Before my mother could say anything the waitress was back with a glass of water. She pretended not to know that she was interrupting. “Did either of you gals catch the special with Geraldo Rivera?” “What special?” Mom who had opened her purse on the seat beside her turned to face the waitress, she kept [...]

Before Mom finished eating Aunt Arlene lit up another cigarette and took a long hard draw. Everyone in the Coffee Cupboard was smoking but Mom. A meringue of smoke hung around the lights. There were a few others in the diner. All men on their own. Two at the counter, sitting with three seats apart, [...]

Mom pretended to read the menu and ordered bacon and eggs, let the waitress lead her through the choices. Over medium eggs. Wheat toast. Orange juice, small. Mom let Mary fill her coffee cup to the top. Aunt Arlene set her coffee cup down on the table, right next to the ashtray and tapped her [...]

It wasn’t really morning yet. Mom had no idea what time it was, her watch was still set to time at our house and we’d barely gone to bed for the night. Where the sisters were, somewhere in Arkansas along Interstate 40, the edges of the sky began to warm toward dawn. Aunt Arlene paced [...]

Sometimes I imagine her in the places I frequent. Haunting me at my unofficial office or while doing menial chores like standing in line at the post office or grocery shopping where I feel I must act as tour guide to the modern world. Most of the time, grocery shopping is only that. I will [...]

Around the time I graduated from college and was foundering about whether I ought to go to graduate school or “into the real world.” An ordinary dilemma that I imagined Mom would have had no patience for. In my memory Mom made her plans and carried them out without waffling. So looking for her guidance, [...]

This is, and is not, a ghost story. I will tell you how one lives with ghosts of ones own making, or at least how I have. I (did and do) imagine her with me when I need her. At first after she died I would imagine her at home with me, in the next [...]

Interstate 40   Mom let Aunt Arlene drive out of Barstow. She ate a surprisingly satisfying chicken salad sandwich there in the passenger seat. There was chopped celery in the mixture, she liked that the gleaming white Styrofoam container balanced on her lap watching desert and desert in the dark pass by the window. The [...]

Back at home, Dad was on the phone, but not with my Aunt Sue as Mom tortured herself imagining.  He sat in the kitchen with only the oven light on, like a nightlight. He sat at the round kitchen table with the phone receiver held up to his ear and the other hand rubbing his [...]

Mom sighed. She stepped on the burning cigarette butt and smeared the tip back and forth against the ground. Somehow she managed to catch a bit of hot ash on the tip of her right sandal. She hissed, flinched backward slightly. Couched down to examine her toe as best she could in the thickening darkness. [...]