“Okay.”
“Okay. So when someone dies … So when my father died, what happens is like you have Interstate 80 stretched out over a lifetime. But all those hours, all those weeks and months where nothing was happening, where you were living your life without even thinking about him, those spaces fall away, and the memories you do have slam into each other, one after another, and they’re moving too fast to stop. It’s one thing if you’re someone like me. I mean, it’s true that even thinking back to your father asleep in his chair can hurt a little once he’s gone. But I didn’t have that many memories of him. A time we played catch because I wanted to make the softball team. Or the time my mother was in the hospital and one morning he had to brush out my hair before I went to school. You remember how sometimes he pulled too hard, and your eyes watered, and your scalp stung, but it was your father brushing out your hair, which never happened before, so you didn’t say anything. But, like I said, there weren’t that many things I remembered, so they didn’t pile up. But my poor mother. She got through the funeral okay, with all the people I hadn’t seen for years, or had never seen, taking her hand and telling some little story of her husband. I wish they hadn’t put him in a casket for everyone to see. But afterward, when the people left, and we went home, and I was standing in the kitchen with her. I was saying something about how nice everything had gone, and when I turned to look at her she was standing at the sink, clutching the edge of the counter. She had her eyes closed tight, and she was saying, ‘Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.’ Just like that. All the empty hours and the stretches of loneliness she used to confide in me about, they all fell away, and everything else was slamming into each other. And she kept saying, ‘Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.’ I could see how they were banging into her rib cage from the inside, and there was nothing I could do but wait till they stopped.”
They had rounded the long bend, and now the Nevada desert lay out flat again. Claire saw how she was gripping the steering wheel tightly, and then releasing the grip, a rhythm she realized had persisted through the woman’s story. The woman had turned away and was looking out the passenger window.
“That’s so sad,” Claire said.
The woman shrugged her shoulders, and when she spoke her voice was again buffeted by the air streaming in.
“It is, I guess. But that’s the way it works. I don’t know how it will be for you, with all of these years passed.”
“Well, he hasn’t died yet,” she said. “How’s your mom now?”
But the woman didn’t answer this question. She was resting her chin on her hand, her elbow propped into the empty space of the window. Her eyes were closed.