October 17, 2026
I woke in my childhood room before the light. Elara was still asleep beside me. Nine years ago today my father died. You do not need an alarm for that one. The body keeps the date even when the mind would rather sleep through it.
“I like what your mom did with it after you moved out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The posters.”
“What’s wrong with car posters?”
“You KNOW I’m not talking about car posters, William.” Ash rarely uses my given name, so something had his hackles up.
“Are you saying you miss the scantily clad, hormone triggers in bikini’s?”
He gave me a look. “You should probably start coffee…for everyone else.”
I slipped out of bed without rousing Elara. “What’s got you so prickly this morning?”
Ash sighed. “A lot of memories here, Mom and Dad, Winter. School, dating, growing up. It feels like its all hanging on a precipice.”
I thought about that as I waited for the coffee pot to start its basic cycle. I looked through the cupboards to see what I could find as a substitute for coffee.
“Just find some orange juice and be done with it.” Ash sat on the windowsill over the sink, looking out into the backyard. I remembered playing catch with Dad while Mom and baby Winter watched from the picnic table.
I took the orange juice and a coffee with cream and sugar back upstairs. Elara was sitting up in bed, looking towards the window and the grey October Saturday that waited for us. I handed her the coffee which elicited a small “Thanks” while Shoneah sat motionless next to her.
“You ok?” I reached out and rubbed her back.
“Yeah, just thinking thoughts. You know how it is.”
“Me? Noooo..” I chuckled. If people weren’t thinking thoughts, I’d probably be in a much different line of work.
I got up to check on mom as she was usually up and moving at this hour. I went to knock on the door of the bedroom she and my dad used to share. She was sitting in her chair by the window, a photo album in her lap, head tilted down, her chin on her chest.
“Oh frak, not today.” Ash whispered.
She gasped and sat back up, blinking heavily. “Oh. Willie. I think I fell asleep.”
“Yeah. Gave us a bit of a start there, mom.” I paused, watching. “I made some coffee. Would you like some?”
“Yes, please. Thank you.”
“Cream and sugar?”
“Yes.”
“That. Was. Upsetting.”
“That’s an understatement.” I focused instead on the coffee for mom. Once that was delivered, I waited for Elara to get out of the shower and laid out my clothes for the day.
“Oh, look. All black. What a shock.”
“Is there anything that is going to move you off this….mood.”
“Maybe another orange juice.” He sulked. “Wrong frakking weekend to stop coffee.”
Winter came by at nine with her family. Her husband, Wyatt, carried in a box of pastries nobody would eat yet. He set it down and hugged me without a word, which is the right number of words. Their five year old daughter Lila does not know what today is, which is exactly as it should be. She came through the door at a dead run, found her grandmother, and got her hug, and then spotted Elara and ran off to her instead. Lila decided some time ago that Elara is hers, and she has not revised the ruling. It was the best thing that had happened in the house in some hours.
Winter is pregnant, due the start of December. She has reached the point where she stands with one hand at the small of her back and does not notice she is doing it. She hugged me longer than Wyatt did. She did not ask if I was okay. She knows better. We just stood in the front hall a second, the two of us. The only two people left who remember the man the way a child remembers a father. That is its own thing, said without saying it.
We went to the cemetery a little before ten. Winter and Wyatt and Lila took their car. My mother rode with us. I drove, and Elara sat in the back with her, because my mother should not sit back there alone on this of all mornings, and Elara knew it before I could ask.
It is a veterans cemetery. You come up a long drive with the flags out. Then the stones start, and they go on in their straight white rows, that particular order that is beautiful and unbearable at once. My father is toward the back. His section looks out over a green on the golf course he played about once a week. He picked the spot, or it got picked for him. Either way it is right. He would like knowing the ninth hole is out there. He always said the back nine was where you found out who a man was.
My mother had been quiet the whole way, looking out the window. As we came up the drive and the stones began, she went still in a different way. Then she said it. Quietly, to the glass more than to us.
“Oh,” she said. “We’re here.”
That was all. But she knew. For that moment she knew exactly where she was and exactly why. I watched it arrive in her and I said nothing. There was nothing to add that would not have made it smaller.
We walked out to him. Winter had brought lilies, white ones. We laid them at the stone, each of us, and then we stood there the way people stand at a grave, not knowing what to do with our hands. My mother said a small prayer under her breath. I did not catch the words and did not try to. At the end of it she said, not to any of us, “I miss you, Walt.” Plain and clear. A wife talking to her husband across nine years and a slab of granite. Then she looked around at the long white rows, and out at the green past them, and something in her settled. She patted my arm and said she would wait in the car. Winter walked her back.
Elara and I stayed a moment. She stood close against my side, her fingers laced through mine, and said nothing, which is the thing she is best at in the world. Ash went and stood in front of the stone. He watched the stone for a moment, looking at the name cut into it, the dates, the small carved emblem of the service.
“He was a good dad,” Ash said.
“He was.” And we left him there. My father, in the good back section, with the green he loved out past the flags. We went to breakfast, because that is what you do after. You go, and you eat, and the eating is part of it.
