spent stationed in Japan and
the unforgettable trip they’d taken to the Orkney Islands.
    There were two other
brimming books of memories tucked underneath it, and I remembered with an ache
in the back of my throat what Becky said about having a couple of the projects
Mom was