It was more slush than snow, white mounds coated in sand, half-transformed into dirty puddles. A false thaw. It was only December.

Laney’s scuffed hiking boots didn’t keep out the wet. It seeped into undiscovered cracks and through the fibers of her worn socks, forcing the blood in her toes to retreat for higher ground, leaving them numb. Behind her she dragged a broken kitchen chair, two legs snapped from the base, their jagged ends still attached to the crossbar. Useless.

Its assigned occupant gone, it had failed to support her. There was no purpose in keeping it. And it thumped along behind her on its way to the trash heap collecting at the old sawmill.

Dead weight. Dead chair.

Some memories were like flashes of light on water, hard to hold onto. Some indelible, scraps so real they weighed down your soul like stones in a sack.

Early that year Laney and Gerry had spoken about the false thaw over breakfast. About the reasons mother nature played the trick. Gerry was going somewhere, Laney couldn’t remember now, the hardware store? The mini-mart? It seems like a thing she should remember. A thing she once knew but had forgotten.

She did remember the way the wind moved the empty swing in the maple tree. How no one had used it in years. How empty the house felt with the children gone. But how full of possibilities life was for two retirees with a pension.

She remembered saying the thaw and freeze cycle was like dough rising and being punched down until spring was fully baked into the earth. She had written that down in a notepad, pleased with herself. She remembered his kiss good bye, the salt from his egg still on his lips.

She remembered he never came home.

She tried to push the rest of it away, the phone call, his wallet and pocket knife sealed in a plastic bag at the police station. The stranger’s apology for her loss, as slick and unwanted as black ice.

She sank into the memory of the cup, it was unrelenting, always tagging along behind the memory of his death. That last cup, just where he had left it, the half inch of coffee that sat in it for days. How in her hazy grief she had washed it one morning and hadn’t mean to. How, crying, she put the soapy rim to her mouth, resting her hand across the worn letters, her lips where his had been, on the good spot without chips. Where they never would be again.

“Mom, you’re gonna make those lace things again, right? With the cream?” Nick poured himself a cup of coffee as he stood near the door of the blue and yellow farmhouse kitchen. Impossibly tall for having come from parents who failed to reach even average height, he half-leaned against the frame while a dark stripe of hair fell over his eye. He was home for a week to celebrate the holidays. At twenty-four, he had his father’s eyes, his whole life ahead of him, and no direction.

He made a lot of dishes in the mean time.

“Irish lace cookies,” Laney said, her voice stale like her five a.m. coffee. “I’ll make them if you want.”

“Wouldn’t be Christmas without them.” He smiled and waited for her to reply in kind.

She lifted one corner of her mouth, it was all she could manage and it was mostly fake.

Nodding in appreciation, he kissed the top of her head and then checked his phone. “Gotta head out and get Suzy Q from the airport.”

Laney poured another cup. “Get me some Irish cream while you’re out.”

“Huh?” He looked up from his phone, the blue light seeming to have erased his recent memory.

“For the cookies.” She took the mixing bowl off the shelf, her shoulder aching from the reach and a bruise hidden under three layers.

“Yea, yea. Sure thing, Mom. I’ll get the good kind.” He winked at her. “Dad’s favorite.”

She rinsed the dust from the bowl. “It doesn’t really matter which kind.”

He was already gone. His jacket slumped over the back of his chair. Forgotten.

Gerry loved these cookies. Of course he loved them, they were difficult. There is a small window between too hot and too cool where the cookies could actually be rolled into the proper shape and then filled with a billowy icing flavored with Irish cream. You couldn’t eat them all in one bite and when you did bite them, they would collapse into cream and crumbs. A mess. Gerry loved messes.

“You’ll spoil your supper,” she had always told him when he snagged one off the plate.

“A good wife spoils her husband,” was his reprise.

His supper wasn’t the only one in need of spoiling, and he’d stuff the kids mouth’s with reindeer sugar cookies. She’d protest and he’d put his finger to her lips and say: “Shh! You’ll spoil Christmas.” And she’d give in. Always.

It was a false fight that had emigrated from a real fight once when the children were too young to notice what arguments were. Then he’d stand next to her, crowded at the old two-bin sink, their hips touching. “You wash, I dry,” he had said, the voice echoing over any memory she had of them washing dishes together. Like the smell of soap and aftershave. Like the bubbles he’d perch on her nose.

“Mom, what about Dad’s retirement?” Suzy, who reminded everyone she was staunchly Sue at twenty-eight, looked at single-level houses online while sitting in a chair covered in fossilized stickers from her childhood. Beside her, a cup of herbal tea, a lemon wheel floating in the green infusion.

No one noticed there were only three chairs at the table.

“It’s there,” Laney said. “Does it matter?” The cookies were done, but the dishes were piling up, and Laney scrubbed oatmeal batter from the bowl with her good arm.