The pancake place is the one my father liked. I told Elara about it on the short drive over. It is an old-school diner, the real kind, the kind that does three things and does them without apology. Lots of butter. Coffee strong enough to prop a spoon in. A griddle that has not been fully cold since the Carter administration. It’s a staple in town. You are not from there if you cannot order from memory.
Elara looked around when we came in. The counter, the stools, the laminated menus nobody needs. She said it reminded her of the diner in her own town. “Just with more pronounced accents,” she said. “And a faster pace. Everyone here is in a hurry to sit still.”
She ordered without the menu. “Corned beef hash, eggs over medium, rye toast, and orange marmalade on the side.”
Ash leaned in at my ear. “I think she’s part of the coven now,” he said, with deep approval. To Ash, an unerring diner order is a sign of serious moral character.
“Good choices,” I told her. “I’ll have the same.”
The waitress, a woman of a certain age who has worked that floor long enough to run it like a tugboat captain, saw my mother and her whole face opened. “Well, Mayor Margaret.” My mother was the mayor of that town once, and a schoolteacher before that. In that diner she is still both. A small town keeps its people in the office it loved them in. “You want your usual, hon?” My mother nodded, pleased. I did not have to say a word. The waitress already had it: three slices of tomato cooked on the griddle with salt and pepper, two strips of bacon well done, two eggs sunny side up, white toast. She has had it for forty years. The town has it memorized.
Winter’s family ordered around us. Lila got chocolate chip pancakes, which is the only correct order when you are five. Wyatt got the waffle sandwich, egg and sausage between two small waffles, a thing that should not work and does. Winter asked for two scrambled eggs and nothing else. When I raised an eyebrow she said she would get all the pancakes she needed off someone else’s plate. She was right. She did.
It was a good breakfast. Loud and warm, a five-year-old narrating her pancakes, my mother bright in the middle of it. They called her Madam Mayor twice more before the check came. For the better part of an hour the day was not a sad day. It was just a family in a diner. That is its own kind of honoring, and maybe the better kind.
We went back to my mother’s after. Winter took Lila up to change into play clothes, in Winter’s own old room, the one that is still half hers no matter how many years go by. Elara and I changed out of the blacks. I felt the day loosen a notch when I did. Taking off a certain set of clothes can let a certain kind of morning end.
Lila towed Elara out back by one hand, because Elara is hers and the yard required supervision. Winter and Wyatt went with them. I heard them through the window. The good noise of it.
My mother did not go out. She stood at the sink with her hands flat on the counter, looking out the back window at them. At my sister and my niece and the yard. She was somewhere else for a moment. Then she said it, without turning around.
“I don’t want you coming up here all the time when I’m gone,” she said. “You or your sister. I don’t want that for either of you. All this driving. For me.”
I came and stood next to her at the sink.
“Mom. Let us worry about what happens then, when it’s then. Before that — let’s just make a few more good memories. That’s all I want out of it. A few more good days like this one.” She did not say anything. But she took one hand off the counter and put it over mine. We stood there together at her sink and watched her people play in her yard.
Winter and family left after an hour or so. Lila was asleep before the car was off the block, the way they go down at that age, all at once, like a switch. I got a pizza for dinner. Just a plain cheese. Nobody had any big choices left in them, and a cheese pizza asks nothing of a grieving house.
My mother was clear all evening. That happens, the clear nights, and you do not question them. You just sit in them and are grateful. We put a movie on. One of those ones where it is somehow Christmas in the middle of August, and a woman in a small town falls for a man who owns a tree farm. Nobody was watching it. It was light and voices in the room, which is what that kind of movie is for.
And somewhere in the middle of it my mother leaned over to Elara on the couch. Confidentially. The way you share a thing you have decided about someone.
“You’re so much nicer than that Siobhan,” she said. “Walt and I never trusted her. She laughed, but it never made it up to her eyes. You know the kind of person I mean?”
Elara nodded. She did not look at me. She just nodded, taking the thing my mother had handed her for exactly what it was.
“I know the kind,” Elara said.
“Well, I’m glad you’re here.” my mother said, satisfied, and went back to the movie. To the tree farm and the improbable August snow. I looked over at Elara whose eyes were struggling to maintain the tears, Shoneah wasn’t struggling though. She had given the tears their space.
I fell asleep thinking about where all the posters went, about whether or not a stray gold ball ever makes its way across the rows of white stones, and about how many photos in a photo album are happy memories and how many are full of strangers faces.
________________________________________________________________________________
Vietnam War Fact of the Day: On October 17, 1967, two rifle companies of the 2nd Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, pushed back into dense jungle near the Ong Thanh stream in Binh Duong Province, South Vietnam. They were moving on a bunker complex they had fought days before. The enemy was waiting. The Viet Cong’s 271st Regiment had deployed in strength, anticipating exactly this advance, and when the Americans were deep in the kill zone it opened up from three sides at once. The battalion was torn apart in a few hours. Sixty-four Americans were killed, seventy-five wounded, two never found. Among the dead was their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Terry de la Mesa Allen Jr., cut down with the men he led. It was a small battle in a long war, one most of the country never heard of. The men who lived it carried it the rest of their lives — in their bodies, and in the rooms of their houses nobody was allowed to enter.