Tom was out on the deck when he received the news. The doctor thought he was the nephew.
“Oh, no, I’m actually her son.” Tom corrected. “She has no nephew, just me.” The doctor was very apologetic. He told Tom that she’d passed away quietly at the hospice in Johnson City when her heart stopped at about eleven o’clock last night. Tom thanked the doctor for the information. He was then silent for just a minute before he cleared his throat and explained that he’d be coming down within the next couple of days.
There were no nonstop flights from Durham, NC where Tom was Department Chair of Biochemistry at Duke, to the airport near his hometown of Jonesborough, Tennessee. He booked a flight that would leave tomorrow and return the next day. There were around 4,000 inhabitants of Jonesborough that day Tom’s mother died in 1999, and even fewer when he lived there as a boy. Tom had gone down to the hospice about a month before when his Momma got real sick. But before then, he hadn’t been anywhere in Tennessee for close to twenty-five years.
The next morning, Tom left for the airport before his daughter was even up for breakfast. He’d said a quick goodnight to her the evening before and told her where he was headed to. But Tom wasn’t one for sympathetic looks and goodbyes. Plus, he figured she didn’t know her MeeMaw too well, so it’d be hard for her to be truly sympathetic anyway.
Tom took his overnight bag and quietly slipped out the sliding glass door of the family’s newly built cedar and stone house. He pulled their 1998 Chevy Tahoe out of the garage, and drove it the twenty minutes to Raleigh/Durham International Airport.
Three hours and fifty minutes later, he was in a taxi on the way to his momma’s house in small-town Tennessee.
Even from moving 30 miles per hour inside a modern taxicab, downtown Jonesborough looked exactly the same. It was a historic town, the oldest in all of Tennessee, so it figured that not much had changed. At 10AM, Main Street was bustling; that is, as bustling as a half-mile stretch of road in the Jonesboro Historic District could possibly be. Tom recognized lots of people moseying about— pretty Ms. Dougherty, who used to teach Sunday school and seemed to have aged like a fine Virginia wine, heading out of the Antique Mart; Richard Hornsby and Caroline Walker, who went to high school with Tom and seemed to be married now, shuffling a collection of offspring out of Ms. Brady’s Book store; and old Willie Wylie, who sometimes dropped groceries off at Momma’s house when she refused to get out of bed, fixin’ to go into Sammons Wood Supplies.
Tom was glad the taxicab driver had chosen to take the tourist route and drive down Main Street. There was a faster way to his Momma’s house, which was really on the outskirts of Jonesborough, but Tom didn’t mind the nostalgic detour.
Before long, Tom was gripping his overnight bag so it wouldn’t get knocked over as the road turned from paved to dirt. Once the road turned, Tom would always know, even if he were blind as a bat, that they were nearing his Momma’s house. Here was where the houses became much fewer and farther between; Tom remembered the worst part as a kid was that it wasn’t all too good of a trick-or-treating neighborhood. But sooner than expected, the taxicab arrived at the one-story wooden house with a tin roof and a wrap-around porch, where Tom had spent the first seventeen years of his life.
“Didja grow up in this house?” asked the driver, as he calculated the fare.
“Yep, it was just my mother and me.” Tom felt his old southern drawl creeping in. He’d since lost it due to years surrounded by scientists from all over the world.
“Did yu’ins live here a long time?”
Yu’ins. Hearing the Tennessee version for what the rest of the South called ‘y’all,’ a word that used to fill Tom’s ears all the time, now caught him off guard.
“I moved away after high school,” Tom replied. “But my Momma lived here her whole life until a little over a month ago. She moved into a hospice. She just passed away, actually.”
“Oh, I’m real sorry to hear that,” sympathized the taxi driver.
“Thank you.” Tom paid the man, and got out of the car. He was standing with his bag in his right hand when, for the first time in a quarter century, he breathed in the scent of his Momma’s house in the early fall. Suddenly, he was eight years old, reading the Jonesboro Sun on the porch; and then he was ten, building forts out of broken rocking chairs in the backyard; and then three, watching the sunlight wash over his mother’s face as she slept late into a Tuesday morning. And he was all the sudden lonelier than he’d felt in a very long time.
Tom recovered from the flood of memories and creaked up the porch stairs. The front door was open, naturally. Once inside, Tom set down his bag on the wooden-planked floor, which had begun to collect quite a bit of dust. When his Momma got real sick, Tom hired a nurse and a cleaning lady to come by every other day to help out, but they hadn’t been around since she was put in the hospice. He’d also been paying for his Momma’s phone and electric for several years now; he chose not to cut them off even since there’d been no one in the house, just in case she ever came back. She didn’t, but at least now he had somewhere in Jonesborough to stay.
Tom turned on the light.