“You need to protect it. For your old age.”

“I think I am at my old age.” There was a time when clean enough wasn’t an option, but Laney was tired and she let the bowl win this one, stubborn traces of batter held fast inside the bottom crease as she placed it in the drainer to drip dry.

“You’ve got a good thirty years left, easy.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Her gaze escaped outside the kitchen window to the maple tree. Her shade tree from the summer heat. Her hugging tree. It knew her secrets and whispered them in the way the branches swayed in the wind. Even the one that was half-broken. It followed the rest.

She picked up another dish.

The day was sunny in her memory. There was sawdust in Gerry’s hair, blue and yellow paint splattered on her overalls. The house was nearly ready to live in.

She was sitting in a scrap of shade from the little maple outside the kitchen. And he laughed as she tried to keep herself protected in its coolness.

“Not much of a shade tree,” he had said.

“It will be, one day,” she told him. “I will have my coffee under it every morning.”

The kitchen was to be perfect. Laney had wanted to write cookbooks. Once. Honestly, she had wanted to write poetry, but Gerry didn’t understand poetry. And poetry wasn’t practical somehow, she couldn’t pretend it would pay the bills. What Gerry, and everyone else in her life, understood was food. You could hold it. Taste it. It justified a garden and lavish desserts on a Wednesday and a dream kitchen— yellow and blue, lemons and sky, the joy of success and the sorrow of waste. Food held life and carried memory.

The lemonade that day had been flavored with a sprig of wild mint she found near the creek bank.

He was thirsty. He reached for the thermos but she pulled it away.

The cup had been in her basket all morning, wrapped in a linen napkin. Hiding. Waiting. She poured some lemonade into it, a mint leaf floating to the surface.

He drank it without looking. Missing the whole point. Her plans broken in a way nearly laughable and very Gerry.

“Aren’t you going to read it?’” she asked.

It was then that he turned the mug, saw ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ emblazoned on the side.

She forgot his words. She remembered the hug. The laughter. The downing of the rest of the lemonade and the sprint to the nearly finished kitchen for cold coffee and a splash of Irish cream. How he’d done that the first time they opened the door with the key once the papers were signed, when the new roof didn’t leak after the rain storm, the first flush after the septic was replaced.

She remembered the muted clunk of a ceramic coffee mug and a plastic thermos top as they cheered the moment.

But mostly, she remembered the widening of his eyes, the smile on his face when he read the cup.

Aren’t you going to read it?

Laney was up at five because she was always up at five. Moreover, there were things that needed doing. Cinnamon buns, rolled and risen, had to go in the oven. The roast lay in the pan, acclimating itself before cooking in a two hundred degree oven all day. She had stabbed it with garlic and rosemary, covered it in salt and pepper. It sat there looking at her, a dead hunk of meat waiting to be consumed by her children.

Her feet moved through the motions of Christmas for hours, necessity keeping her upright. Always there was something that needed doing that no one else would do. Always there was the expectation that things would remain the same. She was like the orange at the toe of the stocking that no one ever ate but tradition demanded appear. And she wondered who would walk these steps when she was gone. She shivered some and pulled her sweater tighter around her.

Presents were few but wrapped and placed under the tree just the same, the red ribbons slightly askew, but no one noticed.

There were no grandchildren and Laney didn’t think there ever would be. Nick enjoyed wrestling the tornado of his life, his feet never still and his humor never failing. Sue was vehemently against everything Laney had ever been, ‘chained to the kitchen and toiling in the garden’. She saw her mother’s life as wasted. Impractical.

Her adult children sat on the floor, like they always had. Laney sat in a green wing-backed chair, the fabric worn through at the arms, clutching a cracked coffee mug boasting the words ‘World’s Greatest Dad’, her fingers aching for warmth.

She gave them each a recipe book she had transcribed by hand months ago— instructions carefully laid out for adults who didn’t know the difference between measuring liquid and dry.

They flipped through them out of politeness. “Oh!” Nick said and held up a page Laney couldn’t read without her glasses. “Are these the frosting potatoes?”

“They’re called duchess potatoes, moron.” Sue folded her Christmas check neatly inside her wallet.

“Can you make those?” Nick asked like the twelve-year-old he had been.

“Mom, you don’t have to,” Sue pushed in before Laney could answer. “You should rest.”

“I’m fine.” Laney assured her, but it was mostly a lie. Duchess potatoes were an extra hour’s work over simple mashed potatoes. “If I have eggs enough, I can.”

When they were looking at the house, Laney was unsure if she liked the way the property was, split on both sides of a one lane dirt road. House on one side, barn and sawmill on the other.

