Gravedigger's Cottage Read Free

right. All right with me. She was gone almost when I first woke up, you know, woke up to the world; and like anything that’s not there when you first wake up you can’t very well miss it. Same goes for Walter’s mom, my second mom. I was still wiping my eyes practically, waking up and calming down at the same time from what happened the first time, and there it happened again. Poor Walter never even knew what hit him. Poor Walter. Poor, lucky Walter. Can’t miss what you never knew, can you?
    Except you can, of course. You can miss. You can and you do miss, and if I lied you would know, so I will try not to lie to you.
    But I told the truth at the same time as lying…
    Both at the same time. I don’t miss my mom, exactly, because I didn’t know her. Much. I’m sure she was lovely. I mean, I have seen pictures, of course, and she was lovely. Very, very lovely to look at.
    And I have no doubt she was also lovely on the inside. I am sure she could hold a kid on her knee and clean scrapes without making them hurt worse. I am sure she could sing. I am sure she smelled like strawberry or patchouli or Oil of Olay, if that is an actual smell. I’m sure she read out loud at bedtime and had a purse full of lipstick and Kleenex and butterscotch candies and Wash ’n Dri moist towelettes for emergencies. I’m sure she could cook. I’m sure she could sing. I know I already said that, but just then I was thinking that she would be singing while she was cooking, and so I said it again because it occurred to me again. I hope you don’t mind. I don’t think you do. I bet she was a very careful driver, and courteous. I bet she was a good swimmer. I bet she would go into the pool and swim with us, no matter that a lot of parents don’t go into the pools and I think it is because they are self-conscious about their flabby parental bodies. Although I know she had a lovely figure. I saw it in a picture. I bet her taste in clothes was excellent.
    So, you see. Those are the things I think. There are more, of course, but you get the picture, and I don’t want to try and give any more of that picture. The point just being, I would miss my mom if I knew all that about her firsthand, from memory. I would miss her, and all the things about her—the inside, outside, everything of her. I would miss them every day, forever.
    Maybe it hurts less then, if you are done the small favor of losing somebody too soon. Before you get to know too much. Maybe. Maybe it hurts less then. Maybe. Maybe that’s why I don’t miss my mom too specifically.
    Generally, though, there’s a different story. That mom space with nothing in it? That hurts probably as much as a hundred real moms could ever hurt you. But, like I said, that’s another story, and that’s not the story I was meaning to tell.
    The story I was meaning to tell was the story of one of the last things that happened at the old house before we moved to the Gravedigger’s Cottage. And, yes, of course it is about a dying, like most stories eventually are, and a burying in the crowded patch of land around that sorry old place.
    Loose Lucy got hit by a car. We buried her in the northeast corner of the yard in the shade of a triangle of hedge but underneath a bright streetlight that shines right down on her once the sun sets. Walter joked that she can’t tell day from night now because of that, and Dad said she was only barely able to tell day from night before, which was partly how she wound up in the ground after all.
    She was a love. But he is right. She was far more heart than head. Loose—as in, her bolts were never really tightened up all the way.
    It seems to me like everybody in the world has one of those stories, one of those hit-by-car stories about their dogs, or former dogs or cats or whatever. I didn’t used to think about it. I think about it all the time now, because I see it now, like I didn’t before, and I feel it now. Everybody was always so okay when they told these