Twenty-five years gone by, and there was just as little furniture as always. And just as many pictures. Tom’s mother’s house had always been lined with photographs, from wall to wall, some framed, some just pinned up with a tack. Photographs of Tom’s ancestors, of the rural Tennessee landscape, some pictures of sights from trips to Nashville and Memphis, a few pictures of Tom himself, and tons of photographs of his Momma when she was young.
People had always told her she looked like a strawberry-haired Elizabeth Taylor. She had perfectly almond-shaped, navy blue eyes that glistened when she laughed and when she sang.
Tom’s Momma had aspired to be a country singer in Nashville all her life. He had only seen her sing once when he was eleven years old. His Momma was feeling good that year and got herself a gig singing in a Cabaret in Knoxville. Tom was standing in the foyer the first time he saw her come out of her room in her performer’s outfit. She looked like someone you’d see in the movies with her hair all done up and her sky blue dress with fringe on the bottom. Old Willie Wylie drove them down that night. Tom’s Momma waltzed right on into that club with her pretty acoustic guitar (not too many ladies could play the guitar back then) and waited coolly backstage until it was her turn to play. Tom sat right in the front row; he was by far the youngest in the club and couldn’t help but gape wide-eyed at all the women in mini-skirts and men with their pork-pie hats and cigars. The room silenced when his Momma got on stage. When she was young, most rooms silenced simply when she unassumingly entered them; so as she strutted her guitar and long legs across the stage, the room fell so quiet, you could hear the swish of the fringe on her dress as she walked even from the furthest table. She performed “Daddy Sang Bass,” by Johnny Cash. Her voice was pretty, not extraordinary, but it was her presence that captivated the audience, even as drunk and distracted as they were. She made Johnny’s lyrics seem like the most important words anyone had even written. And after her performance, all the pork-pied men approached her, offering their business cards and compliments, asking her for dates and autographs, saying when she was a star, they wanted to say they knew her when. Tom stood next to her the whole time, holding onto her dress, partially so he wouldn’t get lost in the crowd, but mostly so people would know he was her son, and proud to be.
She talked about her future as a country star constantly before that performance and in the decades after, but never again did she perform. She never went on auditions or even practiced the guitar by herself. Tom came to the conclusion later in life that his Momma had an undiagnosed mental illness that caused her never to mature beyond the age of thirteen. He was sure she also suffered from severe depression. She never cooked or had a real job. Sometimes she didn’t surface from her bedroom for days. If it weren’t for the small-town kindness of the people in Jonesborough, there would have been many an occasion in Tom’s early childhood when there was nothing to eat for weeks. So, from a very early age, Tom had to learn to support them both himself. Tom knew his Momma loved him, even though she never had the wherewithal to say it; but by the time he was about the age that his own daughter was now, he had given up all hope that she’d ever be a real part of his life. And once high school was over, he moved far away from the South, to Michigan, to attend college. He figured by then, his Momma had pretty much given up too.
Tom finished scanning the museum of photos in his Momma’s living room and turned into the kitchen on the right. Thanks to the hired help, the kitchen was fairly tidy, unlike it had been when Tom lived there. There was, however, a pile on the table of envelopes, surely full of unpaid bills, and various papers, stacked nearly a foot high. Tom took a deep breath and sat down, preparing to sift. His Momma’s will had specified that she wanted to be cremated and that Tom could have the house, which had been in the family for five generations. But beyond that, it didn’t say much, since she didn’t really have anything to give. Tom figured he’d keep the house around for sentimental value, until he had a motivation to sell it. He’d be picking her ashes up tomorrow to take them back to Durham. The reason he was even at the house at all was to see if his Momma had anything of interest that he might want to keep.
He picked up the first few envelopes from the table, all dusty and from numerous companies including Comcast, Suntrust Bank, and the Jonesborough Water Department. Envelope after envelope, Tom glanced at the return address. Some of them, it seemed, were decades old. His Momma had unopened letters from personal addresses, including a few from Tom’s house in Durham, which he knew were old birthday cards and messages to MeeMaw from his daughter. She had accumulated more catalogues and pizza delivery notices than Tom had ever seen. But nothing of interest. Tom transferred all the debris into a garbage bag to recycle, and then decided to tackle her bedroom. The living room with all the photographs was to the left of the front entryway, and the kitchen was to the right. There was a thin door that led from the kitchen back into Tom’s Momma’s bedroom. Tom respectfully entered, where he had always peeked in to see if she was awake. He saw her bed, still unmade from when she screamed for the at-home nurse, who pulled her out of bed and took her to the hospital, where she spent two weeks before transferring to hospice care. The wooden floor was draped in the same rust-colored carpet, which hadn’t been soft to walk on for years, due to all that had been spilled on it. Furnishings in the room were pretty sparse. Cheap blinds that old Willie Wylie had put in ten years ago covered the window over the bed, which sat in between two tables topped with burnt out lamps and bottles of medication that hadn’t been taken. A closet housing her neglected guitar and clothes from the past fifty years was on the west wall of the room. Tom approached the left bedside table and opened the drawer. In it, he found two half-empty bottles of Prednisone, some reading glasses, the Bible, a comb laced with white hair, pages of floral-patterned personalized return address labels that she’d gotten for free in the mail, miscellaneous leaves of sheet music, guitar picks, and an old monogrammed lighter. Tom pocketed one of her picks and the lighter. He moved onto the other bedside table.