Gerry had liked the idea, saying no one could move in across from them. He also liked the idea of a saw mill, derelict as it was and filled with old junk from the house for the showing.

There were boards, she had remembered, stacked on the ground and rotting, making homes for ants. But there were pieces of cherry set on pegs away from the damp. Safe. Useable.

“We could revive this place! Make our own lumber!” Gerry had said, scheming details for a house they didn’t own.

They hadn’t been there long. Twenty minutes maybe? It was how she had always told it. “One thing at a time!” Laney must have said. It was a thing she had to tell him often. Gerry never had fewer than eleven projects going at once.

They weren’t the only ones at the house. There was another couple. She remembered the way the real estate agent’s heels kept sinking into the ground, how she had to jerk her feet out with every step, how Laney hoped that wasn’t a sign the leech field needed replacing. She had wondered why you would wear heels to show a farm house. How the shoes hadn’t been practical but how she had never seen the woman in flats or sneakers. The woman was pointing to the house, the other couple nodding in agreement to whatever she was selling them.

Laney only saw an old farm house. Peeling paint, loose shingles, leaky windows. Gerry saw potential. Acreage, an old barn, a creek for fishing and swimming.

Still, it was hard not to get caught up in his optimism. There was a little maple tree beside the house, a seed that had happened to land there, take root and grow. Now too big to simply be yanked out by hand but not yet a tree. She had remembered this maple in full foliage, but it was early spring and so it couldn’t have been. It was still chilly. She remembered she didn’t bring a jacket and was cold the whole time she was at the sleeping house. A house waiting for someone to wake it up.

There was a set of chairs in the saw mill. Four, all alike, set aside to make the rooms look bigger because they were empty. “Do you think they’d let us have the chairs?” she had asked. “If we bought the house?”

“I think that’s part of an ‘as is’ sale,” Gerry had said. He was still looking at the house. At the other couple. They were laughing. Was the woman pregnant? Laney couldn’t recall. She did remember thinking that there were things in life they both wanted and Gerry really wanted this farm. She remembered saying “I think we should buy it” and how happy it made him.

She remembered him taking off his white cable knit cardigan, the one that still hung on the coat rack, and wrapping it around her. How she told him he would never forgive her if she said no to the house. And he had said something wonderful then, something she had long forgotten. Something akin to not being able to live without her. Did she say it back?

She remembered him standing near the other couple and loudly asking the realtor if the paint had been tested for lead and did she know if the well dried up in the summer or if the dark spot on the roof meant rot.

She remembered signing reams of papers and getting keys, cold and shining in her hand.

It was that odd time before dinner when everything was waiting to be done but nothing was ready to be worked on. It would all erupt at once, because Laney had planned it that way, but this moment she stole for herself.

The children were doing three things simultaneously between the phones and the TV and the joyful bickering, and yet they did nothing of consequence as their laundry sat damp in the washer and the wrapping paper remained stuffed into a corner of the living room.

A half cup of cold coffee burdened Laney’s cracked mug. Pouring in a few glugs of Irish cream, she headed out the door, past the maple tree, and over to the old sawmill.

She stopped at the broken chair and sat across from it on a rusted milk can. In the sharp winter air, she waited, as if for some specter to appear among the smell of ancient saw dust and used chain oil. But the chair remained empty.

One sip she took from her mug and grimaced. “Why did you like this stuff? It’s horrible.”

The chair didn’t reply.

“I glued the mug back together. It’s holding liquid.” She took another sip, stalling. The question she brought with her sat hard in her chest, as if to ask it was to admit the incident did indeed happen and was not some daydream hatched on a dark morning. But there was little point in delaying and she wanted an answer. “Did you break the branch?”

Silence. Not even a bird call she could convince herself was a response.

“I love that tree, you know. You’d say it has to come down once it starts dropping branches.”

The wind blew cold against her cheek, a brush of winter, a time for things to rest.

“Well, if you broke the branch, then it’s your fault the chair broke. And the mug.” She took another sip. “And my shoulder.”

Still the chair said nothing.

“The shoulder is just beat up a bit, it’s not really broken. The mug I could mend.” She held it up for inspection. “I’m afraid your chair is above my pay grade, as you would say.”

There was a mark on the top of the chair. A place where her husband had pulled it out and pushed it back in countless times, where the wood had developed minute cracks that were filled with the remnants of whatever project he’d worked on that day. She could never scrub it clean.

Getting up, she crossed over discarded refuse, broken tools, a collection of cookbooks, blue and yellow paint cans decades old. She navigated the mess and stood behind the chair, resting her hand where he had so many times before, the wood nearly as warm as her skin.

In front of her now was the rope, still attached to the broken limb.

Some memories were slick as wet leaves and some stayed like a brand on the soul.

