“Margaret Feeney,” Mom said. “We grew up together. On Plum Street. We were best friends from first grade until…” She paused. The knife stopped. “Until we weren’t. For a while. Then we were again.”
“I remember her,” I said. “She came to Dad’s funeral, didn’t she?”
Mom set the knife down.
“No,” she said quietly. “That was her sister. Margaret couldn’t make it.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
Mom thought about it.
“Twenty years,” she said. “Maybe a little more.”
“And she just called you? Out of the blue?”
Mom picked the knife back up. She started cutting again.
“Something like that,” she said.
Margaret lived three hours away. In Erie, Pennsylvania. Up on the lake.
Mom said she’d take the train. Amtrak. The Lake Shore Limited. From Cleveland to Erie. It would take two and a half hours.
“I can drive you, Mom.”
“Annie, you work. You have the kids. You have Dave. I’m eighty, not dead. I can sit on a train.”
“For a whole week?”
“Seven days,” Mom said. “Monday to Monday. Margaret has a guest room. She said I can stay as long as I like.”
She smiled.
“We have a lot to catch up on,” she said.
My name is Annie Cole. I’m fifty-four years old.
I’m a dental hygienist in Lakewood, Ohio. Just west of Cleveland. I’ve been married to Dave for twenty-nine years. He manages a Home Depot. We have two kids. Tyler’s twenty-six and lives in Columbus. Grace is twenty-two and just started nursing school at Kent State.
My mother is June Abernathy.
She lives alone in the little white Cape Cod on Hilliard Road in Rocky River where I grew up. Seven minutes from my house. My father, Bill, died in 2009. They were married forty-four years.
She’s eighty years old. She drives to the grocery store. She volunteers at the library on Wednesdays. She goes to Mass at St. Christopher’s every Saturday at five. She plays bridge on Thursdays with three women she’s known for fifty years. 