Tom was rummaging through hair scrunchies and dime-store pearls when he found a folded piece of stationary at the bottom of the drawer. In handwriting like that of a child, the words “September, 1993” were scribbled on the front. Tom quickly calculated his Momma was 71 years old then. He was sure that must have been the first time she’d written in years. Carefully, Tom unfolded the paper to reveal a list.
“Wish List,” it was titled. Tom began to read.
Wish List
1) Go to Montreal
2) Drive a car
3) Go to Paris
4) Go to Italy
5) Have a beautiful house
6) Get a new refrigerator and stove
Tom couldn’t quite make out number 7.
8) Make some money
9) Fix my guitar
10) Sing on television
11) Have a friend
Tom pulled back from the list and scrunched his eyes closed. He wished his wife were there with him. He read the list again.
2) Drive a car.
Tom never knew she had never driven a car. He could have taught her to drive a car. He didn’t know.
4) Go to Italy
Tom and his family had taken a trip to Rome just this past summer. He forgot to send her the photos. Why did he forget to send her the photos?
10) Sing on television
Tom bought his mother her first television when she was 62.
11) Have a friend
Tom delicately folded the list in two like he found it. He shut the drawer to the bedside table and stood. He walked out of the bedroom, passed the kitchen, and knelt down beside his overnight bag, where he tucked the list safely next to his wallet.
Tom slept in his childhood bedroom that night. It was a random, almost storage-closet sized chamber that branched off the living room. He’d decorated it with posters of The Beatles and Neil Armstrong as a kid. Tom didn’t sleep too well that night, due both to the uncomfortable lumps in the sixty-year-old mattress and to distraction. He spent several hours, lying awake, but still, replaying the missed opportunities in Momma’s life and mulling over what he could have made different. And contemplating what his own wish list would say. He could really only think of one thing.
It was 9:15AM when Tom showed up at the Dillow-Taylor Funeral Home to pick up his Momma’s ashes the next morning. It was only three miles away from the house, a three-mile path very similar to the ones he used to take every day to get into town, so Tom decided to walk. When he arrived, the funeral director apologized for his loss, and Tom thanked him. The box of ashes was big and sealed tight. Tom looked down at his carry-on overnight bag and realized he didn’t have enough room to fit the box. He could check the box at the airport, he guessed. Then he considered how strange it would be to check his own mother. He decided he would check the bag instead.
Tom asked the funeral director if he could use their phone to call a cab. He was led to their office, where he found a very old-fashioned looking phone with a rotary dial. He reached for his wallet and retrieved a piece of paper he’d saved with the number of the cab company written on it. He dialed the number and requested a cab to come pick him up from the funeral home and take him to Tri-Cities Regional Airport. He put down the receiver. Tom was placing his wallet back in his overnight bag when he caught a glimpse of the list. It startled him sort of, because after such a cerebral night, he’d almost forgotten that the list actually existed on paper and was real and folded and sitting in the side pocket of his bag. Sort of in a trance, his gaze floated blankly for just a minute over the protruding off-white corners of the stationary, until he came to the conclusion that the funeral director probably wouldn’t mind if he made just one more call. He picked up the phone and dialed. After five rings, he was about to give up, when his daughter picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Annie, it’s Dad.”
“Oh.” She sounded surprised. The upstairs phone didn’t have Caller ID. “Hey Dad. What are you doing? You back in town?”
“No, not yet. I’ll be back later today.” There was a pause. It felt long to Tom. “So, Annie,” he said. “I was wondering. Do you want to go to dinner tonight? Just you and me? Wherever you’d like. Anywhere. Just you and me.” Another pause. “Is that okay?”
“Uhhhh,” Tom heard from over the line. He realized he was holding his breath.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I didn’t make any sleepover plans. Yeah, I’ll pick a place.”
Tom let out an audible exhale.
“Really?” His voice went up in pitch. “Oh good, that’s just perfect. I can’t wait.” He really couldn’t. “See you soon, kiddo. I love you.”
“Love you too, Dad.”
It was 9:32 when Tom Colley hung up the phone. He slung his overnight bag over his shoulder and gently lifted the box. He thanked the funeral director for letting him use their phone, and exited the door. He stood at the corner of 2nd and Main, and waited for the cab that would drive him to the airport, where he’d catch the flight that would take him home to Durham, where he would have dinner with his daughter. Which he knew would be better than any refrigerator or beautiful new house.
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