There had been no plan but a branch that looked inviting and a rope that had been coiled in the mudroom for some forgotten project. There had been a horrible sensation of drowning for months, like rocks tied to her limbs that kept her under an ocean of grief.

Coffee cup in one hand, chair in the other, rope slung over her shoulder, she dragged Gerry’s chair under the tree limb. Setting down the coffee cup, she had stood on the chair and threw the rope over the limb. She had no idea how to tie a noose. Couldn’t think of what would come after. All she knew was that Gerry was gone and she couldn’t breathe. Life had become exhausting and she just wanted to sleep. Forever.

She didn’t know how weak the branch was or that it would snap when she kick the chair out from beneath her, dropping her to the ground, slamming her shoulder on the fallen chair. The cup, somehow a further casualty, cracking between the words ‘Greatest’and ‘Dad’. She had picked up the chair then, throwing it in anger, recoiling at the pain in her shoulder as she threw it and fell back to the ground. She opened her eyes to see the chair legs snapped from the base. Anger, the only other emotion available to her this last year, came roaring back like a hearth flame. Anger at the broken chair, the halved mug. Anger she had failed. Anger because she, terrifyingly, might have succeeded. That’s when the guilt set it, gnawing her down to a numb stump, to an old woman with a sore shoulder and a broken mug and a useless chair.

What had she done?

But that was days ago and now the kids were home and she was making dinner and searching for strength and answers among the ruins of a lifetime in an abandoned saw mill.

There weren’t any.

“I’m tired, Gerry. I’m just so tired.” Tears she could almost feel rolled gently down to her lips, leaving salt kisses. “How am I supposed to….” Her throat closed out what words remained.

Before her, the naked branch, long dead and adorned with a clumsily knotted rope, offered no explanation for its existence. She would burn it in the spring.

Two steps brought a tarp to cover the secret mess. “Don’t want to spoil Christmas.”

She massaged the ache in her shoulder and turned back to the empty chair. Forever vacant. Just another part of the wreckage around her. “Thank you. For breaking.” Her thread-bare will dissolved as she faced the emptiness, tears flowing like water over her face. She let them.

Drips of snowmelt fell from the sawmill roof, lacking rhythm and amounting to nothing but an unchanging puddle near her feet. Water added as quickly as it seeped through the earth.

“Grief feels like winter. The thaw and the freeze. The joy of memories and the sorrow of reality. And it feels like this whole year has been broken, with nothing but winters. I miss you. And I don’t know how to fix this.” She rubbed her chest and then took another sip. “If you couldn’t live without me, then how am I supposed to live without you?”

Silence.

But there was something about the silence now that was full in its emptiness. It asked for nothing and it just let her be. It was a soft place between winter and spring. Pain and memory. Broken and mended.

She looked once more to the house and saw the work they had put into it. How she held the ladder as Gerry reached to paint the peak. The awnings he had put over the doors to keep the rain from leaking in. The clothesline he had replaced the summer before he died.

“Nick is every bit the whirlwind you were. Always on to something new. Can’t even remember his jacket. But he has no one around to remind him that he has one. And Suzy, she’s just been trying to be brave this whole time, being practical. Like me, I guess. Only practical is something different than it used to be. But she is still forgetting herself.”

Laney hung her head, the guilt tight in her chest. The doubling of pain she almost caused with a rope on a winter morning. “What I did… well it wasn’t very practical, was it?” She dumped the remaining coffee beside the chair, like an offering. Light caught the creamy brown, just for an instant and the words filtered into her mind. Aren’t you going to read it? She turned the cup, ‘World’s Greatest’ above the crack, her thumb covering the rest.

She nodded. “Well, that’s debatable. But somehow, you’re still there, in them. I am, too. And this house— it’s all us. It’s what we made, together. And if you can forgive me….” She shut her eyes against the tears, grief and regret and fear like needles stabbing into her once numb heart. But something else, an ember of joy, the comfort of memory in every board in the house and smile from her children and even mixed into the debris of the old sawmill. It warmed her, just a little, melting away some of the hurt. “I can be there for them.”

She wiped her cheeks dry and exhaled, the redness leaving her face. “Guess those rolls are about done.” She rubbed the crack in the mug, the beads of glue that had spilled over and dried. “I’ll try and put myself back together now.”

She trudged back through the mess of dirty slush, towards the faded kitchen, the old chairs that would be filled with what family remained.

Flakes of snow began to fall, blanketing the world in white and covering the broken.

C.M. O’Slatara lives in the shadow of a small mountain where she and her children swim in the creek and eat the wild things. Her work has appeared in The Mad River, The Disapointed Housewife, and the anthology For A Breath I Tarry. You can find her at CMOSlatara.com.

Images:

• Cookies in oven by Ciefo Creativity

• Raw cookies by Olena Somak

• Smiling cookies by CPhotos

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